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Or as Meggs himself put it the following year in briefing a big-ticket political conference on the NDP attitude toward the news media: “They are out to get you … paranoia is a state of enhanced awareness.”

Of course all that was 20 years ago. No reflection of the attitudes Meggs will be bringing back to Victoria in his new job, announced this week, as chief of staff to incoming Premier John Horgan.

So said Meggs himself when asked if his appointment heralds a return to the aggressive Glen Clark style of NDP government of the 1990s.

“Anyone who thinks this is back to the past has just been asleep themselves and hasn’t been paying attention,” Meggs told Dan Fumano of Postmedia.

He also fired back at the B.C. Liberals for focusing their campaign attacks on the NDP government of the 1990s. “Trying to fight old battles that most people — especially people under the age of 30 — can’t even remember.”

He’s right on that score. To have voted in the last election that brought the New Democrats to power in B.C., a voter would be almost 40 years old today. The observation would apply equally to newly registered immigrant voters in communities where the Liberals lost ground.

But this is not the first time Meggs has reinvented himself in the course of a fascinating political career.

On his arrival in the provincial capital to work for Glen Clark in 1996, he was pulling tell-tale baggage as well. He’d been a member of the Communist party for a dozen years, served on its committees and wrote for its newspaper.