MEGGS TO STICKHANDLE ISSUES FOR NEW PREMIER

He held similar job for Glen Clark during last time NDP governed B.C.

The last time Geoff Meggs worked in the office of an NDP premier, he authored an “aggressive” strategy to ensure more favourable media coverage of the Glen Clark government.

“Denials of equal time by reporters or inaccurate reporting of ministers availability should be documented and reported to B.C. (government) communications as well as followed up by ministry staff,” wrote Meggs in a confidential memo distributed to political staffers in 1997.

“This will require strong co-ordination between the minister’s office, the deputy and the communications director, particularly where ministry action is required to achieve satisfactory resolution,” the communications chief to then-premier Clark continued.

‘’The appropriate and necessary response is aggressive and proactive media relations. We need to ensure an authoritative reply within the news cycle, using the minister whenever possible and appropriate.”

Or as Meggs himself put it the following year in briefing a big-ticket political conference on the NDP attitude toward the news media: “They are out to get you … paranoia is a state of enhanced awareness.”

Of course all that was 20 years ago. No reflection of the attitudes Meggs will be bringing back to Victoria in his new job, announced this week, as chief of staff to incoming Premier John Horgan.

So said Meggs himself when asked if his appointment heralds a return to the aggressive Glen Clark style of NDP government of the 1990s.

“Anyone who thinks this is back to the past has just been asleep themselves and hasn’t been paying attention,” Meggs told Dan Fumano of Postmedia.

He also fired back at the B.C. Liberals for focusing their campaign attacks on the NDP government of the 1990s. “Trying to fight old battles that most people — especially people under the age of 30 — can’t even remember.”

He’s right on that score. To have voted in the last election that brought the New Democrats to power in B.C., a voter would be almost 40 years old today. The observation would apply equally to newly registered immigrant voters in communities where the Liberals lost ground.

But this is not the first time Meggs has reinvented himself in the course of a fascinating political career.

On his arrival in the provincial capital to work for Glen Clark in 1996, he was pulling telltale baggage as well. He’d been a member of the Communist party for a dozen years, served on its committees and wrote for its newspaper.

Not that he made any secret of the connection in taking up his duties with Clark. “I reminded him of it just to make sure,” Meggs told reporters. “He was hiring me for a job that had nothing to do with my political past.”

He’d made a clean break with the Communist party at the end of the 1980s. “Those aren’t my views anymore,” said Meggs. “I had a profound personal difference with the party and quit.”

He’d stuck with the party through Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and the crackdown on Poland’s Solidarity movement. So what were the “profound differences” that led to his break with communism? The policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev?

But the best laugh line at Meggs’ expense was delivered by his predecessor’s communications director, Bill Tieleman, speaking at his going away party in 1996.

“I feel like Miss Saigon,” said Tieleman, referring to the Madame Butterfly takeoff, set during the Vietnam War. “I’m leaving before the first Communist arrives.”

Meggs lasted three not-allthat-communicative years as communications director, leaving along with Clark himself in the summer of 1999.

He returned to Vancouver, served as communications director to then-Mayor Larry Campbell, then helped orchestrate the realignment of political forces in the city that saw the emergence of Vision Vancouver.

Vision became the preferred vehicle for moderate leftists, breaking with COPE, a hard-line civic party that had its roots in the same Communist party Meggs had put behind him years before.

Meggs was elected to council in 2008 on the slate headed by Gregor Robertson who became mayor. He has since emerged as the tougher half of a successful political act, where Robertson handles the cheerier side of civic government while Meggs is pressed into service to handle the controversies.

For the most part, he’s good at it. Well briefed. Doesn’t back down. He’ll bring a wealth of knowledge about Metro Vancouver, transit, homelessness and other issues to Horgan’s office, balancing the premier-designate’s roots in the capital region.

The shift from Vancouver council (he resigned this week) must be a welcome one for Meggs, given signs that he was tiring of the Good Gregor/Bad Geoff act.

Five years ago he sought an NDP nomination to run in Vancouver-Fairview, the seat Robertson represented in the legislature before quitting to run for mayor.

Despite support from Vision notables and the powerful civic workers union, Meggs lost the nomination (221 votes to 160) to George Heyman, the former head of the public service union running on a strong environmental platform.

Heyman, so green that he could pass as a member of the Andrew Weaver caucus, is now in his second term as MLA. He is also one of eight Vancouver New Democrats hoping for good news when Horgan appoints a cabinet later this month.

Among those advising Horgan on cabinet choices will be his new chief of staff, Geoff Meggs. As ever in the capital, ironies abound.

Anyone who thinks this is back to the past has just been asleep themselves and hasn’t been paying attention.

GEOFF MEGGS, chief of staff for Premier Horgan