We held a 28-day election campaign to create B.C.’s tightest result. Now we will endure a blackout of at least 14 days – an eerie political limbo – to await the truest result.
The clarity of yesterday’s campaigning has turned to the uncertainty of today’s awaiting. Everyone’s footing is unsure. No party can haggle in confidence with confidence.
Much as we are indulged these days by instant gratification, we are in the hands of the postal and courier system and hand-counting district return officers to recount and tabulate the tens of thousands of absentee ballots May 22-24.
About the only tidy truth in this stretch is that Liberals plan to keep governing the province – even with today’s count of 43 of the 87 seats, even though 41 NDP and three Green MLAs outnumber them.
If the Liberals have an advantage here – and it’s a relatively big if – it’s that they don’t appear likely to lose a seat through the next wave of counting and might yet get the 44 seats for a majority. Their nine-vote loser in Courtenay-Comox was a base commander, so it is logical that absentee ballots will bolster his tally with those on military assignment. In Maple Ridge-Mission, Liberals lost by 120, another possible but less likely pickup.
Of course, Liberals would have to nominate one of their own to be the speaker, someone bound to be a routine tie-breaker if there are 43 Liberals on one side and 43 opponents on the other. But let’s take this one headache at a time.
In a minority situation, and in the absence of a formal NDP-Green coalition, the lieutenant-governor is likely to grant the incumbents the chance to run the province.
Hardly ideal. Unchartered territory. Fraught with tripwires.
A minority Liberal government will need bill-by-bill assistance of the three-seat Greens under Andrew Weaver, and here too is a Liberal advantage.
It would be foolhardy for Weaver to have anything other than a piecemeal political strategy. His party’s showing offers the opportunity of a genuine movement. It would be devoured and shrouded in an NDP coalition. The party would not have the visibility, the credit and the seeming differentiation that permits it to grow next election.
He need not create a formal pact with the Liberals – that, too, would assuredly both alienate and diminish – but he can derive the benefits of what Clark promises would be dialogue.
It helps the Liberals immensely for the left-of-centre cohort to be divided, so she would happily feed it the low-hanging fruit: granting Greens official party status to ask legislature questions and get research resources, creating a path to campaign finance reform and another path to electoral reform, perhaps referring the Site C project to the yawning process of a review by the utility regulator, perhaps doctoring the proposed but unapproved budget. If you believe the courts will delay or kill the Kinder Morgan pipeline, that’s a pretty good haul for the Greens on an ad hoc basis – in the driver’s seat at times with the Liberals, as opposed to being subsumed in coalition as NDP Lite.
John Horgan, meanwhile, has a limited deck from which to deal. He may have congruent policies with the Greens, but he can’t risk offering Weaver outsized stature. He has to hope his overtures – the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing – are clever enough to outwit a Nobel laureate, and that’s a bet I wouldn’t take.
Regardless of a minority or majority position, though, the signal sent to Clark was to be a more flexible, accommodating premier. She will need to heed her own conciliatory words in her early Wednesday speech.
The urban/rural divide in the Liberal results were reminiscent of Stephen Harper’s major-city deficiency, and we all know where that led. Clark’s party could use a Metro Vancouver strategy that goes beyond green-lighting Uber and capping bridge tolls to deal with the broader matters of affordability.
But that’s for another day, for another headache. Surviving the recount, then courting and outfitting the Greens without integrating them, are the next orders of business.
For the time being, while we wait and wait, let’s all take a deep breath – if indeed we have any breath left to catch.
