Christy Clark ran a red light - and with poor Hamish in the car!
For two days, the media went crazy, with an hysteria usually reserved for vilifying the left. But because the consensus is that Ms. Clark has already lost the election, it's now OK to represent a blown red light as a legitimate reason to question her suitability for office.
"My God," says my colleague, leaping on the media outrage bandwagon. "She's not fit for office - this goes to her character!"
Balderdash.
On this, I defend Christy Clark and agree with Adrian Dix; it's not relevant; let's not get into it.
Should people run red lights? No, of course not. But running a red light is not the reason Ms. Clark is unfit for political office. That's like identifying jaywalking in Whoville as the Grinch's main character flaw.
There's ample relevant evidence that goes to Ms. Clark's character without invoking a driving oversight. Her role in years of egregiously dishonest government comes immediately to mind.
But beyond the partisan particulars of Ms. Clark's driving faux pas, the media's hissy fit about such irrelevance speaks to something more disturbing.
B.C.'s media is becoming far too CNN. With little investigation or analysis, they merely parrot the gaffe of the day in their increasingly lazy election coverage.
The effect of such media carpet-bombings about personal inadequacies and missteps is to keep voters uninformed about the important issues.
And the fact the media chose to pillory Ms. Clark over this incident is testament to how far we have gone down the road towards American-style media hysteria, where political policies are lost in a sea of gossip and gotchas.
Our elections should be decided on policy, not personal peccadilloes. I don't care whether Ms. Clark ran a red light or Adrian Dix had a free ride on the SkyTrain.
I do care that the policies and practices of Ms. Clark's government have been odious and dishonest, and that the BC Liberals need to go - but not because of some silly Christy Clark traffic misdemeanour.
As matter of fact, Ms. Clark's running of a red light at 5:10 a.m. is one of the few things she has done in the last dozen years about which I'm not furious.
