Didja here? The BC United party has basically imploded, pulling out of this election, except they haven’t really because they still want to maintain their status as a part so are trying to get a couple people elected.
Nothing like this has ever happened in BC Politics ever before!
Except…
Except that BC politics have historically been populated by, well strange characters is one way to put it.
Bonkers is another way.
Remember Flyin’ Phil Gaglardi, the former televangelist turned politician who was on a mission (possibly, though unlikely, from God) to pave as much of the province as possible?
When he saw road machinery moving in second gear, would literally get out of his vehicle and yell at people, telling them to work faster. “We’ll never get our highways built that way!”
He loved driving fast and hated newspapers. Well, he says they had one good use…in the outhouse. He was the province’s highway minister who lost his licence multiple times due to speeding tickets.
And does anyone remember Ted Nebbeling? He was the Liberal forestry critic back in 1997.
The women of the legislature decided that he had been a bit of a, well, a dick to the female members that year, so they named him “dick of the year.”
To drive the point home, while addressing the house, a group of women approached his desk, and placed a wind-up walking penis on his desk.
More memorable is Gordan Campbell, whose drunken drive while vacationing in Hawaii got him pulled over, tossed in a drunk tank and his licence revoked for 90 days.
Agnes Kripps, a Social Credit backbencher made a pitch to ban sex from the province.
Not sex itself, but the word.
“I hate the word sex,” said Kripps. “I propose that we throw it out of the vocabulary of education. Let’s find a substitute and start all over again.”
Then she suggested substituting the word Bolt. “That stands for… Biology on Life Today: B-O-L-T.”
Added Kripps: “By eliminating the word sex and replacing it with BOLT or any other word — any other word — we will remove the blindfolds, the smirks, the embarrassment and, above all, the ignorance.”
Have you ever seen the monorail episode of the Simpsons? It sets the standard for comedic television. In the show, a flim-flam artist sells the town of Springfield on the idea of building a monorail with their newfound cash.
Turns out, though, the story is not as far fetched as it might seem, as in the 1950s, Swedish vacuum cleaner tycoon Axel Wenner-Gren convinced then-premier W.A.C. Bennett to let him develop a 10-million hectare chunk of the province into a northern utopia: mines, pulp mills, hydro dams, and “10 to 15 towns” tied together with a 280-kph monorail that would cost $1 billion (close to $10-billion now).
The area would have stretched from Prince George north to the Yukon, and, while the project eventually died, (possibly due to political opposition, possibly due to Wenner-Gren’s ties to the Nazis) the W.A.C. Bennett dam on the Peace River was inspired by the project.
But the gold standard, high watermark, biggest-nut-in-the-jar in BC politics was William Alexander Smith, better known to history as Amor De Cosmos—Lover of the Universe.
De Cosmos was a former prospector turned newspaperman and spent a number of years as editor of the Victoria Times Colonist before moving on to politics.
He became BC’s second premier after the first, John Foster McCreight resigned after a motion of no confidence.
McCreight was himself not exactly what one might call a professional politician. A collegue described him as “bad tempered and queer…by fits and turns extremely credulous and extremely suspicious…excessively obstinate in the wrong places…close and reserved in his daily life, and utterly ignorant of politics.” He lasted one year in office.
But De Cosmos? He was actually officially declared insane, though not while he was in office. No, while he was in office (he lasted three years), he got involved with a group of businessmen looking to create a steel mill using iron from Texada Island, and used his power as premier “to acquire possession of Texada Island, in a manner prejudicial to the interests of the public” to gain access to lucrative iron ore deposits.
When word of what he had done was made known, the public was furious, marching on the Legislature, calling for De Cosmos to be hanged, which they did, but fortunately for him, only in effigy.
After lasting twice as long as the province’s first premier, De Cosmos resigned the next day.
He remained in politics, becoming a Member of Parliament in Ottawa, where he lasted for ten years.
Later in his life, after being declared insane in 1895 and seven years after leaving public office, he became infamous for trying to found a hot food delivery company. The company’s goal was to provide hot meals to prospectors in the Klondike Gold Fields. However, he was 220-something years ahead of his time, and so this analogue proto-Uber-eats never took off, and two years later he passed away at the age of 71.
Despite all that, he pursued a policy of political reform, economic expansion, and the development of public institutions—especially schools, laying the foundation for the public education system in BC.
So, what’s happening now with the BC United and BC Conservatives? Is less a wild departure into strange politics and more a return to form for the province.
Bring out the crazies, it’s time for a BC election!
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
