B.C. Politics Today: Green, Red, Orange--and 50 Shades of Grey

When the leader of the B.C. Green Party chooses to sit as an Independent, while the interim party leader attends ( as a sympathetic participant) the same high-profile Native Protest that the Premier has repeatedly refused to attend, you know that something is up in B.C. politics.  We are repeatedly reassured on both sides of the Green-NDP marriage that a painful divorce is not imminent: Dr. Weaver  merely wants some “space” to deal with personal family health matters. But this seems a little odd: The Greens would surely have allowed him to take a compassionate leave from caucus duties, and the other parties would surely have excused Weaver from any committee responsibilities. Why, then, did he have to leave the party?

Perhaps his stated reason is sufficient enough to be taken at face value: he stated on his MLA blog that ““I believe that it is important for the B.C. Green party to develop a new vision and voice independent from mine. My presence in the B.C. Green caucus could hinder that independence.” Thoughtful of him---I guess. But is it considerate of the voters who elected him, in large part because he was a Green?  This could reveal a certain hubris on his part, that of course the voters of Oak Bay voted for him because he was Andrew Weaver, the distinguished climate scientists, and not because he happened to be the leader of a particular political party.

Meanwhile, Premier Horgan looks less than perfectly virtuous himself.  As with the Site C dam, he had to give in on the LNG pipeline, but it doesn’t look great. The message we are getting is that pipelines are evil—as long as they are transporting Alberta oil. If it is fracking BC natural gas on unceded native land you’re talking about , that is a completely different matter. But is it, really?
Then there are the Liberals. They are still in the news because of the blind eye they allegedly took to money laundering in the gambling and real estate industries when they were in office. According to a January 2009 RCMP anti-illegal gaming unit report, a businessman “connected to Asian organized crime” was allowed by a British Columbia public servant to buy part of a B.C. Lottery Corp. casino, and that government employee was later hired in another B.C. casino.  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, instead of following the report’s recommendations, B.C.’s government defunded and disbanded the illegal gaming unit just three months later.

So whether or not Liberals did anything legally 'wrong', I have long felt that they were far too relaxed about money laundering whether in real estate or in gambling. On the other hand, as my securities regulator friend put it to me recently, nobody, either in China or the West, understood and predicted the impact of massive mainland Chinese capital flight. Easily a trillion dollars per year moves illegally out of China. When you have that much clandestine money floating around, shit happens. British Columbia, just like Australia and others, needed to make strict and clear rules about Chinese money as soon as it started coming but, again, the weight of the problem was not understood. “To put it slightly differently, when someone starts throwing money at you, you need to have really good powers of analysis and self-discipline to say “No”. You know that one of your neighbours will say “Yes” the next day.”

 We are fortunate to have finally had a change of government in 2017, so that a new party with a cleaner slate could tackle this subject. But that doesn’t mean that an Adrian Dix government between 2013 and 2017 wouldn’t have been just as compromised as the Liberals were—Dix’s own corrupt, dishonest and “process is for cheese” behaviour while Glen Clark’s assistant during the Burnaby casino scandal (and on several other occasions) strongly suggests otherwise.

 I am placing the odds of a B.C. election occurring this year, and not in the spring of 2021 as contemplated in the NDP-Green Supply Agreement, at around 50%. It is impossible to say from the current polls who would be most likely to win that election--- there is plenty to be unenthusiastic about on all sides. So, there you have it: very little black and white, just 50 shades of grey, B.C.-style.