If the prophets are correct, my deadline being before the event, when you read these words B.C.’s new rulers will be a John Horgan-Andrew Weaver coalition, on whom I bestow a coalition name – the Horers.
Pronounce it carefully.
A week of counter-intuition. Horgan’s New Democrats demand reforms in political donations. Weaver’s Greens demand official party status.
Christy Clark’s Liberals opposed both. Until they didn’t. They made more deathbed confessions than Rome has priests for. And they craftily produced bills to oblige both parties. Which both scorned.
Why?
Support Liberal legislation – never. The surprised Horers want the power pulpit to effect the changes themselves. More flip-flops than a landed cod.
Look at the cheerful side. Voters won’t have to anguish over differences of ideology – let alone virtue – among the three parties.
As a sour reader wrote me even before the May 9 election, voters had three choices: Left, left and left.
More good cheer: Haven’t heard it for a while, but a common saying of the unwashed once was that you can tell when a politician is lying: His lips move. (Feminists are free to protest the adjective, demanding inclusiveness. Whatever.)
No, the most certifiably honest words in the election campaign were Horgan’s. When, in the all-candidates debate, he turned and savagely lit into Weaver, Horgan was speaking with a sincerity you can’t buy.
He loathed Weaver, and becoming his political bedmate (already tossing and turning disturbingly) hasn’t diminished the loathing.
With the legislature deadlocked 43-43 after choice of a Speaker, let us watch the Horers’ bonds of affection closely in the days ahead.
Or months? Or years? Responding to the speech from the throne last week, Horgan – so nakedly, toothily power-grasping that the undersigned actually feels pity for him – three times drooled over the words “four years.”
It defies reality that 86 legislative members will have a perfect four-year attendance record. A rebellious stomach here, a divorce hearing there … and, getting local, what if Bowinn Ma, new NDP member for North Vancouver-Lonsdale, got stuck in Lions Gate Bridge’s infamous traffic en route to a confidence vote? Defeat of even a minor bill humiliates governments.
Defections? Byelections? Exhausted party whips? Compromise of the Speaker’s impartiality? Let alone internal rebellion, less of a threat to the Horers than to the Liberal coalition, which includes federal and fiscal Conservatives and possibly an unrepentant closet Social Crediter or two.
The provincial Conservatives may not revive but at least they’ll stir.
In my shy little prophecy a week before the election in Business in Vancouver, predicting a 43-42-2 rather than the 43-41-3 result – but way off in suggesting Green support for Clark – I ended: “Another election in the fall, anyone?”
Now conventional thought among politics-watchers more knowledgeable than I. Just another heavenly message from my fortune-telling mother, folks.
And what if an election produced essentially the same legislative gridlock?
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More prophecy: One, Premier Horgan will open the books, declare B.C. is in much graver shape than the Liberals let on, and set up the traditional excuse for his future failures. Two, he may allege Liberal rule-breaking or even criminality and call in the cops or strike an inquiry to investigate. And he and his socialist ilk will rule forever and ever.
• • •
Clara Hartree of Re/Max dispels any implication – unintended – in my May 5 piece that former residents of the now-levelled apartment block on Marine Drive at 23rd were hard done by.
It was a co-op. It sold a few years ago for $47 million. Depending on share structure, many owners reaped more than $1 million.
Realtor Hartree notes that zoning permitted two 20-storey towers, but the developers chose one building of 15 floors “out of respect for the community.”
Thanks for this, though my point wasn’t unfairness to the co-op owners. It was that prices in the 35-unit condominium, called Bellevue, are “$4 million and up” – and so much for “affordability,” West Van-style.
• • •
I have administered the obligatory 50 self-lashes for misnaming the former Lions Bay mayor in my last screed. She’s Brenda, not Barbara, Broughton. My apologies.
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Applause for Diane Blaney’s pitch in a North Shore News letter to the editor for a much-needed curling rink at the rebuilt Harry Jerome Community Centre. Well-argued. But the centre’s cost – $130 million?
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OK, it would be a mite more journalistically prestigious if I were, say, reporting for the New York Times on whether Donald Trump is stealthily taking Russian lessons.
But you have to go with what you’ve got, eh?
Which is: For at least two months the hand-drying device in the shabby men’s washroom at Horseshoe Bay Park has been kaput. Western civilization trembles.
West Van council, how about dispatching a couple of high-priced parks and recreation bureaucrats to check it out?
More pointedly: What the hell does this say to visitors, other than this is Canada’s richest two-bit town?
That’s my Canada Day salute. No chest-thumping, no maple leaves.
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