B.C. premier playing victim in trade fight he started

He is the guy who threw the first punch in a bar and is now complaining about the resulting brawl.

British Columbia Premier John Horgan is trying to play the aggrieved victim in the trade war with Alberta while painting Premier Rachel Notley as the irrational aggressor.

“I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to have duelling premiers,” he told a news conference Wednesday afternoon while earnestly hoping that “cooler heads on the other side of the Rockies will prevail.”

It is a political act, of course. Horgan knew exactly what he was doing when he threatened last week to introduce regulations to limit the amount of bitumen Alberta could transport from the oilsands to the West Coast. He knew Notley would see this as a ploy to further delay construction of Kinder Morgan’s expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline.

He knew Notley would be furious. Getting that pipeline built is pretty much the only hope she has of surviving next year’s provincial election.

He also knew his threat had no legal or constitutional basis.

But he did it anyway as a sop to the three anti-pipeline Green Party MLAs who hold the balance of power in B.C.

Budding sommeliers might notice a reduction in selection as Alberta’s sanction on B.C. wine could knock 1,460 products from 117 B.C. wineries off liquor store shelves. That’s more than four per cent of the wine products approved for sale in Alberta, according to the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission.

B.C. wine also made up more than one-quarter of the volume sold in Alberta in 2017, the commission said. Albertans drank 12.8 million litres of B.C. wine last year, which was 28.9 per cent of wine volume sold in the province.

Three of the Top 10 selling wines in Alberta will now be in scarce supply, as they ’re from our western neighbours. Fans best stock up on Copper Moon Shiraz, Bodacious Smooth Red, and Jackson-Triggs PS Pinot Grigio while they can.

The $72 million Alberta paid to B.C. wineries last year was 12 per cent of the $592 million in total wine sales in the province.

However, beer remains king in Alberta. Albertans bought nearly six times as much beer as wine in 2016-17.