The indomitable Corky had words for everyone and everything

"Mr. Speaker," he hailed the legislature during the recent session, "for 14 years before I got here, I was an independent logging contractor. Killing trees and talking here is all I know."

He'd seen the forest industry survive some tough times: "The market goes up and the market goes down. It always has. In 1982 the market was in the basement. We had to hide our Cat in the bush to keep the repo man from taking it away. But we came back."

All this by way of putting Forests Minister Rich Coleman on the spot: "The job of the minister is to see to it that the people are there when the market comes back. My question to the minister is: Were you instructed to kill this industry, or are you doing it on your own?"

Coleman, no stranger to the performance art of question period, replied to this bit of bluster with a blast of his own.

But by then Evans had already scored his point. For sheer energy, there was no matching him in question period. When he got to his feet, even government members leaned forward in anticipation of a good show.

"I've been trying to get Buy BC back for a long time," he said, climbing aboard another hobby horse back in May.

Buy BC being a well-intentioned promotion of home-grown farm products launched under the previous New Democratic Party government and killed by the B.C. Liberals.

"The farmers want it back," Evans continued. "Investment Agriculture said that they want it back. I suspect that the reason we can't get Buy BC back would be because to bring it back would be to suggest that something that happened in the decade of the 1990s was a good idea.

"So just in case I might be right, I'd like to use question period to do a bit of a deal. If I was able to guarantee that I would not and my leader would not and some 30-odd people on this side of the house would never say, 'I told you so,' would the minister of agriculture then be able to reach back, take the very good, affordable idea that makes B.C. products salable in our own market and reinstate Buy BC?"

Agriculture Minister Pat Bell was beaten before he got to his feet, but didn't have the wit to recognize it. "The member opposite seems to be fixated on Buy BC. It's because during the 1990s everyone in B.C. said goodbye to B.C." Better to keep your seat, if that's the best you can do.

Most of the Liberals wouldn't even try to one-up Evans. Some recognized that the maverick New Democrat, in marching to the beat of his own drum, could just as easily provide an unflattering reflection on his own cause even as he disparaged theirs.

This is a guy who launched one of his two bids for the NDP leadership by quipping: "I have an idea. I'd like to be premier. Now if I said that to you at a party you'd all get together and take away my car keys."

Who had this take on his party's shortcomings in government: "We made announcements about things we weren't even going to do."

And this: "We don't have policies on the social side so much as reactionary spending. Whatever was on TV last night gets fixed in hope of getting the item off the 6 o'clock news before we lose points in somebody's poll."

He was even -- gasp! -- known to take shots at the news media. "I quit reading newspapers," he remarked at one point in his term as minister of agriculture, "when I realized the press gallery wouldn't walk 100 metres to listen to farmers unless they were bribed with free liquor, and wouldn't print a story anyway unless the farmers would agree to attack the government."

He had few sacred cows, though, unlike some self-styled populists, he did put in a good word for the MLA pension.

"You work here, you trade quite literally everything there is to trade: Your youth, your health, your family, your outside career and literally all your privacy.

"Every time you make one of those trades, you say to yourself: 'I'll get my health back later. I'll fix my marriage later. I'll get to know my kids better later. I'll go on vacation later. I'll quit smoking or drinking or eating too much or whatever I do to deal with stress later.'

"Sooner or later, it occurs to you that the only rational explanation to give your family has something to do with that later being pensionable."

Often quotable, sometimes over the top and always, always unmistakably Corky.

"I am, in fact, a bit of an anachronism -- I'm comfortable in an oral world," he told reporter Lindsay Kines of the Victoria Times Colonist this week, in announcing that effective with the next election he will be retiring from the legislature.

"I am very, very proud that I have been there for a long time and never spoken words that anybody else ever wrote."

All his own work, for no one else could or would presume to channel Corky.