CLARK’S FINAL DAYS AS PREMIER NOT HER FINEST
New book tells tale of Liberal leader’s failed attempt for a second election
On the day the New Democrats and Greens announced their power-sharing agreement last year, Premier Christy Clark called a preemptive press conference to say how the B.C. Liberals would respond to the threat to bring down her government.
“We have a duty to meet the house and to test its confidence and I intend to do that in very short order,” the premier told reporters on May 30.
“Should the government fail the test of confidence in the house, as seems likely, I would be given the job of leader of the Opposition. And I’m more than ready and willing to take that job on.”
What she was not ready and willing to do — or so she claimed — was to seek a rematch at the ballot box by asking the lieutenant-governor to call a second election.
Clark said it once when a reporter asked: “Are you saying that you wouldn’t, once the government is defeated, ask the LG to go back to the polls? You would be happy to allow the other two parties to form government?”
“That’s up to the LG,” replied the premier. “She will make that decision. I won’t be making that request because the decision is solely hers.”
She said it again when the reporter, double-checking, asked: “So you wouldn’t ask her to go back to the polls?” Clark: “No. No.”
Thus the self-portrait of a leader who, having lost her legislative majority, was prepared to take her medicine. Make way for Premier Horgan. Sit as leader of the Opposition.
Only she didn’t mean a word of it. Clark would spend the next few weeks scheming for a second election and when the scheme failed, she would quit without serving a moment on the Opposition benches.
The whole story is told in A Matter of Confidence, a gripping account of the 2017 election and aftermath, by reporters Rob Shaw of The Vancouver Sun and Global TV’s Richard Zussman.
They tell how Clark’s disavowal of any wish for a second election led to an ill-advised strategy of nudging the lieutenant-governor into calling a second election without the premier appearing to seek one.
It meant trying to show the legislature was unstable, given the 44-to-43-seat balance between the NDPGreen combination and the Liberals, and the possibility (unproven) that the house rules would have to be bent.
It also meant trying to break up the partnership before it really got off the ground, by arguing that a 46-seat Liberal- Green combination would be more stable.
The authors say the latter match was never much of a possibility. They make much of Green MLA Sonia Furstenau’s profound hostility toward the Liberals. They confirm, too, that on the night before the Greens broke off serious talks with the Liberals, Furstenau was physically sick to her stomach.
Still, right up to the end, the over-confident Clark (her political epitaph might well be “nemesis follows hubris”) thought she could persuade Green Leader Andrew Weaver to cross to her side.
“Actually be somebody, rather than a footnote in history,” she pleaded in a face-to-face on June 29. “You’re driving your party off the cliff.”
But Weaver had concluded the Liberals had earned “a time out.”
Later that day the Greens joined the New Democrats in voting non-confidence in the Liberals, a task made more satisfying by the preposterous poaching of NDP promises that was the government’s postelection throne speech. (“It is almost like a repudiation of the last four years,” said Ben Chin, Clark’s communications director.)
The non-confidence vote marked the third time in a week the partners got to demonstrate their ability to assemble a voting majority. Twice before, they’d swatted aside Liberal attempts to trap them into supporting last-minute measures from the government. Yet when Clark visited Government House to resign that evening, she desperately tried to persuade Lt.- Gov. Judith Guichon that the legislature could not function.
“You should dissolve the legislature because no party can govern in there,” the first minister advised the viceregal representative.
“The only way a party can govern is by perverting the rules of our democracy. And you have a responsibility as I do to protect those democratic principles. That is what the lieutenant-governor is appointed to do, is to safeguard democratic process. That’s your job. And my advice to you is to dissolve the legislature or these principles will be violated.”
If Clark had started out arguing for a new election back in May, avoiding all evasions and contrivances, she would have had a better case.
But after a month of stupid legislative stunts, she’d mainly succeeded in demonstrating that the New Democrats deserved a chance to show what they could do.
Instead of accepting Clark’s advice, Guichon accepted her resignation and called on Horgan.
Which is, after all, what Clark herself said the lieutenant-governor should do back on May 30.
“Should my government not meet the test of confidence in the house, which I think is likely, then she would, I think, go and ask the NDP, as the party that got the second-largest number of seats, whether or not they could govern.”
Odd that she didn’t remember those words when the time came to sit down with the lieutenant-governor. Then again, it was a year when the doomed premier too often did not mean what she said, or say what she meant.
After a month of stupid legislative stunts, she’d mainly succeeded in demonstrating that the New Democrats deserved a chance.