Premier Gordon Campbell’s future is as bright as Monty Python’s dead parrot – who will take over?

ha ha 

Of course if Campbell is forced out sometime in the next six months to a year (which is looking more and more likely) - his succesort would have to govern for a couple of years before the next election and would have to make unpopular decisions etc...Diane Watts may have "no political baggage" right now since she has ZERO provincial political experience. But to govern is to choose and if she hypothetically became BC Liberal leader and Premier - she would suddenly starting accumulating MASSIVE amounts of baggage from day 1. She would have to move into a hyper-partisan polarized environment in Victoria where it just isn't good enough to smile a lot and make no tough decisions and where the deep ideological cracks in the BC Liberal coalition will be increasingly hard to paper over.  

She's made plenty of tough decisions that people may or may not agree with. Opposing the so-called carbon tax was a tough decision. Pushing more measures that would increase the number of women in the legisltaure was a tough decision. Pledging to slam the door on all P3s and other underhanded privatization schemes was a tough decision.

People can argue the merits of these decisions - but the point is that Carol James taken controversial policy stances against opposition from some factions in the party....and that's without even being Premier. My point is that it remains be seen how long some supposedly pleasant non-partisan municipal politician like Diane Watts would retain that image if she became premier and had to do fun things like implementing the HST and bringing in savage cuts to health care etc...Things that the rightrwing base of the BC Liberal party would expect and demand.

Anyone can be a popular mayor of a suburb. All you have to do is put in the odd traffic light and make sure the garbage gets collected. Mel Lastman was wildly popular as mayor of North York - he wasn't even able to make the transition from that to being mayor of Toronto, let alone being a provincial party leader (can you imgine??).

Harcourt and Campbell were both Vancouver mayors and later made the transition to provincial leader. James was a school board chair who made the transition to provincial leader.

If you look at Watts' background, she has been a Surrey councillor since 1996 and was aligned with the long-dominant SME municipal party with Doug McCallum as mayor. Watts then had a falling out with McCallum and his "culture of control and conflict" promising "better co-operation between the city and senior governments to bring more social services into Surrey to deal with homelessness, drug use and crime".

As an independent, when she ran as mayor against incumbent McCallum in 2005 and the SME machine she trounced McCallum and the SME is surprisingly no more. Watt's Surrey First municipal party is now dominant on council and includes some New Democrats (Rasode and Villeneuve). That's a tough feet to achieve. She seems to have been quite effective in bringing outreach workers to Surrey in dealing with the homeless, the anti-grow op inspection program, spear-heading the massive Surrey City Centre development in Whalley (new city hall, library, high-rise condo/office clusters), the annual Surrey Regional Economic Summit (Tony Blair guest speaker this year, Steve Forbes next year), etc.

Watts also seems to be the highest profile mayor in Metro Vancouver (unusual as it has always been Vancouver's mayor) and comes across quite well on TV. That said, her car accident a few weeks ago suggests that she may take a breather in her public life - "Watts says she normally goes a hundred miles an hour and sometimes she says you don't get to stop and really live life. That's the most significant lesson she's taken away from the ordeal." Anything about Watts going provincial is just speculation and conjecture at this point.

Frankly, if Watts ran for and won the NDP leadership, I'd wager that she would take NDP polling numbers to historical highs - perhaps toward 60%.

Campbell did his job after all. He managed to keep out the NDP and the socialist barbarians. And, from the right wing point of view, that's the main thing.

I predict a very cushy posting with an enormous salary for his "great" contribution to public service.