The dust is finally beginning to settle on the 2017 provincial election with the North Shore’s government and opposition MLAs preparing to swap sides in the legislature.
The B.C. Liberals’ speech from the throne, borrowed heavily from the Opposition parties’ platforms, went down to defeat June 29 and NDP leader John Horgan was asked to form a new government later that evening.
North Vancouver-Lonsdale’s newly elected NDP MLA Bowinn Ma said she is glad to see an end to weeks of uncertainty.
“As it was happening, I was frustrated by how much delay and distraction was taking place. But that was last week. It is done. We are going to be forming government, and we’re looking forward to actually being able to help people in the ways we promised,” she said.
Ma said she has had a crop of constituents coming to her for help but, until recently, there was little she could explain to them about what the government could do to help.
While the house won’t be recalled until after Labour Day, there are a number of actions the governing NDP and Greens can start on now including addressing the opioid crisis and devising a plan to halt the expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, Ma said.
“There are a lot of options available in order to try to stop Kinder Morgan and we’re going to try all of them,” she said.
Though the pundit class is skeptical, Ma said she believes her government of 41 NDP MLAs and three Greens can live out a four-year mandate.
“You have 44 extremely motivated MLAs who want to make this work because we want to make lives better,” Ma said.
MLAs should get used to working more collaboratively, Ma added, as one of the commitments the deal with the Greens is hinged upon is a referendum on proportional representation in the legislature, which will likely mean many more minority governments in the future.
Ma and North Vancouver Seymour-MLA Jane Thornthwaite were seated together for Canada Day celebrations and the two swapped grinning selfies together to share with their Twitter followers. The two met as MLAs for the first time following the election and found, in many respects, the two were on the same page, Thornthwaite said.
The Liberals would have been wise to campaign on things like transit, banning big money from politics and raising welfare rates, Thornthwaite added.
“My own regret was that it would probably have been better to have more of that before the election than after,” she said.
As for whether she’d support future legislation coming from the NDP-Green government, Thornthwaite said she would have to see the specifics of each bill before deciding. If the NDP’s bill banning corporate and union donations leaves self-serving loopholes, they can expect opposition, she said.
Thornthwaite said North Vancouver-Seymour residents can expect the same level of advocacy for their concerns in the legislature and halls of power with her sitting in Opposition as they have come to expect with her in government. “As far as my constituents are concerned, nothing has changed,” she said.
For longtime West Vancouver-Capilano MLA Ralph Sultan, experiencing the fall of the Liberal government in a non-confidence vote was more emotionally upsetting than he’d imagined.
“Even though I predicted with 100 per cent accuracy what was going to happen, when it actually happened ... it was a bit more emotional than I had foreseen,” he said.
Sultan summed up the mood among his Liberal colleagues since then with, “It’s hardly exaltation.”
Liberals are disappointed, but are mostly taking a “wait and see” approach, he said.
“It’s always better to win than lose. But change in and of itself is not a bad thing from time to time.”
Sultan described the NDP-Green alliance as an “inherently unstable situation” but added now that the lieutenant governor has made her decision, he doesn’t expect any changes in the immediately foreseeable future.
“I don’t think there’s any appetite, at least not in my world, for another election,” he said.
Sultan added while he has read speculation about possible challenges to Christy Clark’s leadership of the party in the media, “I don’t hear about it within the party or in caucus.”
