Nobody said she wasn’t crafty.
Christy Clark has decided long-defended Liberal policies are perfectly disposable if she believes she can squeeze out more time as premier.
Clark has defended her government’s stingy social assistance platforms for the last two election campaigns.
The Liberals’ signature defence was based on an age-old belief that if you make living on social assistance as miserable and impossible as your government is able to do, then people will find jobs.
Alas, even though the data didn’t support that belief, and folks were suffering because of it, the Liberals felt it had a populist appeal that kept getting them elected.
Since May 9, interestingly enough, the Liberals’ ideology seems to be transitioning to a kinder, gentler, more generous one.
Part of the Liberals’ former defence of not raising rates for a decade was that there was simply not enough money to do that. Strangely enough, yet again, the Liberals appear to have found enough money to do just that.
Likewise, the Liberals, pre-election, were wishy-washy about banning corporate and union donations to political parties. Post-election they’ve seen the subject in an entirely different light – a Green light.
The Liberals now say they will introduce legislation to do just that. And the Green party, duty bound to vote for a policy that it campaigned on and believes in, will now have to support the Liberals. Crafty, yes. Ethical, no.
But will this save the Liberals from a non-confidence vote? And if it does, what will Clark’s next move be? Will she eke out the summer months with games of legislative snakes and ladders? Will she keep adopting NDP and Green Party policies to either buy time or gain support in a future election?
It seems rather cynical even for a rather cynical politician. But perhaps this is just part of the new reality of politics. To be sure, all the parties were promising supporters all sorts of things to get votes before May 9; Clark has just extended that to a post-election B.C.
But does anyone really believe that if Clark forces voters to go to the polls again – possibly in the fall – voters will reward her with another term?
Surely there aren’t enough promises in B.C. to buy those votes in a rematch that is forced on very reluctant voters.
But perhaps that is exactly what is needed to ensure that B.C. can properly move forward and get on with it.
