PALMER ON NDP-LED AGENDA
Out of three non-negotiable demands, the Greens won only on the easy two
There was a telling moment this week when the elected members of the NDP- Green alliance gathered at the B.C. legislature for the signing ceremony to formalize their pact.
Standing on the platform, awaiting the arrival of party leaders John Horgan and Andrew Weaver, were 40 New Democrats. Surrounded in their midst were two Greens.
“See? They’ve already been absorbed by the NDP,” one press gallery wag quipped.
Joking aside, the Green agenda was pretty much overridden by that of the NDP in the 10-page agreement between the two parties.
The three dozen or so policy commitments, though ambitious, largely echoed those in the NDP platform. It was hard to identify any points where the Greens had persuaded the NDP to abandon its position and adopt theirs.
Going into the powersharing negotiations, Green Leader Weaver announced three non-negotiable demands: an end to union and corporate donations to political parties, official party status for himself and his two colleagues, and proportional representation.
The first was a gimme for the New Democrats. They’d already promised it in their platform.
Party status for the Greens was another no-brainer for the NDP. As a two-member caucus following the 2001 election debacle, they’d made a good case for party status, albeit one that was denied by a mean-spirited B.C. Liberal administration. Having fought the good fight then, the New Democrats were not about to deny party status to a three-member caucus of Greens.
Weaver got nowhere persuading NDP Leader Horgan to go with the Green position that proportional representation should be imposed on the province by a simple vote of the legislature.
The NDP platform, while sympathetic to proportional representation, insisted it would not be implemented without first being put to the public and approved by referendum.
When Horgan announced last week that there would be no change in the electoral system without a referendum — “I feel strongly about that” — it was a public signal the NDP had non-negotiable positions as well.
The final deal between the two parties, hammered out Sunday morning for all intents and purposes, encapsulates the NDP position on proportional representation — so, too, on construction of the hydroelectric dam at Site C on the Peace River. The Greens wanted to kill the project outright. The NDP promised only to send it for expedited review to the B.C. Utilities Commission — and that’s all the power-sharing agreement promises to do.
Weaver said opposition to twinning of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline was a common cause that brought the two parties together. Nevertheless, the position in the agreement is what the New Democrats took to the voters during the campaign — to do everything within the power of the provincial government to stop the project.
The Greens promised a $4-billion increase in program spending — mainly on education, child care and health — over three years, roughly three times the prospective outlays in the NDP platform.
The agreement includes a number of vague commitments along those lines, but nothing that wasn’t covered in the NDP platform or that would over-commit NDP budget-makers in spending terms.
The Greens wanted to better than double the carbon tax from the current $30 per tonne of emissions to $70 by 2022. The NDP promised to move to $50 by 2022 and slightly compromised, agreeing to move to that rate a year earlier in 2021.
The NDP promised to phase out bridge tolls. Weaver defended them. The agreement is silent on tolls, freeing the NDP to abolish them in the first budget of a Horgan-led government.
The Greens are free to speak against that part of the budget. But they are also pledged to vote for that NDP budget and all NDP budgets up to the time the agreement expires in the fall of 2021.
That four-and-a-half-year target might be taken as a win for the Greens, because Weaver was looking for a long-term agreement. But the goal is contingent on the government surviving that long with a one-seat majority in the legislature.
Moreover, that survival is more a concern for Weaver than Horgan. An early election would not only disprove the Green claim that minority government works, it would plunge the province into a polarized election where Green support might be liquidated by an electorate seeking a return to majority government.
So, to recap, Weaver’s vaunted negotiating strategy did not extract much in the way of concessions from the NDP, other than tweaks here and there.
I expect the New Democrats realized that for all Weaver’s talk of being open to dealing with the B.C. Liberals, many Greens were not prepared to go with him on that.
They likely discovered that one of the three Green MLAs, environmental activist Sonia Furstenau, was visceral to the point of revulsion in her opposition to dealing with the Liberals.
Realizing Weaver had nowhere else to go, Horgan and his able chief of staff Bob Dewar saw no need to offer the Greens more than what was already in the NDP platform, nor did they.
Back to that scene at the legislature Tuesday — those few Greens sheltering amid all those New Democrats. For the caption contest, I’d suggest a line from John Horgan’s beloved Star Trek: “You will be assimilated.”
The process has already begun in the policy sense, and I wonder when Weaver will wake up to it.
It was hard to identify any points where the Greens had persuaded the NDP to abandon its position and adopt theirs.