In November, 1998, frustrated by lack of access to Glen Clark's NDP government, business leaders in British Columbia took matters into their own hands: They mounted the B.C. Business Summit to draw public attention to the province's plight. Speakers enumerated the dubious economic distinctions that had befallen B.C. in the 1990s: Canada's lowest private-sector investment growth, lowest productivity growth, lowest per-capita GDP growth. Average annual take-home pay had declined by more than $800 in real terms since the NDP took power in 1991. (By 2001, the figure was up to more than $1,700.) The NDP had posted seven consecutive budget deficits, and the provincial debt had doubled in seven years (it now stands at more than $37 billion). The province was being abandoned by businesses, and by people (about 45,000 moved to Alberta alone). Scarier still, beautiful B.C., whose lush rainforest seems to represent infinite bounty, was on the verge of becoming a have-not province, depending on handouts from Ottawa to get by.

In his keynote address to the summit, Jimmy Pattison, the patron saint of B.C. capitalism, called for a "big bang" of massive cuts to government and taxes, plus a slate of pro-business labour laws. Frank McKenna, brought in for the event, drew a similar road map in explaining how, during his decade as Premier, he turned New Brunswick into the little province that could. By bookending the summit with Pattison and McKenna, the organizers sent a clear signal: Big business (Pattison) and new Liberals (McKenna) were of one mind. No one internalized the message more, it seems, than Liberal leader Gordon Campbell.

Three years after the seminal summit, I ponder all this as I sip my third Starbucks latte-it's taken that many to get through the morning papers on this stereotypically wet November day in Vancouver. The front pages of the national and local dailies are unanimous in leading with now-Premier Campbell's plan to cut up to 11,500 civil service jobs, about a quarter of the provincial government's direct payroll. It reminds me of that old saying about being careful what you wish for. Big bangs are messy affairs.

Of course, B.C. politics is no stranger to extremes. For the past three decades, control of the legislature has veered back and forth between the free-enterprisers and the social democrats. But there is something very different this time. It's as if, by sheer force of repetition, the pendulum has swung harder. Campbell, elected last May with 77 of the legislature's 79 seats, came to power promising a "New Era" for B.C.

But nobody expected it to be this new. As I gather up my papers, I wonder whether Campbell can avoid making British Columbians nostalgic for the NDP. It's a hard road ahead. Will the new Premier, a Clintonesque yuppie whose conservative convictions are untested, be able to press on at full speed?

As fate would have it, Campbell has announced his job reduction targets the very moment 2,200 delegates have descended on Vancouver for a Canadian Union of Public Employees convention. And barely a day after British Columbia's chief health officer has revealed that B.C. holds the Canadian record for stomach flu, likely owing to the province's above-average rates of contaminated drinking water. It turns out not to be the wisest moment to announce plans to gut the public service-when you've got hundreds of angry labour leaders fresh from the battlefields of Ontario and Alberta on your doorstep, eager to offer up disaster scenarios à la Walkerton at the nearest media mike.

But timing has never been Gordon Campbell's strong suit. There was the instance back in the early 1980s, when he bought a new house before selling his old one, and was squeezed when mortgage rates suddenly soared above 20%. He lost a bundle by unloading one of the properties in a fire sale. Then there was the time in 1993 he made the leap from being mayor of Vancouver to leading the B.C. Liberal party, amid polls showing the Liberals were set to hammer the governing New Democrats. When the election finally did come, in early 1996, a revitalized NDP under new leader Clark snatched victory. Campbell, an impatient man, had to bide his time for another five years on the Opposition benches, watching helplessly as B.C. floundered while the rest of Canada rode the boom to prosperity. Now, he has become Premier at the worst possible moment in the economic cycle.

Were Campbell paranoid, he might say factors are conspiring to ensure he falls flat on his face. The 54-year-old Premier faces not just a recession, but also a job-killing lumber trade war with the United States and suddenly shrivelling U.S. demand for B.C.'s once-hot electricity. And those are only the major headaches. Since Campbell's ascension to the Premier's office on June 5, he's learned that the worst mountain pine beetle epidemic in B.C. history is killing vast swaths of forest; he's watched as two more B.C. head offices-its biggest, Westcoast Energy Inc., and one of its brightest, Future Shop Ltd.-are relegated to branch-plant status; he's seen what was left of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, the computers of the CDNX, shut down; and he's seen Japan's economy slide-once again-into recession, only days after returning from an Asian trip to kick-start trade.

Yet Campbell seems determined to win with the hand he's been dealt. Seated on a forest-green velvet couch in his Vancouver office, he invites challenges and judgment. Between now and the next time British Columbians go to the polls, he promises to transform his province into a Lotusland Tiger. It sounds like a lot of blue-skying to me. But Campbell is itching to prove me, and anyone else who would say so, wrong.

" Listen," he says. "If you don't strive for it, you're never going to get there. I was at UVic [University of Victoria] recently and a student asked me why politicians always say one thing before an election and do differently afterwards. I said: 'Because we let them.' If people voted for the federal Liberals in 1993 because they said they would get rid of the GST and then didn't, is that right? I'm going to hold myself accountable and I hope the public will too. It will be tough. We have some really tough issues to get through."

Campbell still sounds like a new Premier not yet sobered by the constraints of governing. He stays relentlessly on-message: accountability this, accountability that. It's easy to understand why the Liberals would exploit the theme. Clark's NDP was famous for evasion, most memorably in its "fudge-it budget," which turned a deficit into a surplus on the eve of the 1996 election. So the highly accountable Premier Campbell hit the ground running, fulfilling his "90-day agenda" of promises in his first 85 days in office and tying 20% of cabinet ministers' salaries to the achievement of performance goals.

The hard part of Campbell's agenda-the pain-inducing task of balancing the budget and restructuring the public service and health care-is only beginning. No one will have a tougher time earning his bonus than Gary Collins, Campbell's Finance Minister. Collins's credibility has already taken a hit thanks to his July 30 mini-budget that forecast dreamy growth rates for B.C. of 3.8% in 2001 and 2.2% this year. (In November, he revised the projection downward to 0.9% and 0.6%, respectively.)

The flip-flop has put the onus on Collins to reverse the impression that he is in over his head. His only real chance comes with the tabling on Feb. 19 of his first full budget. He must establish a credible formula for meeting the self-imposed obligation to eliminate the deficit by 2004-2005. That task has been vastly complicated by Collins's implementation of a gargantuan tax cut on the government's first full day in office-before he had even had a real look at the books.

To offset the $1.5 billion in lost revenue from the one-time 25% cut and $800 million foregone in corporate tax reductions, cuts to public services will now have to be several layers deeper than anyone contemplated before the election. Indeed, it was only after the election, on learning that a modest surplus projected by the NDP would balloon into a deficit of $3 billion or more for the current fiscal year, that Campbell acknowledged his tax cuts would not be "self-financing." (The government is currently projecting a $2-billion deficit for the year ending March 31.) Collins, who will detail the expenditure cuts in his budget, has already indicated that program spending outside of health and education will be slashed by between 10% and 43%. The cuts will make Mike Harris and Ralph Klein-those inspirations to the New Era platform-look like socialist softies.

There is no underestimating the degree of disruption. Campbell's health-care revolution will include widespread cuts to acute-care institutions, more private-sector involvement, and a delisting of dozens of services and drugs from medicare and pharmacare coverage. He's already slashed the number of regional health authorities from 52 to five. (The old system, he says, was-what else?-"not accountable.") The government is expected to roll back collective agreements signed by the NDP, a move that will only further poison labour-government relations. Campbell is set to deregulate B.C.'s electricity sector, privatize parts of BC Hydro and end a three-decade-old moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration. The elimination of NDP regulations that protected jobs in lumber towns will devastate small-town B.C. A province-wide referendum on native land-claim negotiations is bound to polarize the public.

None of Campbell's reforms will go unchallenged by labour, environmentalists, natives and anti-poverty advocates. The Liberals face no Official Opposition-but the unofficial Opposition is mobilizing. "We're going back 100 years with [Campbell's] blatantly ideological agenda," warns Jim Sinclair, president of the B.C. Federation of Labour. "It's more extreme than what Mike Harris did. At least Harris didn't reduce the minimum wage." (Campbell's 90-day agenda included the introduction of a "training wage" for first-time employees.)

Ideological or not, Campbell's agenda is certainly unique. Other governments-the Chrétien Liberals and even the Bush Republicans-are resorting to old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus to fight the recession. It's as if B.C., the last province to tackle its deficit, is caught up in a time warp that has left it permanently a few cycles behind. Slashing spending so dramatically in a recession risks driving B.C.'s economy even deeper into the abyss. And the social ills bred of a more protracted decline could defeat Campbell's purpose of making B.C. a more attractive place to invest. "The cuts to spending are too big, too socially damaging," says University of British Columbia economics professor Jonathan Kesselman. "If the Liberals thought the NDP was dead, they may just end up giving them new life." Kesselman urges the Liberals to opt for the middle ground. His plan includes implementing moderate spending cuts and making up for the short- to mid-term revenue shortfall with the introduction of an employer payroll tax, similar to those used in four provinces to fund health care.

Collins, a 38-year-old former flight instructor and political scrapper par excellence, spurns the advice. "We've tried the big-tax, big-government model for the past decade and it moved us to last place in economic growth in the country. People in B.C. voted for something different in an overwhelming way. We intend to stay the course." Adds Campbell: "The business community says what we're doing is right. This is all part of getting a private sector that is vibrant and vital."

No small task, given the B.C. economy's chronic failure to live up to potential. The forest industry, still the province's economic mainstay (it accounts for as much as 24% of GDP), needs electroshock. Rooted in a raw-resource mentality, the industry has been slower to innovate than its European peers. B.C.'s coastal producers are only now preparing to produce the kiln-dried lumber required by Japanese building codes since 1995. As a result, B.C. producers have lost market share to quick-footed Scandinavian competitors.

High tech is another case of unrealized potential. Despite B.C.'s proximity to the Microsoft-Silicon Valley axis, it lacks critical mass. The crash-up of 360networks Inc. aside, even B.C.'s tech stars-fuel-cell developer Ballard Power Systems Inc. and biotech firm QLT Inc.-have been slow to grow. And now tourism, the one industry where B.C.'s competitive advantage is undeniable, has been injured by the Sept. 11 aftermath.

Still, some of Campbell's reforms can only help. The income-tax cuts will make it easier to lure the high-income professionals that B.C. needs. And the elimination of the corporate capital tax, which takes full effect in September, will give business an incentive to invest. "Most people in the business community are agreeably surprised by the speed at which Gordon Campbell is attacking these things. There's a very positive view that the government is on the right track," says Jimmy Pattison. Indeed, B.C. business is uniformly uncritical of the new government.

David Bond found out about the strength of the consensus the hard way: Before the election, the veteran economist had his HSBC Bank of Canada contract terminated after he suggested that Campbell could not implement his tax cuts without creating a huge deficit. No one in the business community came to Bond's defence, not then, or even now that his forecast has come to pass. "I could be tempted to say, 'I told you so,' but I shouldn't," a vindicated but still bitter Bond said after Collins announced the coming cuts. "After all, Mr. Collins, who was saying there wouldn't be a deficit, is a certified flight instructor and all I've got is a PhD in economics."

The question now is whether business will remain as uncritical of Campbell as the full impact of the revolution they asked for is felt. When the government ceases, as it promises it will, to mete out business subsidies. When B.C.'s labour movement-already English Canada's most bellicose-mounts its counteroffensive with, quite possibly, economy-paralyzing general strikes. When Campbell's cap on health-care spending-huge in real terms, given spiralling costs-strains private-sector benefit plans and forces big hikes in employer premiums. When all that disruption actually makes B.C. a tougher place to do business, for a while at least.

More important, what will Campbell himself do, then? It's easy to plow ahead when the stench left by the NDP is still in the air. But voters will soon cease to define the Liberals by what they are not. Eventually, public support will soften (even a December poll showed the government's approval rating had fallen 22 points in three months). And the dozens of surplus MLAs on the Liberal back benches will start getting antsy about their own re-election. What will Campbell do then? He is no Common-Sense revolutionary in the Mike Harris-Tom Long mould. Nor is he a populist like Klein, able to ride out the tough parts by sheer force of personality. So what is he?

" My sense of Campbell is that he's a solid centrist; he's not likely to enjoy inflicting pain," says Michael Goldberg, a former dean of UBC's commerce faculty. Indeed, Opposition attempts to tar Campbell as a right-wing ideologue seem misplaced. His political models are Bobby Kennedy and Frank McKenna, and Campbell manifests elements of each-the former's idealism, the latter's business-minded realism. But he's more, too. A voracious reader with eclectic and sophisticated tastes, Campbell has the kind of questioning, agile mind that does not lend itself easily to ideology. Despite his own background as a developer, he was seen as a largely progressive mayor during his 1986-1993 tenure at Vancouver City Hall. He tied the approval of commercial projects to generous commitments from builders to construct social housing, and set up the country's first needle exchange for intravenous drug users.

Campbell resembles Bill Clinton more than any of the Premier's contemporaries on the right. Like Clinton, he is a policy wonk, always abreast of the latest guru's prescriptions for curing what ails post-industrial society. While he lacks Clinton's easy rapport, he is cut from the same '60s-idealist-turned-'80s-yuppie cloth. (And like Clinton, he has a bright and competitive wife in Nancy, a former triathlete who is now a high-school vice-principal.)

Campbell's yuppie credentials make his New Era election platform, still the only real guidebook to the Liberal agenda, a tough document to decipher. It is unflinchingly right-wing. It expresses unquestioning faith in Reaganomics. The Protestant ethic is praised; the welfare state excoriated. To be sure, New Era is crafted to appeal to all those rural right-wingers who deprived Campbell of victory in 1996 by backing provincial Reformers and Socreds. But perhaps more telling is what is not in the document. There is no promise to repeal B.C.'s anti-scab labour laws. There is no promise to introduce a flat income tax. There is no promise to kill proposed pay equity legislation, only to delay it. An ideological purist on the right, a true believer, would hardly be so mushy.

" To understand Gord's political philosophy, you have to understand that he is very community-first. For him, if it's going to happen, it's going to start at the grassroots level," explains Jim Moodie, a Vancouver planning consultant and one of Campbell's closest friends since their UBC days in the early 1970s. Campbell is unlikely to remain indifferent if public opinion sours on the New Era revolution. He's basically a pragmatist. He long ago coined the term "Pegonomics" to describe the kitchen-table common sense he learned as a teenager, watching his widowed mother raise four kids on a clerk's salary. He is driven by an obsessive need to get the job done, even, or perhaps especially, if it means he has to do it himself. He's a notorious control freak, with seven deputy ministers reporting directly to him.

He has also surrounded himself with a group of aides who appear to share his centrist ways. First among them is cabinet secretary Ken Dobell, a career bureaucrat with a keen sense of what will fly with the public. Outside the Premier's office, Campbell counts on Larry Bell, who has deep experience in both government and business. He was ousted as chairman of BC Hydro by the NDP; Campbell reinstalled him.

So the Premier's circle is not one dedicated, like Ontario's, to downsizing government as a first principle. Yet I can't help but wonder whether not being an ideologue is Campbell's biggest handicap. The big bang, whether ideologically or merely politically driven, has happened. Short of repealing his tax cuts-the equivalent of political hara-kiri-Campbell must somehow deal with the consequences of a self-imposed revenue crunch. It will take stone-faced resolve for any Premier to get through the next few, inevitably messy, years in B.C. And maybe only a true believer can stomach that.