Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most endangered B.C. politician of them all?
Andrew Weaver. The Green party can have either power or principles. Not both. In the bitter give-and-get deal-making to exploit its tiny three-seat status, only a cunning hand could avoid disillusioning Green true believers and heal party splits.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most dangerous B.C. politician of them all?
Andrew Weaver. His two top priorities aren’t to save this fjord or that copse of trees where little birdies sing, or even to fill the roads with electric cars by tomorrow.
They are cynically self-serving. First, to end corporate and union political contributions. What a surprise. The Greens attract neither. And to impose proportional representation in the election system. What another surprise. That, a goal of all marginal parties, would consolidate Green political power – and, as Vaughn Palmer notes, Weaver has no intention of this democratic stuff of submitting the issue to the voters. Subject to a change in election night’s 43-42-3 split, Weaver is angling in slippery political channels to cut a deal for the three Green markers.
Forked tongue shrewdly wagging, Weaver won’t say if he would support a Liberal or a New Democratic government. Wrapped in leafy virtue, the party would vote their Green conscience issue-by-issue. Which is unrealistic, unstable, untenable. In plain language: Weaver’s deceiving you.
Beware. B.C.’s prosperity and jobs are in profound danger.
Weaver and John Horgan – whose nasty temper, blamed on his Irish blood, will make his NDP caucus wish nice Adrian Dix was in charge and overbearing Horgan swilling Guinnesses in Limerick – are cut from the same ideological cloth.
They are essentially anti-business and anti-capitalism. Horgan is a professional NDP bureaucrat. Weaver is a career academic. They haven’t had low-caste jobs since student days.
Neither has had to meet a payroll in their lives. (Aside: Neither have I, or most media people. We’re smart enough to sit in the blues and keep out of the arena. A grateful country thanks us.)
The Horgan-Weaver mouth-to-mouth mutual slagging in the leaders debate shouldn’t be misunderstood: They were two scorpions in a bottle, stinging over which would command B.C.’s left and expand its anti-business, big-government, high-tax zeitgeist.
Green economics? Mark Milke in the Calgary Herald noted that “it might be premature to put away the hard hats in forestry, mining, oil and gas. Jock Finlayson, chief policy officer for the Business Council of B.C., noted just last month that B.C.’s entire clean technology sector – the ‘new economy’ – has only the value of a single B.C. forestry company, Canfor.’’
As for prop rep, it’s chatted about by all parties at election time, including Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals. But it’s generally left to die by first-past-the-post winners, swift converts to the go-home-with-the-guy-what-brung you theory. And a good thing too, I say. All systems replacing the present one are worse medicine than the disease.
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Our sister publication, Business in Vancouver, asked me to soothsay for the recent election.
Why? I had predicted that the Liberals would win the 2013 B.C. election. Shocked media, including a well-known broadcaster, reported “no one” had. I politely corrected him. He never admitted error.
My prediction this time: Liberals 43, NDP 42, Greens 2.
The results at this point: Liberals 43, NDP 41, Greens 3.
Naturally, I hang my head for prognosticating one riding rich for the NDP, and one short for the Greens.
On certain media who ducked behind mealy-mouthed terms like “unpredictable,” I hereby bestow the degree of PhPP – Doctor of Pusilanimous Punditry. I’m of the H.L. Mencken school:
“Better to be wrong than to be timorous.”
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Two stained-glass windows, designed by parishioner Carol Nicholson, will be dedicated at Caulfeild Cove’s St. Francis-in-the-Wood Anglican Church at 10 a.m. May 28, completing a project begun some 40 years ago. Rector Rev. Angus Stuart says it was based on a canticle composed by the great St. Francis himself.
Funding was by the late Rex Des Brisay, by Nell Turner and her late husband Jay, and by their daughter, Kathleen Glynn-Morris and her husband Rodney.
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WV retail scene: Rogers’ Chocolates has opened a store in Dundarave. Founded in 1885, Rogers’ is a class addition to West Van – directly across from Temper chocolate shop, making Marine and 24th the corner for hot chocolate competition, so to speak.
An Iranian bakery will open in Ambleside in the former premises of sadly missed Avant Gardener, shuttered for more than a year.
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There’s good reason Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus is performed so often. North Shore Light Opera chose it for its 70th season, including two Sunday matinees, at Presentation House Theatre. Go see. We could all use a laugh.
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Take these words, blow them up, and stick them on signs for a downtown march: Save the Whales! Release the Park Board!
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