Dave Barrett, who died Friday, packed about three terms’ worth of excitement, drama, comedy and controversy into just three short years as premier of B.C.
Four decades after he was bounced out of office, we’re still talking about him and his legacies. On the policy and the personal fronts, he made huge impressions on the province and on all the people he met.
I first met him at a political rally in 1979. He was in Duncan and delivered an extended riff on a TV spot his Social Credit opponents were running that suggested he wore Commie-red underwear.
He set the crowd up with mock outrage. Then he played with them, saying he didn’t want to talk about the colour of his underwear. “I’ll leave that to your imagination.”
Then he set them up again. “I understand that Grace McCarthy is behind this idea.”
Then he moved in for the kill. “I want to assure everyone that Grace McCarthy is one woman who will never see the colour of my underwear.”
It was a comic masterpiece that brought the house down. It worked so well he used it for weeks. It was a big revelation to me, to realize that politics could be fun.
That campaign was enormously appealing, but came up short and he was defeated. Social Credit Leader Bill Bennett had unseated him in 1975 after Barrett called an ill-advised election. Bennett beat him a third time, in 1983, before Barrett vacated the provincial scene for a stint in Ottawa.
He didn’t go without a fight. He was ejected from the assembly hall at 4:30 a.m. one day in 1983 on orders from the Speaker after a procedural fight.
Barrett and Bennett spent almost a decade locked in combat publicly, and full of animosity toward each other privately. Much later they shared something else in common — a wretched ordeal through Alzheimer’s. (Bennett succumbed in 2015.)
People dwell on the Insurance Corp. of B.C. and the Agricultural Land Reserve as Barrett’s legacy, but there was lots more.
His education minister, Eileen Dailly, was committed to doing away with the strap in B.C. schools. When the ban on corporal punishment was imposed, it prompted an astonishing backlash, but Barrett backed his minister throughout.
As told in The Art of the Impossible, a fond recounting of his term by Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh, he fired back to one irate parent: “Why the hell should we use taxpayers’ money to beat your child?”
Barrett instinctively liked nearly everyone he met, and after a few minutes in his company, most people returned the affection — even if they didn’t vote for him.
B.C. only gave him one shot at running the joint, but people had an enduring respect and fondness for him, long after they pushed him out of office.
The current NDP government is full of people with vivid memories of Barrett. No doubt they’ll name something after him in due course. I hope it’s something big and exciting that thousands of people will enjoy.
