Liberals quit nurturing Green growth

A n odd thing happened this week. The B.C. Liberals criticized the B.C. Green Party. Liberals have been counting on the Greens to bleed some support from the NDP. In Liberal strategy sessions, one of the favourite creative visualization exercises is to imagine the Greens getting enough seats not only to deny the NDP power, but to splinter the party more or less permanently.

After beating them four times in a row, the prospect of watching the Greens put a long-term damper on the NDP’s chances of ever winning makes Liberals giddy with excitement.

Four years ago, the Liberals even bought a full-page ad just before the election that favourably mentioned the Greens at the expense of the NDP.

After Weaver won the first seat for the party, he was treated with noticeable warmth by Premier Christy Clark during his first term. She’s usually extremely solicitous, and favourably inclined in the legislature to nearly everything he says.

Not all the Liberals adopt this posture. Cabinet minister Andrew Wilkinson and Weaver are frenemies and have some kind of Rhodes Scholar grudge match going that gets bitter. And after Weaver called the cabinet “a pack of fools” two years ago, minister Rich Coleman blasted him.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about” was the gist.

But even though Weaver has been increasingly venomous about a lot of Liberal priorities and about Clark’s leadership, she lets most of it go by. More than a few times, Clark and her ministers have exchanged routine insults with NDP Leader John Horgan and his team, then fielded a question from Weaver and gone out of their way to be respectful and courteous.

And whenever the chance arose to boost his profile, she obliged.

He pitched the idea of outlawing the practice of employers making women wear high heels at work and it immediately went viral, getting coverage as far away as Brazil. Every politician in the country immediately had the same reaction: “Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Clark snatched it up right away: “I agree with Andrew Weaver … that this practice needs to stop. Government will take action to do exactly that.”

Last year, he introduced another idea — requiring the post-secondary world to have sexual-violence and misconduct policies.

Clark grabbed that idea, as well, ordering up a short-notice government bill that requires exactly that. And due credit was given to Weaver for the idea.

So it was startling this week to see the Liberals bang off a news release that cuffed him around for his agriculture policy, of all things.

“Andrew Weaver and the B.C. Green Party showed how out of touch they are with farmers when they released their so-called agriculture platform today.”

The somewhat arcane point was that the policy didn’t mention trade and exports. Agriculture Minister Norm Letnick appeared flabbergasted. “It’s inconceivable,” he spluttered. Considering all the nasty things Weaver has said about the Liberals for the past few years, taking formal offence because the Greens’ agriculture policy doesn’t mention trade and exports is a strange thing to get agitated about.

The next day, the Liberals took an even stronger swipe at the Greens. Weaver had released the party’s climate-change policy, with its breathtaking plans to more than double the carbon tax and end revenue neutrality.

Liberals dropped the respectful tone and dismissed him as “just another tax-and-spend politician.”

The Green plan “is expensive for British Columbians, reckless for our economy, and would drive jobs and investment out of our province.”

But a party with one MLA can afford to take radical stands. It’s unlikely they’d ever have to raise the carbon tax from $30 a tonne to $70 in just four years.

The point is to put down a marker and see what the other parties do about it.

What the Liberals did about it is a departure from their standard response of ignoring most of Weaver’s attacks and going out of their way to prop up his party as much as possible. Maybe it’s just a tactical switch as game time approaches.

Or maybe they think the Greens are starting to poach from their base, as well as the NDP’s.