The election campaign is officially underway, which means British Columbians will have to endure 28 days of overblown rhetoric, personal invective, half-truths and a fair amount of hypocrisy.
And it will come from the entire range of the political spectrum. No matter who wins the vote on May 14th, no party will emerge with clean hands when it comes to being completely forthright with the electorate.
The two major parties - the NDP and the B.C. Liberals - would have you believe, for example, that they have completely opposite approaches to the province's finances. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Both parties want to raise corporate income taxes. Both parties want to raise income taxes on the rich. There was a time when such policies were the darling of the left, but now the B.C. Liberals have adopted the same philosophy as the NDP.
Of course, the NDP wants a 12 per cent corporate tax rate while the B.C. Liberals prefer an 11 per cent rate. I suppose the former is unbridled socialism, while the latter is unfettered capitalism.
The B.C. Liberals are in the midst of running four and possibly five deficit budgets (I'm not one of the measly 12 per cent of British Columbians who, according to pollster Ipsos-Reid, actually believe the current one will be balanced) and the NDP intends to table three consecutive deficit budgets.
The B.C. Liberals will have doubled the provincial debt during their time in office, which is exactly what the NDP did during their administration in the 1990s.
The B.C. Liberals have provided massive spending hikes to the health care system. The NDP intends to do the same.
Do I sense a pattern here? About the only real difference between the two party's fiscal plans is the NDP's plan to reintroduce a tax (which existed during the early term of the B.C. Liberal government) on banks and financial institutions.
The NDP would also expand activities captured by the carbon tax (a tax created, of course, by the B.C. Liberals).
Does this really represent a yawning ideological schism between the two parties, or does it merely indicate the rather grim fiscal reality facing either party should it win the election?
Yet, on the campaign trail, I'm sure we'll hear the NDP talk about how the B.C. Liberals have somehow "cut" health care spending, no matter how misleading (and wrong) such a statement really is.
And the B.C. Liberals will denounce the New Democrats as tax-and-spenders who will run up deficits, when they've done exactly the same on Christy Clark's watch.
Each party will wrap itself in a cloak of self-righteous indignation, portraying itself as the only competent alternative, the only one to be trusted with the levers of power.
But brush all these flotsam and jetsam aside and we'll be left with two central campaign messages coming from each of the major parties.
For the B.C. Liberals, that message will be "it's all about trust," as in: who can you trust best with growing the economy and handling provincial finances? This will involve a double-barrelled approach that combines the party boasting about its economic skills while portraying the NDP's time in government as a complete disaster for the province.
The NDP, meanwhile, will exploit the apparent widespread desire (according to opinion polls) for a change in government in this province. Any party that spends a more than a dozen years in government piles up a lot of baggage over the years, and the NDP will remind voters of that baggage over and over again.
There will be plenty of photo ops on the leaders' campaigns that are focused on such issues as health-care, education, forestry and the environment. While all those issues are important, they are not what this election is about. "Trust" and "change" are the key emotional issues driving the vote.
Of course, the two minor (for now) political parties - the B.C.
Conservatives and the Greens - will try to make their voices heard over the next month. I suspect they will have more success than in previous campaigns because the electorate appears more volatile this time around.
So hang on tight for the next 28 days. The end result will be either a change in government, a miracle comeback for all time, or a historic breakthrough by one of the minor parties.
But a lot of hot air will be expelled before we know which scenario we end up with.
