Why did Christy really resign?

Editor: In the 1980s, Lee Atwater was a motormouthed, high-flying Republican strategist for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. One of his oft-quoted dictums is “In politics, perception is reality.”

His words of wisdom immediately came to mind on Friday July 28, as the brand-new B.C. Liberal Party interim Leader, Rich Coleman, addressed the media outside their caucus meeting.

Former Premier Christy Clark had suddenly advised that she was vacating the party leadership and would be resigning her seat in B.C.’s legislature.

Standing in front of visibly shocked caucus members, the usually stoic Coleman looked quite flustered and confused to the point of almost blubbering.

Coleman announced: “What she’s given to the province should never be forgiven,” then hastily amended that last word to “forgotten.”

There has always been something misty and twisty about Christy Clark, and there will be much speculation on why she pulled the plug on her party and her career at this crucial stage.

The truth may never be revealed to John Q. Public, but we will probably be getting a few versions before too long.

Maybe she was she jumping ship before she was forced to walk the plank by the party hierarchy, as they were certainly displeased by her ineffectual 2017 election campaign.

More displeasure followed her amazing flipflop in the Throne Speech in June, suddenly embracing so many of the NDP policies with high-cost initiatives that she had ridiculed for years, and viewed by skeptics as a desperate attempt to cling to power.

Maybe there was something of a ‘Trump tantrum’ pulled before she headed out the door after a couple of months of constant declarations that she was proud to lead a strong Opposition, and well-poised to regain power.

Maybe she was hurt by critics within her party, and decided that, in the Shakespearean words of The Godfather Don Corleone, “revenge is a dish best served cold.”

Whatever really happened, she handed the Green-Democratic (G-D) Alliance a 44-42 advantage, which will definitely stay as long as the new G-D Premier can avoid calling a by-election for her vacant seat.

Lee Atwater had it dead right, “In politics, perception is reality.” Bernie Smith, Parksville Association in the mid-1970s. An article in the April 28, 1975 edition of Newsweek reported NOAA declaring global cooling to be a certain thing.

And there were dire warnings about growing polar ice caps and diminished food production, which required the immediate attention of political leadership around the world.

Unlike the NOAA scientists of today, who are leading the charge on global warming, their predecessors admitted that their knowledge of climate change mechanisms was as fragmentary as their data and that they really didn’t know enough to pose the key questions, let alone answer them.

Were the NOAA “cooling” scientists of 1975 dumber than the NOAA “warming “scientists of 2017? Who knows, but they may have been more honest about what they did or didn’t know. One thing’s for sure: The current crew would have disavowed them as apostates. What’s changed in 42 years? That’s nothing in the earth’s climate record, but now there’s huge political attention and lots of money in play, and people respond to this. The UN has a comprehensive agenda based on the notion of man-made global warming and an accompanying social imperative which requires a massive transfer of wealth to developing nations under the label of mitigating the effects of climate change.

The biggest threat to humanity isn’t climate change. It’s rampaging population growth in the Third World and the associated demands for food, clean water, resources and energy.

The global population has mushroomed from 4 billion in 1975 to 7.5 billion today and is estimated to become 10 billion by 2050.

Classic population controls by the Four Horsemen aren’t that effective anymore and there’s a growing imperative to respond to the situation in the Third World.

To quote the late and former federal Liberal Environment Minister Christine Stewart, “no matter the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

It’s unfortunate that we don’t identify the real problem instead of trying to deal with it indirectly under the label of fighting climate change. John Thompson, Kaleden