Sure they lost the negotiations with the Greens, then lost the confidence of the house, then lost power.
But some B.C. Liberals are determined to look on the bright side.
“We have the most powerful opposition in B.C. history, so stay tuned!” one messaged this week.
That’s putting the best possible face on what is still going to be a wrenching adjustment next week after 16 years in power.
It would have been difficult enough had they stood pat on their platform and positions and simply been voted down in the house. But the increasingly desperate moves Premier Christy Clark made in the six weeks from the election to the confidence vote make things even more complicated.
She capitulated on major issues and swiped large portions of the NDP and Green platforms in a bid to fracture the confidence agreement that was designed to bring her down.
She “amended” the four-month-old budget to promise another billion dollars for child care.
She adopted the idea of a poverty-reduction plan.
The 10-year freeze on welfare rates miraculously thawed, and she promised a $100-a-month hike.
She promised to drop metro Vancouver bridge tolls.
She joined the NDP and Greens in committing to carbon-tax increases and campaign finance reform.
Those ideas are going to wind up in an NDP throne speech in September, which will leave the Liberals in the awkward position of having to vote against promises that they’d just made. After all the manoeuvring in the past several weeks, about the only major differences between the outgoing government and the incoming one are the Site C dam, electoral reform and the commitments to LNG and the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
They’ll find a way to oppose the NDP government, no doubt. It’s their new job.
Clark provided a few hints on how they’ll tackle their new role in an interview with CHNL’s Jim Harrison in Kamloops this week.
The Greens’ top priority since election night has been to use their newfound clout to get a new proportional-representation voting system in place. It’s an obvious advantage to the party. But Clark is ready to campaign against the idea based on who it penalizes, which is likely rural B.C., where the Liberals have a huge edge in seats.
Short of creating another couple of dozen MLAs, the only way to bring about PR is to shrink the number of ridings considerably, to make room for the number that are named by the parties to reflect their share of the popular vote.
“We should all be really worried about the Green-NDP plan to put proportional representation on the ballot as a referendum,” said Clark. “Because proportional representation deprives communities of MLAs, of a direct representative, and it also will massively swing power out of northern and Interior communities down to the … cities. And I don’t think B.C. will work if we tilt the balance of power so dramatically in favour of the cities.”
She acknowledged her government wasn’t focused enough “on some of those things that mattered down south … They want a strong economy, but they also want us to focus on social programs, environmental protection.”
She said the throne speech was a bid to address those concerns and get parties working together.
“I think that’s actually what people wanted. They want the screaming and the yelling to stop.”
Maybe so, but there will be a new round of yelling about the NDP-Green schemes to make the legislature function when the seat count is tied at 43 after a Speaker is appointed. And Clark is ready to start it.
“Having a partisan Speaker, stacking committees so that it’s unreflective of the legislature and the vote that people cast so that you can jam legislation through, that stuff hasn’t been done in the British Parliamentary system since practically Henry VIII.
“And I’m really worried that they would have to bend the rules of democracy so that they can never be unbent.”
“Henry the VIII” is probably over-reaching by about three or four hundred years. But having acknowledged that most people aren’t terribly interested in parliamentary procedural changes, she’s going to go to those lengths to try to make them care.
