Home
BCBOOKLOOK PRESS RELEASE
Rod Mickleburgh to receive Ryga Award
The George Ryga Award for Social Awareness will be presented for this first time in Victoria at 1 pm on Saturday, April 27, at the James Bay Library branch, 385 Menzies Street—to Rod Mickleburgh for his book, On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement (Harbour $44.95).
The City of Vancouver will simultaneously honour Rod Mickleburgh with its proclamation of Author Appreciation Day.
*
The Winnipeg General Strike happened 100 years—and nowadays few Canadians can tell you what it was, and what happened.
The notion that workers should collectivize to support one another and prevent exploitation is increasingly viewed as arcane in the Age of Tweets.
Society barely bats an eye as unionization of the workplace declines, and more and more workers are hired under contract with no job security and few benefits. Rights and conditions workers fought for years to achieve – some gave their lives – are steadily being eroded.
Hence judges have selected Rod Mickleburgh’s wide-ranging study as this year’s winner of the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness. The last attempt to provide a full history of B.C. labour was Paul Phillips’ No Power Greater: A Century of Labour in British Columbia (1967) so an extensive overview was long overdue.
Mickleburgh, formerly a labour reporter for both the Vancouver Sun and Province and a senior writer for The Globe and Mail, has documented the broad historical sweep of what has been Canada's most volatile and progressive provincial labour force, re-educating British Columbians to why unions are essential for a progressive society.
The story begins back in 1849 when Scottish labourers went on strike to protest barbaric working conditions at B.C.'s first coal mine at Fort Rupert on Vancouver Island.
Mickleburgh’s On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement revisits most of the major labour struggles since then. For four tumultuous months in 1983, for instance, the grassroots labour initiative in B.C. called Operation Solidarity–which took its name as an offshoot of the successful Solidarity movement in the shipyards of Poland at the time–was fighting the Social Credit government’s Restraint Budget.
Finally, on November 13, Jack Munro, president of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), signed a controversial deal with B.C. Premier Bill Bennett to end the Coalition’s plans for a general strike.
Mickleburgh’s account of how unionists achieved the five-day work week, the eight-hour day, paid holidays, the right to a safe, non-discriminatory workplace and many more now-taken-for-granted features rights continues into the second decade of the 21st century to recount the successful campaign led by the B.C. Teacher's Federation (BCTF) to improve classroom conditions and class sizes.
The two runners-up for the Ryga Prize this year are Chelene Knight for her second book, Dear Current Occupant (Book Thug) and Sarah Cox for Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand Against Big Hydro (On Point Press).
During his long career, Rod Mickleburgh has worked for the Penticton Herald, Prince George Citizen, Vernon News and CBC TV, in addition to the Sun, Province and Globe and Mail. In 1992 he was nominated for a National Newspaper Award; in 1993, he was a co-winner, with André Picard, of the Michener Award.
Mickleburgh’s first book was Rare Courage: Veterans of the Second World War Remember (M&S 2005), a collection of 20 memoirs profiling Canadian veterans of World War II (with Rudyard Griffiths, executive director of the Dominion Institute) and he earned the 2013 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for The Art of the Impossible (Harbour 2012), co-authored with Geoff Meggs.
Judges for the Ryga Award were professor and author Trevor Carolan, Joe Fortes Library branch manager Jane Curry and freelance writer and author Beverly Cramp.
BOOKS:
Rare Courage: Veterans of the Second World War Remember(McClelland and Stewart, 2005)
The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972-1975 (Harbour, 2012) With Geoff Meggs $32.95 978-1-55017-579-0
On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement (Harbour 2018) $44.95 978-1-55017-826-5
[BCBW 2019] "War"
+++
John Horgan: In His Own Words
by John Horgan with Rod Mickleburgh
(Harbour, $38.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2026)
After leading the province for five years and resigning in 2022, John Horgan, BC’s 36th premier, passed away in 2024. Few provincial leaders in living memory earned the level of public affection Horgan enjoyed — a tribute to his stalwart administration during the global Covid epidemic. While others faced economic, social or environmental challenges, none as premier ever confronted an existential crisis of that magnitude. His legacy is engraved at the heart of our definition of genuine public service.
We knew little of his personal story. John Horgan squeaked into the premier’s office through an alliance with the Green Party in 2017, ending 16 years of Liberal government that was tarnished by the “Casino Gate” scandal (when alleged foreign money was laundered through gambling and later invested in BC real estate) … or when, as The Province newspaper reported, “Metro Vancouver housing prices soared beyond the reach of non-millionaires.”
This is a book filled with remembrance. Following his resignation as premier, an event as unexpected and free of drama as Bill Bennett’s departure in 1986, Horgan—a two-time cancer survivor—recorded a series of interview conversations with labour journalist Rod Mickleburgh addressing his life and the history of his long political voyage. They met at Royal Roads University in Victoria in August 2023 and their sessions ran several days. They talked again the following November. More interviews followed via Zoom sessions in spring 2024 after Horgan had been appointed Canada’s ambassador to Germany. But that June, Horgan was diagnosed with thyroid cancer—his third round with cancer. Mickleburgh’s introduction relates that with Horgan sitting up in his Berlin hospital bed, they logged four final sessions in late-August. Horgan died in November.
Those interviews shape In His Own Words, a deep-dive memoir and autobiography from a political leader broadly experienced in governing. Horgan knew hard times growing up and if salty language isn’t in your wheelhouse, especially in the early chapters, be advised.
BC's first NDP premier to earn re-election recalls how his path to the premier’s office came after years as an NDP staffer in Ottawa and Victoria. He attended Trent University in Peterborough after learning of it in Ocean Falls, the pulp mill town where he migrated after a working-class upbringing in Saanich. The mill’s solid union wages enabled him to study social work. At Trent, he heard Canada’s beloved social justice hero, Tommy Douglas speak. From then on, Horgan intimates, he knew who he was and that what he believed in was worth fighting for.
His father, he says, was a drunk. An Irish scrapper and sports fan who made truck deliveries around Chinatown. He died while Horgan was an infant, leaving the load of raising four kids to his wife, Alice. “She did everything pretty much by herself,” Horgan explains.
Horgan had a passion for lacrosse. He could play and became, he says, “the guy everyone wanted on their team.” Horgan dreamed of joining Victoria’s renowned Shamrocks but never made the senior squad. Yet it was during this time he grasped that “team sports were where you learned that everyone’s role was important.”
By grade 8, Horgan concedes he “was heading into the ditch.” He was troubled and credits Jack Lusk, his high school basketball coach, for bringing him around. He finished high school, the only one of his siblings to manage that. His mother returned to school, learned to drive and secured a CUPE job in local government. While not a religious family, “the basic decency of Christianity permeated our existence,” Horgan recalls. Along the way he befriended Bruce Hutchinson, the renowned political journalist. They’d spend hours together by the stove, “talking about politics, past and present.”
At Trent, Horgan met his wife Ellie, a biologist who became his rock and accompanied him to Australia where he earned his Master’s degree in history. Five years in Ottawa followed where Horgan worked in public policy development for the NDP. The narrative spices up when he recalls his favourite MPs. This is a book that names names—those who helped, and those who helped themselves.
In 1991, the Horgan family settled in Victoria’s Langford district. Horgan worked in various capacities for three premiers—Mike Harcourt, Glen Clark and Dan Miller. His strength was fixing problems—he got things done. Horgan speaks candidly about these former bosses and of Ujjal Dosanjh whose premier’s term ended the NDP’s almost 10-year run in office.
Significantly, Horgan was drawn to natural resource and energy development issues. In 1999, he moved sideways into the Columbia Power Corporation, a Crown operation responsible for putting “the final elements of the Columbia River Treaty into place.” Involving flood control, purchasing and repowering existing dams from Cominco, job creation for the Kootenays and revenue generation from selling energy to the US, Horgan confirms that, “It all added up to a $500 million deal.”
Dan Miller, the short-term premier from Prince Rupert, hired Horgan as his Chief of Staff just as climate change began making government agendas. Horgan understood that energy and emissions action was about to boom and could talk to environmentalists and big labour alike. But the NDP was dethroned in 2001; Horgan considered his future from the sidelines.
When Gordon Campbell’s Liberals awarded a ferry-building contract to Germany, Horgan howled at the news. The drummer in his son’s garage rock band overheard and asked, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Horgan responded by getting elected as MLA in the next election, joining leader Carole James’ Official Opposition. For 12 years he polished his public speaking and media skills, critiquing Liberal premiers Campbell and Christy Clark. When Clark demolished Adrian Dix in the 2013 election, Horgan says it was “one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever seen.”
Known as an economic pragmatist, Horgan was approached to join the Liberals who needed an Island voice, but declined to cross over. He saw that Clark had out-strategized the NDP and didn’t forget.
By 2014, Horgan was leader of BC’s NDP. The party was stone broke and had “internal divisions.” He treaded water, built alliances with unions and the Indigenous community and gradually pulled things into cohesion.
Significantly, Horgan championed the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) for which he is still warmly remembered, and he includes a chapter of sincerity and insight into Indigenous issues and reconciliation. He also developed a reputation having a temper. He and Clark did not get on—“not at all,” Horgan emphasizes.
With his party still struggling, Horgan brought in Bob Dewar, a seasoned Manitoba campaigner, as Chief of Staff. Dewar brought the mojo Horgan needed and “the sinking stopped.” Then came The Big One. In 2017, Horgan pulled off the unthinkable after forging an understanding with Dr. Andrew Weaver, leader of BC’s Greens. With their combined seats, they narrowly toppled Christy Clark, despite her pleas for a second, snap election that Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon declined. Horgan’s explanation of the agreement with Weaver is fascinating reading. Both made economic and ecological compromises that benefitted the province.
John Horgan’s party inherited a budget surplus from the Liberals. The NDP got busy: no more Medical Services Plan premiums, improved disability assistance rates, tuition fees waived for adult education and ESL, free postsecondary education for 18-year-olds coming out of foster care, Port Mann Bridge tolls ended. The NDP increased the minimum wage. Carole James in finance added a new tax bracket for those earning over $250,000, as well as a speculation and vacancy tax on empty homes. They balanced the budget and BC earned Canada’s highest credit rating. Horgan delivered for the people and didn’t mind sharing the applause around, regardless of affiliation.
He admits “the transition from activist to administrator” is challenging. But it was the anti-old-growth logging protests at Fairy Creek and the Site C dam decision in the Peace River country that earned him the wrath of eco-activists. On the books for 40 years and kick-started by the Liberals, the Site C infrastructure project faced skyrocketing costs and geotechnical issues. Yet, “even if getting there has been one of the province’s most challenging public policy questions,” Horgan could see its enormous value “in an energy-constrained marketplace.” He moved it forward. His chapter on working with the Greens on this and LNG issues explores the most complex ethical and economic questions he encountered in political life. Of his controversial commitments to “working forests,” hydroelectric power and developing LNG as a clean energy source—a $40 billion private sector investment—he explains his higher responsibility to “[meet] the needs of five million people,” not just the dissenters.
When Covid hit in 2020, Horgan’s government lead a bewildered public through the shock. His deputies on the file, Dr. Bonnie Henry and Adrian Dix, got BC past the worst. Who can forget their nightly updates? Ironically, the Greens’ support grew shaky; Andrew Weaver began sitting as an independent. Horgan’s decision to call a snap election after only three years caused grief and he speaks compellingly to this.
Maximum pressure came in 2021: extreme temperatures, a “heat dome” and “atmospheric rivers,” vast wildfires including the Lytton conflagration, flooding, and pipeline decisions—it was a fateful time. And Horgan now had throat cancer.
Horgan maintains he was already “becoming a grumpy happy warrior;” however, a badly thought out decision proposing a long public closure of the Royal BC Museum proved the tipping point. He realized that he was “not reading the room right on something [he was] passionate about.” Mindfully, he apologized and decided he was done.
In his afterword, Mickleburgh concludes this valuable book with an emotional grace note. During their final interview he asked Horgan, “What he would want me to say about him if today ever came?” In a scene so typical of Horgan, he responded simply, “‘Just tell everyone I did my level best.’”
9781998526260
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver where he served as municipal councillor.
Rod Mickleburgh to receive Ryga Award
The George Ryga Award for Social Awareness will be presented for this first time in Victoria at 1 pm on Saturday, April 27, at the James Bay Library branch, 385 Menzies Street—to Rod Mickleburgh for his book, On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement (Harbour $44.95).
The City of Vancouver will simultaneously honour Rod Mickleburgh with its proclamation of Author Appreciation Day.
*
The Winnipeg General Strike happened 100 years—and nowadays few Canadians can tell you what it was, and what happened.
The notion that workers should collectivize to support one another and prevent exploitation is increasingly viewed as arcane in the Age of Tweets.
Society barely bats an eye as unionization of the workplace declines, and more and more workers are hired under contract with no job security and few benefits. Rights and conditions workers fought for years to achieve – some gave their lives – are steadily being eroded.
Hence judges have selected Rod Mickleburgh’s wide-ranging study as this year’s winner of the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness. The last attempt to provide a full history of B.C. labour was Paul Phillips’ No Power Greater: A Century of Labour in British Columbia (1967) so an extensive overview was long overdue.
Mickleburgh, formerly a labour reporter for both the Vancouver Sun and Province and a senior writer for The Globe and Mail, has documented the broad historical sweep of what has been Canada's most volatile and progressive provincial labour force, re-educating British Columbians to why unions are essential for a progressive society.
The story begins back in 1849 when Scottish labourers went on strike to protest barbaric working conditions at B.C.'s first coal mine at Fort Rupert on Vancouver Island.
Mickleburgh’s On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement revisits most of the major labour struggles since then. For four tumultuous months in 1983, for instance, the grassroots labour initiative in B.C. called Operation Solidarity–which took its name as an offshoot of the successful Solidarity movement in the shipyards of Poland at the time–was fighting the Social Credit government’s Restraint Budget.
Finally, on November 13, Jack Munro, president of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), signed a controversial deal with B.C. Premier Bill Bennett to end the Coalition’s plans for a general strike.
Mickleburgh’s account of how unionists achieved the five-day work week, the eight-hour day, paid holidays, the right to a safe, non-discriminatory workplace and many more now-taken-for-granted features rights continues into the second decade of the 21st century to recount the successful campaign led by the B.C. Teacher's Federation (BCTF) to improve classroom conditions and class sizes.
The two runners-up for the Ryga Prize this year are Chelene Knight for her second book, Dear Current Occupant (Book Thug) and Sarah Cox for Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand Against Big Hydro (On Point Press).
During his long career, Rod Mickleburgh has worked for the Penticton Herald, Prince George Citizen, Vernon News and CBC TV, in addition to the Sun, Province and Globe and Mail. In 1992 he was nominated for a National Newspaper Award; in 1993, he was a co-winner, with André Picard, of the Michener Award.
Mickleburgh’s first book was Rare Courage: Veterans of the Second World War Remember (M&S 2005), a collection of 20 memoirs profiling Canadian veterans of World War II (with Rudyard Griffiths, executive director of the Dominion Institute) and he earned the 2013 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for The Art of the Impossible (Harbour 2012), co-authored with Geoff Meggs.
Judges for the Ryga Award were professor and author Trevor Carolan, Joe Fortes Library branch manager Jane Curry and freelance writer and author Beverly Cramp.
*
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972-1975
BOOKS:
Rare Courage: Veterans of the Second World War Remember(McClelland and Stewart, 2005)
The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972-1975 (Harbour, 2012) With Geoff Meggs $32.95 978-1-55017-579-0
On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement (Harbour 2018) $44.95 978-1-55017-826-5
[BCBW 2019] "War"
+++
John Horgan: In His Own Words
by John Horgan with Rod Mickleburgh
(Harbour, $38.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2026)
After leading the province for five years and resigning in 2022, John Horgan, BC’s 36th premier, passed away in 2024. Few provincial leaders in living memory earned the level of public affection Horgan enjoyed — a tribute to his stalwart administration during the global Covid epidemic. While others faced economic, social or environmental challenges, none as premier ever confronted an existential crisis of that magnitude. His legacy is engraved at the heart of our definition of genuine public service.
We knew little of his personal story. John Horgan squeaked into the premier’s office through an alliance with the Green Party in 2017, ending 16 years of Liberal government that was tarnished by the “Casino Gate” scandal (when alleged foreign money was laundered through gambling and later invested in BC real estate) … or when, as The Province newspaper reported, “Metro Vancouver housing prices soared beyond the reach of non-millionaires.”
This is a book filled with remembrance. Following his resignation as premier, an event as unexpected and free of drama as Bill Bennett’s departure in 1986, Horgan—a two-time cancer survivor—recorded a series of interview conversations with labour journalist Rod Mickleburgh addressing his life and the history of his long political voyage. They met at Royal Roads University in Victoria in August 2023 and their sessions ran several days. They talked again the following November. More interviews followed via Zoom sessions in spring 2024 after Horgan had been appointed Canada’s ambassador to Germany. But that June, Horgan was diagnosed with thyroid cancer—his third round with cancer. Mickleburgh’s introduction relates that with Horgan sitting up in his Berlin hospital bed, they logged four final sessions in late-August. Horgan died in November.
Those interviews shape In His Own Words, a deep-dive memoir and autobiography from a political leader broadly experienced in governing. Horgan knew hard times growing up and if salty language isn’t in your wheelhouse, especially in the early chapters, be advised.
BC's first NDP premier to earn re-election recalls how his path to the premier’s office came after years as an NDP staffer in Ottawa and Victoria. He attended Trent University in Peterborough after learning of it in Ocean Falls, the pulp mill town where he migrated after a working-class upbringing in Saanich. The mill’s solid union wages enabled him to study social work. At Trent, he heard Canada’s beloved social justice hero, Tommy Douglas speak. From then on, Horgan intimates, he knew who he was and that what he believed in was worth fighting for.
His father, he says, was a drunk. An Irish scrapper and sports fan who made truck deliveries around Chinatown. He died while Horgan was an infant, leaving the load of raising four kids to his wife, Alice. “She did everything pretty much by herself,” Horgan explains.
Horgan had a passion for lacrosse. He could play and became, he says, “the guy everyone wanted on their team.” Horgan dreamed of joining Victoria’s renowned Shamrocks but never made the senior squad. Yet it was during this time he grasped that “team sports were where you learned that everyone’s role was important.”
By grade 8, Horgan concedes he “was heading into the ditch.” He was troubled and credits Jack Lusk, his high school basketball coach, for bringing him around. He finished high school, the only one of his siblings to manage that. His mother returned to school, learned to drive and secured a CUPE job in local government. While not a religious family, “the basic decency of Christianity permeated our existence,” Horgan recalls. Along the way he befriended Bruce Hutchinson, the renowned political journalist. They’d spend hours together by the stove, “talking about politics, past and present.”
At Trent, Horgan met his wife Ellie, a biologist who became his rock and accompanied him to Australia where he earned his Master’s degree in history. Five years in Ottawa followed where Horgan worked in public policy development for the NDP. The narrative spices up when he recalls his favourite MPs. This is a book that names names—those who helped, and those who helped themselves.
In 1991, the Horgan family settled in Victoria’s Langford district. Horgan worked in various capacities for three premiers—Mike Harcourt, Glen Clark and Dan Miller. His strength was fixing problems—he got things done. Horgan speaks candidly about these former bosses and of Ujjal Dosanjh whose premier’s term ended the NDP’s almost 10-year run in office.
Significantly, Horgan was drawn to natural resource and energy development issues. In 1999, he moved sideways into the Columbia Power Corporation, a Crown operation responsible for putting “the final elements of the Columbia River Treaty into place.” Involving flood control, purchasing and repowering existing dams from Cominco, job creation for the Kootenays and revenue generation from selling energy to the US, Horgan confirms that, “It all added up to a $500 million deal.”
Dan Miller, the short-term premier from Prince Rupert, hired Horgan as his Chief of Staff just as climate change began making government agendas. Horgan understood that energy and emissions action was about to boom and could talk to environmentalists and big labour alike. But the NDP was dethroned in 2001; Horgan considered his future from the sidelines.
When Gordon Campbell’s Liberals awarded a ferry-building contract to Germany, Horgan howled at the news. The drummer in his son’s garage rock band overheard and asked, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Horgan responded by getting elected as MLA in the next election, joining leader Carole James’ Official Opposition. For 12 years he polished his public speaking and media skills, critiquing Liberal premiers Campbell and Christy Clark. When Clark demolished Adrian Dix in the 2013 election, Horgan says it was “one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever seen.”
Known as an economic pragmatist, Horgan was approached to join the Liberals who needed an Island voice, but declined to cross over. He saw that Clark had out-strategized the NDP and didn’t forget.
By 2014, Horgan was leader of BC’s NDP. The party was stone broke and had “internal divisions.” He treaded water, built alliances with unions and the Indigenous community and gradually pulled things into cohesion.
Significantly, Horgan championed the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) for which he is still warmly remembered, and he includes a chapter of sincerity and insight into Indigenous issues and reconciliation. He also developed a reputation having a temper. He and Clark did not get on—“not at all,” Horgan emphasizes.
With his party still struggling, Horgan brought in Bob Dewar, a seasoned Manitoba campaigner, as Chief of Staff. Dewar brought the mojo Horgan needed and “the sinking stopped.” Then came The Big One. In 2017, Horgan pulled off the unthinkable after forging an understanding with Dr. Andrew Weaver, leader of BC’s Greens. With their combined seats, they narrowly toppled Christy Clark, despite her pleas for a second, snap election that Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon declined. Horgan’s explanation of the agreement with Weaver is fascinating reading. Both made economic and ecological compromises that benefitted the province.
John Horgan’s party inherited a budget surplus from the Liberals. The NDP got busy: no more Medical Services Plan premiums, improved disability assistance rates, tuition fees waived for adult education and ESL, free postsecondary education for 18-year-olds coming out of foster care, Port Mann Bridge tolls ended. The NDP increased the minimum wage. Carole James in finance added a new tax bracket for those earning over $250,000, as well as a speculation and vacancy tax on empty homes. They balanced the budget and BC earned Canada’s highest credit rating. Horgan delivered for the people and didn’t mind sharing the applause around, regardless of affiliation.
He admits “the transition from activist to administrator” is challenging. But it was the anti-old-growth logging protests at Fairy Creek and the Site C dam decision in the Peace River country that earned him the wrath of eco-activists. On the books for 40 years and kick-started by the Liberals, the Site C infrastructure project faced skyrocketing costs and geotechnical issues. Yet, “even if getting there has been one of the province’s most challenging public policy questions,” Horgan could see its enormous value “in an energy-constrained marketplace.” He moved it forward. His chapter on working with the Greens on this and LNG issues explores the most complex ethical and economic questions he encountered in political life. Of his controversial commitments to “working forests,” hydroelectric power and developing LNG as a clean energy source—a $40 billion private sector investment—he explains his higher responsibility to “[meet] the needs of five million people,” not just the dissenters.
When Covid hit in 2020, Horgan’s government lead a bewildered public through the shock. His deputies on the file, Dr. Bonnie Henry and Adrian Dix, got BC past the worst. Who can forget their nightly updates? Ironically, the Greens’ support grew shaky; Andrew Weaver began sitting as an independent. Horgan’s decision to call a snap election after only three years caused grief and he speaks compellingly to this.
Maximum pressure came in 2021: extreme temperatures, a “heat dome” and “atmospheric rivers,” vast wildfires including the Lytton conflagration, flooding, and pipeline decisions—it was a fateful time. And Horgan now had throat cancer.
Horgan maintains he was already “becoming a grumpy happy warrior;” however, a badly thought out decision proposing a long public closure of the Royal BC Museum proved the tipping point. He realized that he was “not reading the room right on something [he was] passionate about.” Mindfully, he apologized and decided he was done.
In his afterword, Mickleburgh concludes this valuable book with an emotional grace note. During their final interview he asked Horgan, “What he would want me to say about him if today ever came?” In a scene so typical of Horgan, he responded simply, “‘Just tell everyone I did my level best.’”
9781998526260
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver where he served as municipal councillor.
Articles: 1 Article for this author
The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett & the NDP in Power 1972 – 1975
Review (2012)
The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett & the NDP in Power 1972 - 1975 by Geoff Meggs & Rod Mickleburgh (Harbour $32.95)
With Dave Barrett's NDP election victory in 1972, the electorate was deeply and passionately divided.
Progressives predicted that the era of conservative, corporate-friendly politics, long the hallmark of British Columbia government, would give way to modernizing social democratic politics, putting British Columbia into the forefront of social reform.
Those of a more conservative bent, supported by much of the media, believed that disaster was ahead, and that the socialist hordes committed to class warfare would destroy sacred institutions and ravish the economy in short order.
So it was a polarized time, not unlike many places in the world today, including our neighbour to the south. Polarization and the challenges it created is just one of the themes underlying The Art of the Impossible by veteran reporter Rod Mickleburgh and journalist-turned-city councillor Geoff Meggs. Together they have fashioned an informative and delightful telling of what actually happened during one of the most eventful periods in British Columbia's political history.
The Art of the Impossible is based on detailed research into what was said and done by many of the key actors. As a result, its telling has a deeply human dimension that is often lacking in histories of this sort. The authors pull back the usually-drawn curtains and closed doors of the legislative building offices and meeting rooms, permitting us virtually to see and hear what is happening, largely as told by those who were there. The book is jam-packed with tales of the manoeuvrings, missteps and political adventures of the many larger-than-life characters that made up the NDP cabinet, the caucus and other organizations of the time-none more colourful than the Premier himself.
Dave Barrett was, we are told, a reporter's dream. "Are we here for a long time?"; he famously asked his colleagues, "or a good time?"; clearly implying he leaned to the latter. He loved headlines. And he was notoriously irreverent.
Even media types were not immune to Barrett's take-no-prisoners politics and ungovernable tongue. When a prominent female columnist pestered him about an ill-advised attempt to personally direct the supposedly independent Egg Marketing Board (affording special treatment to a farmer he thought had been wronged), the premier railed at her, "F- you. F- you, you venomous bitch.";
This is a hard book to put down.
The government was no sooner elected than it embarked on a dizzying and hyperactive agenda seemingly intent on fixing all of the accumulated ills of society in a single term of office. The press called it "legislation by thunderbolt."; A barrage of early new initiatives, many of which appeared to have caught the caucus and even some of the cabinet by surprise when announced, included:
? oil and gas price regulation
? new mineral royalties
? public auto insurance
? a freeze on the rezoning of agricultural land
? creation of a new Agricultural Land Reserve
? a new petroleum Crown Corporation with a monopoly over the purchase of all oil and gas produced
? a minimum income plan for seniors
? a condemnation of oil tankers off the coast
? a ban on corporal punishment in schools
? the purchase of the Ocean Falls pulp mill and community
? the purchase of a major pulp and lumber company
? the imposition and then retraction of a hilariously misconceived daylight savings plan for the whole province
A reporter calculated that Barrett committed to forty-two new policies during his first forty-five days as premier and, during the first session of the legislature, enacted ninety-six bills. That torrid pace continued in the ensuing years. Nothing seemed beyond the reach of the new crowd in Victoria.
It was a cabinet of large egos and big ideas. Many of the biggest and best initiatives were poorly planned and badly-handled. Even the great enduring successes like the Agricultural Land Reserve and the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia involved potentially career-ending fumbles by ministers. To the credit of the authors, they report faithfully the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as the successes.
The notorious and politically damaging overspending of the re-formed welfare budget is fairly presented regardless of the obvious respect Mickleburgh and Meggs have for the minister, Norman Levy. Indeed, all the attempts at policy change are told with a keen eye for both the frequent creativity of ministers and the screw-ups that seem to have plagued most everything the government touched.
It is fairly clear that some ministers are held in much higher regard than others. Labour minister Bill King and Minister of Resources and Environment Bob Williams come through relatively unscathed and enjoy obvious special respect. Ministers who come through as less than stellar include Education Minister and Deputy Premier Eileen Dailly and, somewhat surprisingly, Agriculture Minister and, towards the end, Finance Minister, David Stupich, who accomplished a lot and was widely respected by his fellow ministers across the country for his record in agriculture.
The authors say little about the performance of Barrett as his own minister of finance, perhaps because his foibles as premier overshadowed anything he did in the finance portfolio.
Among the many travails of the Barrett government, this book provides especially valuable insights into two that one would expect an NDP government to handle with ease. One was a frayed and eventually poisoned relationship with organized labour. The other was the deep anger of the expanding women's movement. Both felt that Barrett never understood their needs and their special place in the NDP universe.
From this book, it is pretty clear that labour's expectations were unrealistic and ill-judged. Modest but effective amendments to the labour code disappointed labour. Things really came apart with back-to-work legislation and price controls in 1975. The authors make the case that back-to-work legislation was realistic and price controls were inevitable given the economic conditions of the time. Labour refused to understand the impossible position the government was in.
The case of the women's movement is different. It is hard not to conclude that Barrett at best had a tin ear and more probably had a deep antipathy to the demands of feminists seeking equality for women. The women's movement was justifiably alienated by his and his government's views. He just didn't get it.
A question long posed by observers of British Columbia politics is "what kind of government did Barrett actually provide?";
Was it a radical left government intent on altering the fundamental social and economic order, as many in the business sector claimed then and continue to claim today?
Or was it essentially a populist, reformist government faced with the necessary but almost impossible task of modernizing, in short order, a province that had fallen badly behind, as many of the New Democrat faithful claimed then and claim now?
Or was it simply a quixotic, incoherent band of political adventurers, with generally good intentions, thrown into government unprepared and unequipped to create and manage a well-considered agenda, only accidentally having done some good and enduring things, as some political analysts suggest?
If you are searching for an answer as to which it is, you will not find it here. But if you want a lively, readable, somewhat detailed, but very human story about a remarkable time in British Columbia politics, this book is highly recommended. 978-1550175790
Review by Doug McArthur, professor in the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University. He is a former deputy minister to Premiers Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark.
[BCBW 2012]
Doug McArthur
