Years ago I used to lament all the times I had stayed late at work while my daughter fended for herself at home. I couldn't forgive myself for the times I had yelled when I should have just taken a deep breath. I still cringe when I remember how I didn't recognize how much she was struggling with the changes in her life. I was definitely not a perfect parent.
But I came to realize that I was a good enough one.
Everything I did must have been good enough because she's turned out perfectly fine after all.
I'm thinking a lot about the concept of "good enough" these days in the lead up to the election in May. After 16 years of a government that focused on slashing social services and enriching the already rich, I'd love nothing more than a new government to right all those wrongs, to put people before profit, to restore the threads of our shredded social safety net and to do all that it possibly can to protect our air, land and water from pollution and desecration.
I want a government that prioritizes all the issues that I think are important.
But I know that I'm going to have to settle for a good enough one.
I used to vote for the Green Party and the NDP, alternately. I voted Green when two friends ran provincially and federally for office at a time when the evidence about human-made climate change was mounting. Voting for a party that put the environment first seemed logical given the fact that without a liveable environment, all other issues are moot.
When other friends raised questions about the social and economic policies of Green candidates, I ignored them. I didn't want to hear that a party that would protect the environment had any flaws in its platform.
And then came the attacks by the minister of education on the Vancouver School Board, and I took note of how the Green Party member on the board responded. How she sided with those who bought into the minister's vilification of board members.
Later I started to notice how often Andrew Weaver supports the B.C. Liberals and Christy Clark, and how much time he spends attacking John Horgan.
I'm going to vote for them because they're a team of good-enough politicians who I expect to do the very best they can.
Given Christy Clark's political record since 2001, starting with the gutting of all social service budgets when she was deputy premier and her government's tarnished environmental stewardship reputation, I find it difficult to understand why Horgan is the target of Weaver's attacks.
These days social media is abuzz with prognostications about the election in May. There are all kinds of predictions about how voting for the Green Party is really a vote for four more years of the B.C. Liberals. There are also lots of vehement rebuttals of this argument but, given that some ridings were won by the B.C. Liberals with just a few hundred votes in 2013, it's hard not to consider the impact of a Green Party vote.
And so I'm going to vote for the B.C. NDP, not because they're the perfect party, and not because I expect them to undo 16 years of B.C. Liberal rule anytime soon, or even that they will work right away on my personal top priorities.
I'm going to vote for them because they're a team of good-enough politicians who I expect to do the very best they can given the massive provincial debt they will inherit from the B.C. Liberals.
And I expect that when they can do better, they will.
I came to Canada the last time the NDP was in government in B.C. and I watched in fascination the unfolding on television of Glen Clark's resignation over a deck.
If the same standards of intolerance for malfeasance were applied to the B.C. Liberals today, Christy Clark should have resigned when the first reports of the deaths of children in government care began to surface. She should have resigned when the lies about the health-care researchers were revealed. She should have resigned when the New York Times' revelations about her "pay for play" finally forced local media to look at our "wild west" of electioneering. And she certainly should have resigned last week when she was caught in a Trump-like lie about hacking.
It would be a challenge to make a credible argument that Christy Clark and the B.C. Liberals are good enough for B.C. by any measure, including fiscal management. The B.C. Liberal record is riddled with fiscal fumbling and a failure to be anything even close to "transparent".
On the May 10, I hope to be waking up to a new day in B.C. with a "good enough for now" government working hard to be better at governing this province than the B.C. Liberals ever were.
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