The Journal has once more spoken with veteran political correspondent Keith Baldrey, legislative bureau chief for Global BC News, about the current state of B.C. politics (current as of the time of writing, at least). The interview was conducted on June 23, and is the first of two parts.
The Journal: I want to talk about the Throne Speech, which the Greens have called a Green Throne Speech, and the NDP have called an NDP one. So what word would you use to describe the Liberal Throne Speech? Hypocritical? Opportunistic?
Keith Baldrey: I would say hypocritical, opportunistic, cynical, and potentially productive. Often cynicism and hypocrisy and opportunism can serve you quite well in politics. It is breathtaking in the number of policies in that speech that were firmly and decidedly rejected outright by the Liberals and by Christy Clark—and her predecessor Gordon Campbell—over the years.
They went a decade without raising social assistance rates, claiming that would be a meaningless gesture and that was not the right way to get people off of welfare, and what do they do? They raise social assistance rates by $100 a month. They ridicule the plan for huge expansion of childcare as simply unaffordable, and what do they do but come up with a $1 billion plan over four years to do just that.
The list goes on. There’s about two dozen items in that speech that I think people didn’t see coming, because they were coming from the Liberals. You just don’t associate things like that with the track record of the B.C. Liberals. That’s why it really was sort of mind-blowing how much outright theft it was of the other two parties’ platforms.
The only real difference between the Liberals and the other parties now remains on issues like raising taxes, which the Liberals are still dead-set against, support for things like the Site C dam and the Kinder-Morgan pipeline and the resource sector—that’s a big difference between the B.C. Liberals and the other parties—and things like changing the labour code, which is a big NDP priority but certainly not a B.C. Liberal one.
The list of differences has been narrowed significantly from what it was before the reading of that Throne Speech.
So how does this turn out to be productive for the Liberals?
Unless there is a re-emergence of the [B.C.] Conservative party—and I don’t think there’s any evidence to suggest that’s going to happen—the Liberals should remain fairly safe in the ridings they hold outside of Metro Vancouver.
They won places like Kamloops and Prince George, and parts of the Interior, by very wide margins, and given the NDP and Green’s positions on the resource sector and on much of the industrial sector, there’s nothing to suggest that the Liberals will lose those seats anytime soon.
Where the Liberals lost the election was in the suburbs of Metro Vancouver. Issues like childcare, education, and transit — which all figured large in that Throne Speech — are critical issues in the ridings that surround Metro Vancouver. In places like Mission, the Tri-Cities, Burnaby, things like expanding childcare and getting rid of the tolls on the Port Mann Bridge, and putting even more money into education, are potentially very popular to the voters in those ridings.
It may very well be that those voters see this as pure vote-buying, but clearly this is a Throne Speech designed to speak to those voters in the suburbs rather than voters around the province.
On the Throne Speech: both the Greens and the NDP like a lot of the things there, and why wouldn’t they? They were taken from both parties’ platforms. But they’ve both very cheerfully said “Yes. We’re going to vote it down.” So when it comes to cynical, can we flip it over to that side?
There’s an artificialness to this whole thing. The Speech from the Throne is deemed to be a confidence vote. For the Greens and the NDP, their end-game is to have themselves run the show, rather than the Liberals. The way to get there, to achieve that ultimate goal, is to defeat the Throne Speech. So I don’t think it really mattered what was in that Throne Speech; it was never going to be voted on favourably.
And I don’t blame them for voting against it; they clearly have cobbled together something they think can work, and between them have one more seat than the Liberals. It could be a little embarrassing, I suppose, for the NDP and the Greens to denounce the speech, but at the end of the day this will be forgotten. By the time John Horgan becomes premier for any period of time the dust-up over this Throne Speech will be a distant memory.
The platform contained in the Throne Speech will be the platform for the B.C. Liberals, so that will come back at election time; but any uncomfortableness amongst the Greens and NDP in voting this speech down will be gone pretty quickly.
Do you think there will be any questions after the NDP and Greens vote against the Throne Speech, defeat the government, presumably become government, and then turn around in their own Throne Speech and presumably announce many of the same things that Christy Clark did? How do they sell that?
Well, that’s going to be John Horgan’s challenge now. He’s going to find out very quickly that it’s very easy to be the opposition leader; it’s a lot more difficult to run a government. You suddenly have more scrutiny, and you pay consequences for your actions. He ran on a platform, for example, to greatly expand daycare, to get rid of the tolls on the Port Mann Bridge, to put more money into education.
There were a lot of things in that Throne Speech that I think the NDP will gleefully put in their own Throne Speech. They had those ideas first, and I don’t think the Liberals have a monopoly on them anymore, so I fully expect that a lot of that stuff we heard in the Throne Speech will be repeated when [Lieutenant-Governor] Judith Guichon reads the next one, sometime probably in September.
I’m picturing the Liberals handing her their Throne Speech when the time comes for the NDP to read theirs, saying “Here, just read this.”
Exactly. And one of the other, ironic, things that may occur in the next Throne Speech after this one is that it too will be a confidence vote, and the Liberals will have to ask themselves are we now going to vote against a Throne Speech that is basically a copy of the Throne Speech we delivered a few weeks before.
They have to be careful about how far they want to go in denouncing each other’s platforms, when increasingly their platforms are very similar.
This is why I think Horgan has a bit of latitude in his first confidence vote. I don’t think the Liberals will be in a very good position to vote against something they introduced themselves only weeks earlier.
I want to go back to the point you made about daycare, and all these things the Liberals announced, which are very Lower Mainland-centric. Looking at the other side of the coin, when it comes times for the NDP and the Greens to form government, how do they do something similar with the rural voters that they’re going to have to win over in order to get a majority in the next election?
That’s the great challenge they’re going to be facing. The NDP is virtually shut out apart from Metro Vancouver. They only have a handful of ridings [in the rest of the province] and they’re not going to have much representation: not only at the cabinet table, but in the caucus room; and policies really stem from caucus.
There will be very few people advocating for things that might be of greater interest outside of Metro Vancouver. The risk for the North and the Interior with the NDP/Green alliance is of their interests being buried by the interests of the ridings in which the NDP were elected, and which they need to hold if they want a bigger majority in the next election.
The last two elections really exposed the rural/urban divide in this province. The Liberals are obviously trying to close that divide with some of the policies announced in the Throne Speech, to make themselves more attractive to the urban/suburban voter, feeling that they already have the support of the rural and regional voter.
The NDP have yet to show, unlike the Liberals, how they can reach over that divide and fashion their policies to attract the people they don’t currently enjoy the support of. We’ll see in Horgan’s Throne Speech whether he can figure out a way to talk to people in the Okanagan and the Cariboo and the North. Right now they don’t display any evidence that they know how to do that.
Next week: How Fraser-Nicola could play a role in the next election.