A little over two years ago, on May 10th, 2017, Dr. Andrew G. Weaver, the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia, issued a threat: he might use his three-person caucus to keep the criminal enterprise known as the BC Liberal Party in office if the BC New Democratic Party did not give him what he wanted. The BC Liberals had held power in the province for sixteen years. During that time, they had conducted a fire sale of public assets, selling, for instance, a railroad valued at $1.1 billion for $99 million. That sale was so egregious, some of the party’s underlings had to do some time for it in exchange for their families being looked-after.
The one decent thing the BC Liberals had done was to introduce a carbon tax in 2008, a tax that was capped by the party’s second leader, Christy Clark, in 2011. Clark’s government had been focused on vastly expanding fracking and petroleum extraction in the province and selling the “natural gas” to unspecified buyers in East Asia. The BC Liberals had also sold off public forest land, allowed mining companies to break the law with impunity and vastly expanded casino gambling in the province, which had become a haven for those wishing to use an inflated real estate market and an insufficiently supervised set of casinos to launder billions of dollars.
Nevertheless, Weaver threatened BC’s New Democratic Party with the possibility that he would keep this crew of kleptocratic money-laundering climate villains in office if the party did not do all it could to woo him to their side.
To make all of this work, the BC Green Party leader, who was still a member of the Liberal Party of Canada and not of the Canadian Greens, hired Norman Spector as his chief negotiator to deal with the competing NDP and Liberal demands to support their legislative minorities. Spector had been the deputy minister to Thatcherite BC premier Bill Bennett and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. And he had been instrumental in the Restraint Program and the efforts to shut down Operation Solidarity, which opposed it, making BC a laboratory for unfettered Thatcherism, with its austerity and privatization, in 1983.
Spector flitted back and forth between Clark and NDP leader John Horgan, trying to make a deal Weaver found favourable, for nearly a month. In the end, in exchange for agreeing to vote “no confidence” against Clark, Weaver obtained what we call the “confidence and supply agreement.”
The agreement was pretty problematic as it was based on what we might call “process promises” – promises in which someone commits to do what some future consultation or evaluative process tells them to do. The BC NDP secured an agreement from Weaver and his caucus that they would support the government until 2021 in exchange for a promised minimum wage increase being referred to a commission, the decision on whether to build the Site C hydro megaproject being referred to the BC Utilities Commission and ditching first-past-the-post and bringing in proportional representation referred to a postal referendum.
This stood in pretty dramatic contrast to similar agreements at the federal level like Jack Layton’s 2004 agreement to support Paul Martin’s government for nine months in exchange for $4 billion in new social spending, or Tommy Douglas’s 1965 agreement to support Lester Pearson’s government in exchange for creating Medicare. This was especially underlined, contemporaneously, in 2017, by the Democratic Unionist Party propping up Theresa May’s regime in London in exchange for billions of dollars in new spending and a hard border being re-created in Northern Ireland in contravention of the Good Friday Agreement. Whereas the DUP had secured not just a fortune in government spending but the dismantling of a multi-decade international peace process, Weaver secured an agreement to listen to civil servants.
But, when the BC Utilities Commission found that there was neither an energy, economic nor environmental case for Site C, the NDP went ahead with it. When the NDP appointed a fake YES committee for proportional representation, run by the historical enemies of electoral reform, who looted the government’s funds and presided over a historic defeat for PR, the Greens did not bat an eye. They were more concerned with three issues:
- inviting Uber, the American Ponzi scheme dressed up as a taxi company, seeking to abolish public transportation, into BC and pay drivers less than minimum wage while doing it;
- preventing “card certification” of unions in non-union workplaces, forcing workers to vote twice to be unionized, the second vote under the supervision of their bosses and subject to intimidation and coercion; and
- preventing the minimum wage from rising to $15 before 2021, keeping it under that of Jason Kenney’s Alberta until the end of the government’s mandate
During their time working with the NDP, Weaver’s Greens developed a fourth major concern: preventing British Columbians who own two homes from paying a surtax on their second home in places where homeless people were desperate for shelter.
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The Greens have not been shy in threatening to bring the government down over the latter three issues, threatening to vote with the BC Liberals in the next confidence vote if the government did not scale back its support for workers unionizing or earning a decent wage.
Before going on, I should clarify what a confidence vote is: it is a vote before the legislature that falls into one of two categories: (a) it pertains to appropriations/money or (b) it is declared to be a “confidence vote” by a majority of members of the legislature. Any time there is a “confidence vote” before the legislature, the government must win this vote. Otherwise, the Lieutenant-Governor will either choose a new premier from among the assembly’s members or a call a new elections. Sometimes a confidence vote is a budget. Sometimes it is a tax bill. Sometimes it as an innocuous bill that has had the following phrase added to it as an amendment, “and this house has no confidence in the government.” That’s how Joe Clark’s government fell in 1980.
I am writing this piece because of recent events in which Dr. Weaver has offered us a second-rate Pontius Pilate impression around some provincial legislation that served to massively increase fracking in the Peace Region, build a pipeline from the Peace to Kitimat, and construct the highest-emission, most climate-changing megaproject in BC’s 162-year history by giving a billion dollars in tax breaks to Royal Dutch Shell. Royal Dutch Shell, for those with a shorter memory, was the petroleum company of apartheid South Africa and a key actor in the genocide against the Ogoni people in Nigeria.
According to Weaver and his apologists, there is nothing the BC Green Party can do to stop the package of $6 billion in tax breaks for transnational oil companies to develop liquified “natural gas” export facilities in Squamish and Kitimat, based on fracking and pipeline-building, with the “product” destined to be burned in the USA or East Asia to fire inefficient industrial production. They argue that there is nothing they can do because the BC Liberals and BC NDP both support these LNG projects and, between them these parties control the vast majority of votes in the legislature.
This seems strange because the concessions Layton demanded in 2004 were opposed by the Liberals and Conservatives who comprised the vast majority of MPs; this was also true of the Medicare reforms the NDP demanded in the 1960s; they too were opposed by most of the MPs in the house. Similarly, a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is opposed by the vast majority of MPs in Westminster. The reason that Layton and Douglas got their way is because they did not just threaten to vote against the government on the specific issue; they threatened to vote against the government on everything unless they got what they wanted.
The Tories, being implacable enemies of the Liberals, put all kinds of confidence matters before the house, just as the BC Liberals do against the BC NDP. There is a wealth of opportunities for Weaver and his confederates to defeat the government if the Horgan regime does not do what they want. But they only threaten to do this when they want to reduce wages and undermine the rights of workers. Whenever there is an environmental matter on the table, they claim their hands are tied because they must vote with the government on all confidence matters in the interests of “stability,” a nebulous concept they refuse to define.
So, let us be clear: when it comes to sticking up for property and business owners, the BC Greens threaten to bring the government down all the time and obtain major concessions from the NDP but when it comes to the environment, their supposed raison d’être, they state that they cannot threaten to change their vote on a confidence vote unless it specifically mentions LNG. According to the Greens “if you don’t do what we want, we will vote to defeat you at the next opportunity” is a threat that is both impossible and unethical, even though Medicare, the putative bedrock of our social contract was obtained by that very threat.
In response to this reasoning, some Greens have stated, “but what if the NDP won’t back down and we do have to bring down the government?” “What if they win a majority or the Liberals do?” The argument seems to be that unless the threat of defeating the government over the biggest carbon bomb BC has ever built has a 100% chance of succeeding, it should never be issued. The reasoning appears to be that a 100% chance of two huge LNG plants, fueled by fracked gas in the Peace, carried by pipeline through Unist’ot’en territory, to Squamish and Kitimat, is somehow not as risky as whatever a majority NDP or Liberal government would do. So it is better vote for that rather than take a risk and try to stop it, even though this involves signing off on the most omnicidal legislative act in BC history.
Let’s be clear: if the world increases carbon emissions at the rate the BC NDP-Green government proposes to, we are all dead and so is most of everything else, except maybe a rat every four miles. There is a good chance we’re dead anyway, but at least we have a shot if we try to stop governments accelerating the extinction event that grips our planet.
The BC Green Party is right. There is a chance that if they actually tried to stop Kitimat and Squamish LNG they might fail. But we are out of time. If we take no risks in attempting to save the planet, it’s over. We’re done. And we will have deserved to die.
