CLONE SPEECH
Christy Clark’s Liberals copy NDP and Green policies
It was a throne speech that became a clone speech as Christy Clark continued her amazing transformation into an NDP copycat.
Clark’s barely governing Liberals have now so precisely duplicated the NDP election platform that maybe she should just go ahead and change her first name to “Glen.” I always thought there was no relation between Christy Clark and former NDP premier Glen Clark, but now I’m starting to wonder if they were twins secretly separated at birth.
The clone speech was a shameless rehash of the NDP platform from the May 9 election, with the Liberals now officially endorsing a long list of policies they previously savaged as dangerous, foolhardy and unaffordable.
Consider the Liberals’ new clonespeech commitment to eliminate tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges, an NDP promise that won John Horgan’s party a lot of votes in Surrey. Clark and the Liberals had called it “short-sighted” and “reckless” and said it would sink the budget into deficit, destroy the province’s credit rating and saddle future generations with crippling debt. Now they’re all for it, debt be damned, and there were all the obedient little Liberal MLAs applauding their toss-the-tolls plan like it was their own idea.
Send in the clones, indeed. It’s not the NDP, folks, but an incredible simulation.
The former Liberals are now all fully on-board with a $1-billion child-care program that will be “low- or no-cost” for parents and would be implemented even faster than the NDP’s $10-a-day plan. Yes, that’s the same NDP childcare plan that Clark said would plunge the province into such fiscal ruin that there would be no money left over for other services.
The Liberals are banning corporate donations to political parties, hiking welfare rates, delaying Uber, fully funding school playgrounds and even entertaining second thoughts on Clark’s precious Massey Tunnel replacement bridge — all firmly held NDP positions.
And while they’re doing all that, the Liberals plan to start spending taxpayers’ money like New Democrats on steroids. The clone speech even raised the possibility of building SkyTrain to Squamish. What’s next? A monorail to Prince George? An anti-gravity train to Vancouver Island?
And to think these are the same people who preached small government, low taxes and reduced regulations on business. Now they’re backing policies so left wing it would make Bernie Sanders blush.
What is the point of all this, you’re wondering? Welcome to the club.
Obviously the Liberals now realize their own vapid election platform — basically everything was already so awesome in B.C. there was no need to do anything else — was a total stinker that bombed with voters. So now they’re simply stealing the NDP’s ideas and hoping voters develop collective amnesia, forget all the stuff they said just a few weeks ago and fall in love with Christy all over again.
This is a bizarre strategy that presents many dangers and pitfalls for Clark’s Liberals, who are poised to be defeated in the legislature and sent to the opposition benches. How can the Liberals effectively criticize an NDP government after they have flip-flopped and endorsed so many core NDP policies?
The opposition is supposed to be a watchdog, not a lapdog. The Liberals will be toothless tigers.
But I think the bigger risk for Clark is that this kind of weak capitulation to the NDP exposes the Liberals’ flank on the right. We still have a thing in this province called the B.C. Conservative Party. Right now it’s broke and leaderless. But if Clark continues leading the Liberals down this wimpy path of retreat, the Tories could spring back to life to fill the void. That would be a big problem for the Liberals if their right-wing base of support starts peeling off to a party with ideas other than copying the NDP.
Of course, all bets will be off if B.C. is suddenly thrust into a summer election. Though Clark says she doesn’t want one, I think she secretly desires another trip to the polls as quickly as possible. That could be her only hope for winning back a majority government, and save her leadership of the NDLP — the New Democratic Liberal Party.