News in 1963
W.A.C. Bennett is our Premier and Finance Minister:
· "The Socialist Hordes are at the gates of British Columbia!"
· "The finest sound in the land is the ringing of cash registers."
William Andrew Cecil Bennett has already been Premier for eleven years. He has nine more to go! Bennett had been a Conservative but left that party to sit as an independent member. He later joined the Socreds.
(Ahhh, nutty B.C. politics: the post war coalition had wanted to prevent the splitting of the Liberal and Conservative vote which would be to the advantage of those socialist hordes, a familiar situation in B.C. for the next half of the century. A second preference vote was introduced for the purpose. As matters turned out, the C.C.F. voters would not mark as their second preference a member of the old line parties, whom they wished to keep out of office, and generally marked as their second preference the only other choice, the Social Credit candidate who couldn't win anyway. It was a discard.
(The end result of that second preference mechanism intended to keep out the C.C.F. after the war was that the Socreds ended up with so many of those discard votes that they had almost enough members to form a minority government! They were only one seat short. Some last minute arm twisting when everybody arrived in Victoria by upstart Bennett secured the extra member necessary and the Social Credit formed a new government: no more coalition. The whole thing was so unexpected that they all arrived in the capital without a party leader. Bennett became leader only after the election and then by a vote of just the caucus. Bennett prevailed by ten votes to nine for the other contender. It had been Wacky Bennett's familiar, Flying Phil, who had been the other candidate for Socred leadership in that caucus vote.)
Remember Flying Phil's ubiquitous orange and black highway signs saying "Sorry for the inconvenience" and prominently displaying his name? If you're from Prince George, or along the cow trail that was Highway 16, you remember "Gaglardi, Ginter and God"!
Joey Smallwood still rules on The Rock in the year of our escape from high school.
In the spring, Douglas Harkness resigns as Defence Minister over the nuclear weapons policy of Dief and the Chief's government succumbs shortly thereafter.
Pearson becomes our p.m. later that spring and with that most Canadian of political institutions, too, a Liberal minority government.
