Christy Clark is looking to Northern B.C. with a sense of inspiration, she told The Citizen in the final few days before BC Liberal Party holds its leadership vote.
She is one of four candidates vying for the job of party leader and Premier-elect.
It was the economic activity already happening or near to fruition in the north, she said, that has B.C. on confident fiscal footing.
"Government has to focus on resource communities first," she said. "That enables economic expansion which feeds the whole province. We all - and I think this is becoming more understood in the south - depend on the economic development of the north. It is what has fed British Columbia and always will."
She promised trade missions to both India and China within the first six months of her mandate, should she win the position, with a big focus on the opportunities of the North.
The government should also facilitate new innovations and secondary business ventures to find their legs, she said.
Northern infrastructure requiring help in the short-term include the Port of Prince Rupert's ability to export wood pellets, the electrification of Highway 37, and improvements to Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George in conjunction with the Highway 97 plans already underway.
Standing apart from leadership candidate Kevin Falcon's strong stand against Aboriginal veto powers on industrial project proposals, Clark contends all economic activities in the North needs First Nations onside. She pointed to opportunities in coal mining, oil and gas and forestry where First Nations, the provincial government and the private sector worked together amicably.
Clark's campaign has had a few bumps along the way, however. Few can forget her campaign organizer's feline fiasco, when she signed up her cat Olympia as a Liberal Party member.
And Clark has also been a target for her "flip flop" on the HST. Whereas she initially said the HST should be debated via a free vote in the legislature, she eventually agreed with her rival candidates, after "listening to British Columbians," that a referendum was the best recourse.
Fellow leadership candidate George Abbott has been the most critical of her, publishing a two-page anti-Clark rant that was mailed to party members in recent weeks.
Clark still tracks well with the public, however. In an Ipsos Reid poll released Tuesday of 800 B.C. residents (including 317 Liberal and 289 NDP), 32 per cent have a positive impression of her and 32 per cent a negative impression - second only to George Abbott.
One element Clark herself has not lingered on, although others have, is her gender. If she wins Saturday's party vote would be the first woman in the history of B.C. to be Premier with a mandate of more than a year still ahead. (Rita Johnson, B.C.'s only woman Premier so far, held the post for seven months in 1991.)
"I have had a lot of women come to me and tell me that they appreciate that there is a woman in a role model position in politics, to show their daughters that women are very able to be the Premier of the province or anything they want to be."
