It looks like friends and family in British Columbia could be kept on edge politically for much of the next four years. A one-seat majority in the Legislature holds no promise of stability. The accord between the provincial New Democrats and the Green Party holds no guarantee of long-term success.
And you can imagine the fixation that Christy Clark and her Liberals will have on driving wedges into that accord and finding the weak links on both sides. There could be no quarter asked or given when a member of any party misses a vote. The NDP government has a mission to dismantle the advantages the Liberals had in fundraising and are as adamant as the Green Party to block the completion of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion.
Blocking the Kinder Morgan project will also pit the NDP and their Green allies against both Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Ottawa and Rachel Notley’s NDP in Alberta. With Kinder Morgan trying to raise close to $7 billion to make the expansion happen, the American company might not find much enthusiasm for the deal from share sales and other funding sources. With the work scheduled to start this fall, there better not be any provincial permits or licenses still needed as those offices will likely be closed to the company.
Cooler heads prevailed for both the Greens and NDP in regards to the $9 billion Site C Dam project that is already under construction. The two parties plan to have the independent B.C. Utilities Commission conduct a thorough review of the need for the project without stopping construction. Both parties are concerned about the 2000 employees already at work but the Clark government had refused to allow such a review. The two parties want to know what they were missing about the deal.
The only yawn in the NDP/Green accord is the promise that B.C. voters will be allowed to vote on a resolution to implement proportional voting next year. B.C. voters have had that vote too often already and the federal examination of the question last year also put an end to the idea federally.
But the left coast is going to have political fun times.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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