Christy Clark’s Purse


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It was the middle of the night last night when it hit me. Last Friday’s cover of Vancouver’s 24 Hours headline/tabloid/no-context-or-detail free newspaper [see below] made me think of a piece I read in the Republic a while back.

My old boss, Education Minister Christy Clark, was on the cover. I attended SFU when she was there in the late 1980s or early 1990s. She never graduated from there or any university, but that’s ok. While at SFU she was on the student society doing what she has come to do best: alienate, offend and annoy people, including a couple friends of mine who were department reps on the student society. I think she saw herself as being assertive, while others called her beligerent.

Before retiring from being a public school teacher, my boss, Minister Clark, carried the trophy of teacher hatred around her like a laurel leaf on her head, refusing to meet with teachers for more than about 2.5 hours or something over her whole tenure, while she was eager to meet at length with all other stakeholder groups. At any rate, we were her whipping slaves and she did well by ramming a “contract” down our throats to put us in our place; we’re so uppity.

So then after countless teachers screamed at her in the produce section of Port Moody grocery stores, she decides to retire from politics, despite being deputy premier and a high-profile minister hammering away at DrunkGord Campbell’s neoLiberal privatization agenda.

So then I remember Kevin Potvin’s piece about three high profile cabinet ministers leaving politics…perhaps before criminal investigations hit them directly. Or maybe Harmony Air was just a good opportunity for Gary Collins and Christy Clark did really want to spend more time with her son.

But if her son was the reason for her to leave politics–at least temporarily–I got a huge kick out of her appearance on the cover of 24 Hours. Living the quiet, stay at home mom, suburban lifestyle hardly calls for a media splash to keep her in the public eye. I suspect she’ll end up running for–or being parachuted into–the Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam federal Liberal nomination to run against Conservative James Moore, someone hard to beat. With her family connections to the federal Liberals and Paul Martin, she may be a good west coast Belinda Stronach to help a minority government get another breath of air.

And 24 Hours was well inclined to give her a puff piece playing up her bouncy family lifestyle, especially when they referred to her as the former Minister of Children and Family Development, thereby not calling up the hellish days when she oversaw the closure of over 100 community public schools in BC and the firing of thousands of BC’s public school teachers.

Christy Clark

FORMER MINISTER OF CHILDREN
AND FAMILY DEVELOPMENT, PRESENTLY OVERSEEING HER
OWN CHILD AND FAMILY.

“My son wants to marry me,” says Clark, and in her purse is the blue, gizillion-carat toy store ring to prove it. “I never carried Kleenex before I had a baby.” We’re willing to bet you wouldn’t have found a Spider-Man action figure in there a few years back either – which incidentally is on its way back to the drycleaner where three-year-old Hamish lifted it from.

So, what’s in there …?

– A bus transfer.

– A shopping list: shiitake mushrooms, chili, green beans.

– Williams Lake and Ucluelet lapel pins.

– Collar stays from her husband’s shirt saved from demise at the drycleaner.

– A Japanese punk rock CD.

– Laura Mercier terra cotta lip liner and tea rose lipstick.

– A Taiwanese good luck charm.

– A Blackberry and cell phone.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun
Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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2 thoughts on “Christy Clark’s Purse”

  1. yes stephen…let me tell you, i am so tired of seeing those gaudy orange 24 hour newspapers (if you can even call them newspapers) sitting on every block and draped over every bus seat. what a pile of fluff…we are chopping down trees to print crap. the same corporation running The Province runs 24 hours, and of course they have the same corrupt agenda. why can’t the public read poetry or a paper like Fire This Time when on the bus or working out? or if they want to space out mentally, they should just stare into thin air and plain space out…they would receive much more enlightenment that way!

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