In a campaign that has had some weird moments, former B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver’s support for the B.C. Conservatives is one of the harder moves to process.
His entire academic career is studying climate change and warning about its perils. It was the main drum he beat during his two terms as an Oak Bay-Gordon Head MLA.
But now he is endorsing Conservative candidate Stephen Andrew in his former riding. Conservatives are dismissive of climate change and committed to repealing the carbon tax that Weaver advised the B.C. Liberal government on 17 years ago.
You have to have a lot on your mind to overlook that and throw your support behind a candidate for a party that is relatively indifferent to your life’s work.
The pair appeared on an online forum this week and Stephen Andrew will be papering the riding next week with a letter of support Weaver wrote.
Weaver has explained his thinking in recent blog posts and they centre on the personal, as much as the political. He has misgivings about B.C. NDP Leader David Eby and gets along much better with Conservative Leader John Rustad. He considers Stephen Andrew a friend.
As for the Greens, he parted ways with them years ago. Internal differences contributed to him stepping down as leader in 2019, then resigning from the caucus months later. He quit the party entirely and didn’t run in the 2020 election.
Along the way, he started sniping at the two remaining Green MLAs. The breach now looks to be permanent.
After voting B.C. Liberal, Green and NDP in the past, now he’s voting Conservative in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, although with some reservations about the Conservative team’s appetite for conspiracy theories and the party’s platform.
Weaver posted recently that the Conservatives’ energy plan demonstrates “energy illiteracy” and “reads like it was written by a 20-something from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s team.”
(Just to make clear that he’s through with the Greens, he said they are “lost in an ecosocialist hinterland” and are “virtue- signalling a pathway to economic collapse.”)
He has also endorsed a random assortment of candidates from all three parties, plus two independents, for pragmatic reasons, proving he puts more weight on individuals than parties.
The friendship he developed with former premier John Horgan went a long way to smoothing the Green-NDP confidence agreement. But any warm feelings he had for the NDP chilled when David Eby took over.
“Radical ideological-drive activism, empty promises with destructive consequences and out-of-touch hubris embody the hallmarks of his tenure,” Weaver wrote a few months ago.
After Eby signalled he will abandon the carbon tax on consumers, Weaver called it a disappointing, cynical ploy. He outlined how NDP tinkering with the tax over the years led to a situation where most B.C. residents get less in carbon tax rebates than people in other provinces.
Eby cited affordability worries as one reason he’s ready to kill it. But it’s the NDP redesign of the tax that makes the cost to consumers a concern.
Weaver said even though Conservatives would also cancel the carbon tax, after talking to Rustad, the gaps between the two on climate change are “not as wide as some might imagine.”
Eby said Friday at a campaign stop in Comox that it was the federal Liberals’ move to exempt Atlantic Canada from the tax that makes the carbon tax “politically toxic.” That controversy came on top of concerns about the federal plan to escalate the tax in the face of major affordability challenges across Canada.
B.C.’s carbon tax is on a rapid escalator as well, since it had to keep pace with federal policy. But if the federal mandate is dropped, it will disappear entirely, according to both front-running parties.
Eby said: “British Columbians have supported a carbon tax for a long time. But we weren’t able to save it.” People thought they were being forced to choose between climate action and whether or not they could cover basic living costs, he said.
The carbon tax is now on life support and looks to be doomed, but Eby said the NDP is still committed to fighting climate change on other fronts. If he wins the election, the one thing that’s clear is that he’ll be doing so without the support of a preeminent expert in the field.
