Carole Taylor (Profile)

Taylor, Carole (Profile)

Carole Taylor is looking great. She's been British Columbia's finance minister for all of nine months, long enough to table a mini-budget last September, and a surplus budget this February; long enough to weather the contrived outrage over tabling said budget in $600 Gucci shoes; long enough for pundits to declare her premier-in-waiting, or, Lord help her, a potential leader of the federal Liberals. It's Wednesday evening, March 29, and Taylor has other priorities, as she kicks back in her sprawling Victoria legislative office, once the lair of W.A.C. "Wacky" BENNETT, the longest serving premier in B.C. history. She's in the midst of achieving the near impossible: something akin to labour peace with B.C.'s many and fractious public service unions.

When Liberal Premier Gordon CAMPBELL, a long-time friend and godfather to the second of her two grown children, gave Taylor the Finance portfolio last June, buried within was a land mine for the rookie MLA to defuse. As Taylor soon discovered: (a) all public sector employers report to her, and (b) the contracts for 90 per cent of the province's 300,000 public employees were set to expire the same day, March 31, 2006. Add to this a festering pool of resentment born of privatization schemes and two years of wage freezes and rollbacks, and you get some idea of the challenge. "Obviously that's a pretty stressful situation," she says, looking, well, unstressed with two days to deadline. "To think, all your doctors, nurses, health care workers, electricians could go on strike the same day."

Didn't happen. Instead, last week ended as it began, with her office cranking out press releases by the dozen, announcing tentative agreements with groups as diverse as the province's 8,800 doctors, faculty associations, auto insurance workers, hospital workers, paramedics, and the powerful B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union (BCGEU).

Just maybe the poisonous relationship with the Liberals can be healed, says BCGEU president George Heyman, with guarded enthusiasm. Taylor seems less right-wing than the typical Campbell Liberal, he concedes. She appreciates the role of unions in society, he says, "and that you can't treat them like a group of criminals you will legislate into oblivion every time they annoy you." High praise, by the standards of past labour-Liberal exchanges.

None of this success happened without controversy. Taylor budgeted $6 billion to fund the next four years of compensation increases for the public sector. Included was $1 billion to pay workers an "incentive" of about $4,000 each if contracts were signed by last Friday. Another $300 million sweetened the pot for unions signing four-year deals, averaging about 11 per cent, and guaranteeing labour peace through the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Bribery, sniffed a few critics. Sharing the prosperity, Taylor says. She'd urged negotiators to be "creative, proactive, respectful and responsive," and to be damn quick about it. "You couldn't fiddle around the edges," she says. "Relationships were so damaged you had to be dramatic in doing it a different way."

She's blessed with fortuitous timing. The heavy budget-cutting was done in the first Liberal term by Gary Collins, her predecessor in Finance. Then came a spike in gas and oil revenues. Lucky her. But that's the rap that always dogs Taylor: she sails through life on the sweet winds of charm, beauty, wealth, political connections and, oh yeah, brains.

Today, at 60, as for much of her 40-plus years in the public eye, she battles a tyrannical illusion that hers is a perfect life, where all is handed her without toil or sacrifice. Cue the violins: plucky Miss Toronto beauty queen becomes stellar broadcast journalist (interviewing and marrying her second husband, Art Phillips, the wealthy mayor of Vancouver, along the way). She's elected to Vancouver city council, then chairs both the Vancouver and Canada Ports corporations, the Vancouver Board of Trade and the CBC, with seats on several A-list corporate boards.

Still, luck only goes so far. Hers is the kind that's earned through hard-won expertise, says Darcy Rezac, who worked with Taylor as managing director of the Vancouver Board of Trade. He's forever hearing rumours of the next grand job Taylor is being courted for, from business to politics to ambassadorships. "It's probably all true," he says. "We need more Carole Taylors."

Taylor is a reluctant expert on perfection. She often talks about it with young women, and what a terrible lie it is. "I think that this pressure to be a superwoman is still there in our society." It's why politics attracts young, high-achieving women at the wrong point in their lives, she believes. Society's great wasted resource is women of a certain age, she says, those whose career climb and child-rearing imperatives are behind them, and who have the time and wisdom to contribute. "Yes, you can have everything, but not all at once," she says. "Take your time, and in doing so, make sure you make mistakes, because if you're not making mistakes, you're not trying."

If that sounds like she's talking herself into the federal Liberal leadership race, she replies with a firm "No." Besides, the action is at the provincial level these days, she says, giving Conservative Prime Minister Stephen HARPER's "respect" for provincial rights a solid endorsement. "I think there's a chance for a great alignment of policies here between B.C. and Canada." As for the job of premier, Taylor smiles. "I would feel very pleased if I could finish my career doing a really good job as minister of finance."

The opposition NDP hopes so. The prospect of her replacing Campbell is a worst-case scenario. It raises the spectre of an election battle between the two Caroles: their nice and personable leader, Carole James, versus the ferociously accomplished, nice and personable, Carole Taylor. So they search for chinks in the armour. They can't decry her throwing money at labour. Hence, the focus on the price of her new-budget Guccis. It shows she's "out of touch" with voters, says finance critic Jenny Kwan, wearing this day a strappy pair of black stilettos. A gift, she says, from her sister.

The footwear furor hasn't gained much traction, certainly not enough for Taylor to rein in her designer wardrobe. Just the other day, a truck driver hollered, "Hey, nice shoes," as she walked down the street. Naturally enough, she took it as a compliment.

Maclean's April 10, 2006