BC NDP Changes Approach

Horgan and the NDP are changing their approach. Previously, some NDP MLAs, such as Doug Routley, had been attacking Green leader Andrew Weaver repeatedly. Now, with the NDP House Leader Mike Farnsworth shutting down Routley's attacks and Horgan agreeing with some of Weaver's proposals, the party has obviously taken a different tack. Both are now advocating proportional representation, expressing concern over the regressive medicare premiums, and aligning with Independent Vicki Huntingdon in demanding release of the provincial report on fracking, which they believe has been held back for six months now because of health-related concerns in the report. 

This approach is almost certainly strategic as Vaughn Palmer outlines in the following article. 

While Horgan's comment that the Greens have little support in then natural resource BC Interior is largely true, the strong environmental movement in the Kootenays is an exception to this generalization and polls suggest Green Party support has risen to the mid-teens in Metro Vancouver and is very strong in southern Vancouver Island.

Quote:

 

... Opposition leader John Horgan is starting to lay out the planks for the New Democratic Party platform in the next campaign. One of his (Horgan's) first ideas would herald a major change in B.C., by shifting the province to a system where the number of seats that a party wins in the legislature would be proportional to its share of the total votes cast in an election.

Given that B.C. parties hardly ever win as much as 50 per cent of the popular vote, the outcome would more often than not be power-sharing in the legislature via minority or coalition governments.

“Well and I’m OK with that,” said Horgan when I raised the power-sharing implications in a recent interview. “The reason that I’m comfortable with it is that the NDP is a coalition party. When Mike Harcourt was successful in 1991, it was bringing together environmental voters, blue collar workers, academics, theologians — the broad base that is the NDP and has always been since the 1930s.” ...

He’s come to share the frustrations of many voters with the winner-take-all outcomes of the first-past-the-post system of electing governments. ...

“Too many people feel that their vote doesn’t count because minority parties continue to form majority governments, whether it be the federal Conservatives, whether it be the BC Liberals. They got well less than 50 per cent of the vote, yet they have all of the power,”...

The nuts and bolts of the shift he would leave to after the 2017 election. Presuming the NDP were to win, then a Premier Horgan would initiate a public consultation on options for proportional representation, followed by a midterm referendum on the preferred system.

If approved, the new system would be put in place for the election in 2021. Granted, then, that Horgan’s call for proportional representation is doubly “iffy,” needing as it does an NDP win in 2017, then a “yes” vote in a referendum in 2019 thereabouts. Still his willingness to share power with other parties may serve a political purpose in the interim.

The Green party has long supported proportional representation. Horgan’s shift to supporting it as well is one of several signs he is seeking a more constructive relationship with the Greens and their supporters. Horgan in the interview all but endorsed Green MLA Andrew Weaver’s call for the government to rein in soaring premiums for the medical services plan.

“I have a similar concern about MSP premiums,” he said. “They’re regressive. So I believe that Andrew and I are on the same page. I think most British Columbians recognize that we’re the only province that has medical services premiums. And it’s perhaps time that we fund our health services, as other jurisdictions do, through general revenue.”

He fully endorsed the call from Weaver’s sometime ally, Independent MLA Vicki Huntington, for the Liberals to release a report they’ve been sitting on for six months on the health effects of oil and gas development in northeastern B.C. “I absolutely support Vicki’s work in this regard,” said Horgan. “When it comes to hydraulic fracturing, when it comes to sour gas leaks, the whole range of potential lethal activity within the gas industry, government has to go beyond regular regulation and accountability to make sure that the public has a level of comfort that is as high as it possibly can be. When you sit on a report for six months, that doesn’t build confidence, that builds fear.”

The New Democrats have lately toned down their attacks on the Greens, after that embarrassing exchange on social media in January when MLA Doug Routley and Horgan’s chief of staff John Heaney discussed slinging a “mudline” at Weaver. When Routley resumed sniping at Weaver on the floor of the legislature last week, NDP house leader Mike Farnworth personally intervened to put a stop to it.

Horgan, for his part, is promoting a more realistic view of the threat that the Greens pose to NDP support, suggesting it is confined to a handful of ridings, mostly in the capital region.

“When you get outside of the South Island, the Green vote is very, very flat,” he maintains. “Five, six, seven per cent at best in communities in the Lower Mainland. Virtually nothing when you get out into the hinterland where resource development is what keeps communities vibrant.”

Combine that perspective with his stance on proportional representation, MSP premiums and fracking and one glimpses the makings of a tacit pitch to potential green supporters in the next election: Vote Green, if you must, in the few ridings where the party might win; vote NDP everywhere else, lest you again end up with the Liberals.

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Vaughn+Palmer+Horgan+ponders+sharin...