B.C. Tory leader Dan Brooks — a man on the move, to Kamloops

By MEL ROTHENBURGER

NEWS/ POLITICS — Friday morning was busy in Motivo’s coffee shop on Victoria Street.

Dan Brooks was the only one in the place who wasn’t drinking coffee. He’s a Mormon, he explained.

Brooks is also leader of the B.C. Conservative Party and he was having a busy day. He’s been getting some traction with the media this week on his five-point plan for ending the teachers’ strike, and had another phone appointment with a reporter after we were done.

His political duties weren’t the only reason he was busy — his wife Ellen and their kids were scheduled to arrive for the weekend from Vanderhoof so they can move into their new house in Dufferin.

It’s a big move, though Brooks has spent a lot of time here since being elected leader of the party in April. Not everyone in the party liked the idea of setting up the provincial office outside the Lower Mainland, but Brooks was adamant about taking the provincial Conservatives closer to grassroots B.C.

“I looked around and I said which community makes reasonable sense,” he said as I sipped my caffe Americano. “Kamloops is a big town with a small-town feel.”

The reason we were where we were was an editorial I wrote recently that suggested Dan Brooks should be saying and doing something about the Mount Polley tailings-pond disaster.

Christy Clark and John Horgan were up in Likely talking to people and flying over the disaster zone. Clark was talking about how the cause must be found and fixed so it can never happen again, and so on, and Horgan was demanding an independent inquiry and release of all relevant documents by the government.

Brooks? Not a peep.

“I thought about it,” he said. “It’s a triple tragedy.” Environment-health, public trust, and the trickle-down effect on the mining industry.

“It’s too early to tell what the long-term effects are. The mining industry better pull up its socks and find some alternatives to tailings ponds. It’s absolutely devastating.”

So where was he on Aug. 4, and 5th, and 6th? There wasn’t much that could be said that would add to the public discourse, he explained, other than what everybody else was already saying about vowing it must never happen again and demanding inquiries, so he didn’t.

As for heading up to Likely and flying around in helicopters, the reality is he’s the leader of a party with no members in the legislature and very little money.

Fair enough, but while we were on the subject, what about Ajax? If he was Premier Dan Brooks, what would he do with Ajax?

“I would revamp the entire planning process.” That would include what he likes to call “cumulative impact planning,” meaning that the effect of a new industry on a particular area has to be considered in the context of all the other industries that are already there.

“At some point we’ve got to say it’s time to progress. The public will never trust a corporate-driven process.”

But back to Brooks and his rather dramatic move to uproot from his hometown of Vanderhoof and move house and home to Kamloops. It will all work out, he said — he’s hired a manager to run the Crystal Lakes Resort Ltd. hunting and fishing lodge he owns southwest of Vanderhoof. Since it’s a seasonal business, he’ll only have to return periodically, next week being one of those occasions.

How, though, does a party that hasn’t elected anyone in 30 years find its way out of the wilderness by setting up shop in Kamloops? Brooks admitted it’s no easy challenge, but he spends as much time travelling the province as he can, and cranks out press releases at a pretty good clip.

His “5-point Common-Sense Plan To Resolve the Government-Teachers’ Dispute” got pretty good ink in the Sun and the Province, as well as some other media. He happened to have a 12-page spiral-bound copy of it with him. He was quoted locally this week as saying Education Minister Peter Fassbender had lifted aspects of his plan in the minister’s meetings with the BCTF and B.C. Public School Employers Association.

That wasn’t totally true, Brooks told me — what he’d actually said was that it might seem that was the case.

Indeed, his 5-Point Common-Sense Plan has similarities to what Fassbender has proposed. It includes dealing with class size and composition through the province’s Learning Improvement Fund, dropping the government’s appeal of the latest B.C. Supreme Court ruling on teacher bargaining rights (Fassbender suggested the BCTF put potential grievances arising out of the appeal on hold), a $2,500 signing bonus, and a five-year contract with salary increases of 1.5 per cent per year.

With seven daughters of school age, Brooks has a strong interest in getting the school system functional by the time classes are supposed to start next week.

By the way, though his home riding will now be Kamloops-South Thompson, it’s not a given he’ll run against Transportation Minister Todd Stone in the next election. He’ll keep the option open of running in the Nechako Lakes riding in his old hometown of Vanderhoof.

That’s where he ran in the last election, getting 12.6 per cent of the popular vote, higher than the party’s average. His job, working from his new base in Kamloops, is to take the B.C. Conservatives to a much higher level in the next provincial election.