It is a fact that Ujjal Dosanjh has unlimited ambitions.In 1995/96 after Mike Harcourt quit as Premier, Dosanjh believed that, as Attorney General for the past few months, He should be the heir presumptive to the Premiership. When this title went instead to East End community planner and former Ironworker's organizer Glen Clark, Dosanjh was livid.
He began having discussions at that point, in 1995/96, with both Paul Martin and Brian Tobin about joining the Federal Liberals and running for them. Note that this is three/four years before he sought the provincial NDP Leadership. And four/five years before he led the NDP to its worst popular vote score in BC in the party's 70 year history, just 21%.
In the final months before the crash, some MLAs refused to run again and even one key strategist who had helped Dosanjh acquire the leadership quit and walked away. Why? Because as far as they could tell he was just shirking it, doing nothing effective at all in terms of election readiness, strategy, etc. and they just could not bear to watch the inevitable result.
Granted, 2001 was not going to be a great year for the BC NDP in any event. But these experienced politicos, who were seeing the situation up close and personal and with a lot at stake, were convinced that Dosanjh was doing, or in some cases not doing, everything humanly possible to make a bad situation a whole lot worse than what it really needed to be.
Curious, ... or what??? If only we could see Bill Cunningham and Mark Marrisen's daytimers for the years 1995 through 2001. And hey, ... what about Dave Basi's appointment book???