Much as her foes disbelieve there is a sincere Christy Clark somewhere in there, last week’s throne speech of necessary directional change was one she had to authorize and be comfortable with delivering should an election ensue.
She wasn’t burning the bridge. She was trying to build one – and not for four years hence, but for now.
It is true that Clark did not apprehend chronic conditions in prosperous British Columbia: the affordability problem for urban renters and wannabe owners, the challenge for parents seeking safe child care, the uncontrolled system of political financing or the undignified plight of people with disabilities or those trapped in welfare.
Her administration has been much more about letting the good times roll than about getting the good times to roll, and the latter quality requires imagination and creative responses to conditions.
Sometimes leaders and governments run out of ideas, as would any creative institution, but mainly they falter when they inhabit a bubble of reinforced flattery, of cozy support that renders blind hills on the highway.
It has been evident in her words and deeds of the campaign and since that Clark fell prey.
Her effort in the last few weeks has been to wrest agency of the agenda, reinvent and calculate there will be another opportunity for a happy ending to public life.
That being said, the throne speech would have, say, six months ago, provided a sufficient socially conscious construct to afford electoral victory. For all the accusations of the style and substance of the BC Liberals, they have a good track record on fulfilling what they promise and can control.
They would have made good on those policy planks were they in a campaign, just as they would follow through on the throne speech, and we would be a better province for those plans. Indeed, their ideas on rent-to-own housing and on child care are more practical at first blush than those of their rivals. But now is late in the day for Clark and the BC Liberals. Are they to be believed, or does the public apprehend more of a forgery of convictions than an authentic forging ahead with them?
Since the election, there have been many Liberals saying they prefer to be dispatched into the wilderness for a term to breathe more clearly. They seem to want a changing of the guard, not a salvage campaign of desperation.
Their leader, though, has set the stage for one – and an election call she would not particularly own and wear.
Once the Liberals lose the legislature’s confidence, it is possible John Horgan will limp along with the Andrew Weaver Trio for a few weeks or months. Clark would stick around that long – would be asked to – because any process of replacing her would leave the party without a leader if the duo collapses.
It is also possible Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon will listen to London’s advice and determine immediately that the frail “GreeNDP” alliance would unduly change the traditional role of the Speaker – that she must intervene to protect parliamentary convention from partisan expediency.
In which case, we can pin the election on the Queen.
That scenario also offers Clark another swing of the bat. It then becomes a referendum on her as rejuvenated and not amid deathbed repentance. It presents Horgan with an opportunity at a majority if voters don’t buy into what Clark sells. It renders Weaver a verdict on his alliance decision, likely a dear price as votes harden to support one of two majority options.
Meantime, to force the issue, the BC Liberals will force the Greens and NDP to vote against measures they would themselves propose and that Liberals would themselves never have dreamt of proposing only weeks ago.
As we say every week in B.C. politics: crazier things have happened.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
