Daggers Unsheathed: The Political Assassination of Glen Clark

Rowan Shaw is a constituency assistant to a member of British
Columbia’s Legislative Assembly.

Judy Tyabji Wilson, a former British Columbia MLA and wife of NDP
insider Gordon Wilson, is well positioned to write about what she
characterizes as the political assassination of former premier Glen
Clark. In Daggers Unsheathed, she endeavors to explain how Clark went
from being the B.C. NDP’s knight in shining armor to being an enormous
political liability, leading to the opposition Liberals forming the
province’s largest majority government ever. The book covers Clark’s
early life; his rise to the position of MLA for the riding of East
Vancouver; his rescuing of the NDP from near-certain election defeat in
1996, amid the bingo scandal involving former premier Mike Harcourt; and
the turbulent period in B.C. politics that culminated in the 2002
verdict in Clark’s criminal conflict of interest trial.

Wilson makes effective use of press clippings and interviews with the
players involved to build her case that the B.C. Liberals had a hand in
Clark’s bashing in the media. Among the questions she asks is how the
media and the RCMP—led by an individual who would later be offered a
Liberal by-election nomination—managed to arrive at Clark’s East
Vancouver home just at the moment a search warrant was being executed.
Though not without its biases, this readable book provides much food for
thought.