There’s rough water ahead for the NDP in BC.
The BC Liberal Party refuelled its rusty tub with an old can of bunker fuel they had stored in a back cupboard. Diane Watts was first aboard at the refuelling wharf, but she was treading water while Andrew Wilkinson let the tide ease him into the captain’s chair.
Rich Coleman’s shipmate Mike DeJong sunk just shy of the starting line. Maybe Coleman gas doesn’t have the octane rating it used to.
Meanwhile, the NDP barge, launch ceremony champagne barely dried, could founder like an LNG freighter on the submerged hulk of the BC Liberal steamer it barely managed to scuttle last summer.
The NDP’s sinking of the SS Christy Clark took three Green swabbies and Darryl Plecas, the only BC Liberal with a conscience and a working understanding of parliamentary democracy – but not before the Clark’s crew seeded the province’s political waters with an array of potentially devastating mines.
So far, NDP steersman John Horgan avoided the BC Hydro debt charge, encountered too soon after the sinking of the Clark for people to forget which tide it had floated in on.
Then came the Site C dam. Green skipper Andrew Weaver reluctantly allowed that ship to sail.
With public memory capacity on a par with goldfish, the NDP may yet be anchored to the Clark’s ICBC debt charge.
Now the Vancouver housing crisis appears to be washing ashore in a tangled net of casinos and money laundering. Obviously, Horgan can’t leave it lying around, fouling the beaches. But it looks like that net also contains joyful BC Liberal raves of billion-dollar gaming revenues.
With enough irony to build a fleet of political vessels, however, the NDP’s biggest threat is a torpedo being readied by the Green skiff.
Weaver signalled that his tug won’t pull the NDP barge past any LNG facilities – while Horgan was floating a barge-full across the ocean. With the coming provincial budget looking like a tsunami swollen by the Clark’s mines, Greens are considering throwing the NDP’s sheets to the wind.
Only Wilkinson’s New Liberals will be trusted to understand the business of business. The NDP will be sent below-decks, and it will take salvage crews a decade to figure out where the Greens went down.
And BC voters continue to swim in circles, occasionally expostulating, “Oh look! A castle!”