If you are a progressive living in BC, I have some bad news for you. His name is Kevin Falcon (picture from here). He was elected leader of BC’s free-market party – the BC Liberal Party – on Saturday Feb. 5th, 2022.
The BC Liberal party has never pretended to be progressive. It is fundamentally different than its federal party namesake. Federally, the Liberal Party has two wings – a corporate wing and a progressive wing. Sitting to its right is the federal Conservative Party. Sitting to its left is the federal New Democratic Party (NDP), sometimes referred to as the Liberal Party in a hurry!
The BC Liberal Party does not have a progressive wing. The provincial Conservative Party exists in name only. Its far-right beliefs and members are very comfortable within the provincial Liberal Party.
With all of the above in mind, the BC Liberal Party is bad news for progressives no matter who the leader is. Kevin Falcon will make a bad situation even worse.
On the morning of Monday February 7th, new BC Liberal Leader Falcon was interviewed on CBC’s Early Edition. He must have repeated a dozen times or more his commitment to “getting things done”. However, when the host, Stephen Quinn, asked him for examples of the BC Liberal Party’s “getting things done” during its 16 years in office (2001-2017), all he referred to was megaprojects.
During the BC Liberal government years, Falcon led a number of ministries, first under Premier Gordon Campbell and then under Premier Christy Clark.
After serving for two years under Christy Clark as Finance Minister and Deputy Premier, Falcon left elected politics in 2013 for the private sector, working primarily in investment, focusing mainly on real-estate financing and property acquisition.
Getting things done, in Kevin Falcon’s books, does not mean meaningfully tackling the existential threat of our time, the climate crisis. Nor does it mean tackling the growing threat to social cohesion of wealth inequality. It does not include addressing society’s moral crime of failing to provide housing to the homeless. Getting things done is only about the construction of large capital projects and reducing, wherever possible, our government’s ability to provide much needed social programs by massively reducing government revenues.
Andrew Wilkinson, the BC Liberal’s previous leader, was out of touch with average British Columbians. Kevin Falcon is a leaner and meaner version.
If you are a progressive living in BC, hold onto your hat and start working now to elect as many BC NDP and BC Green MLAs as possible in the next provincial election scheduled for 2024. It will be here before we know it.
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (Feb. 9, 2022): 418.70 ppm
One year ago (Feb. 10, 2021): 417.79 ppm
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