Things are tough all around for Christy these days. It's no wonder she doesn't feel the need for the extra hassle of opening the legislature to democracy this fall.

We've all gone through periods in our lives when the burden seems too much to bear, when we feel like we'd rather just roll up in a ball in a corner and shut out the world.

Most of us just take the easy way out: we give in to outside pressure to hide our weakness, throw back our shoulders, we march forward, disregarding the wise inner voice that tells us we need to hang back and let someone else shoulder the load for a while.

Not Christy. As premier of British Columbia, she is showing what it means to be a real leader - she's clearly not afraid to show the rest of us that, sometimes, it truly is best to curl up into that little ball in the corner.

A true leader knows when it is time to set aside the little things - like democracy, for instance - for the sake of a better chance at personal survival.

For the greater good of all, of course.

Although she knows that it's generally pretty hard for us ordinary folk to understand most things, Christy knows that her current predicament is something we can empathize with.

We've all had "friends" who have stuck us in the back at some time or another.

And she's been finding she has a growing number of those kinds of friends.

That's not to mention the marked decline in the number of friends and acquaintances supporting her in the polls.

Instead of throwing their bodies on all the political grenades strewn about, a number of her top cabinet colleagues have been opting instead to step aside, out of the fan's line of fire.

In fact, it's becoming increasingly obvious that some of those noble stalwarts were the ones feeding the fan in the first place - evidenced, for instance, by the budget bits that former finance minister Kevin Falcon left behind for his successor Mike De Jong to clean up.

Luckily for Christy, De Jong is from a farming family and a farming community, and he feels eminently capable of handling what Falcon left behind.

And she still does have some friendships worth cultivating, evidenced by her appearance at her freshly minted second-in-command Rich Coleman's annual barbecue this weekend.

Nevertheless, it appears she isn't entirely confident of all her newbie cabinet friends' ability to catch up with the fan's speed.

So, as a leader with only her ardent followers' best interests in mind, it is incumbent on her to take a page out of Stephen Harper's book - another benevolent dictator... er... leader who has shown a proclivity for self-preservation for the good of his constituency.

By taking the legislature into extended hiding, she can give her new finance minister - and health, and transportation, and other ministers and sundry backbenchers - a bit of breathing room - outside of that pesky democratic process that requires needless justification of decisions to irrelevant people, like opposition MLAs, media, and ordinary Joe and Jill voters who probably wouldn't understand if it was explained to them, for instance through open debate in the legislature.

Christy is just doing what any good leader today knows how to do best: smile pretty for the cameras, send out optimistic press releases, demonstrate the ability to do a little creative bending of the rules (and/or truth) and, most of all, get out of the way when the hard questions start getting fired in your direction.

In British Columbia, as in Canada as a whole, we are privileged to be living at a time when freedom from democracy appears to be experiencing its finest hour.

Bob Groeneveld is editor of the Langley Advance, a sister paper to the Now. He can be reached at editor@ langleyadvance.com

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