After several madcap weeks of targeted spending announcements for just about every community in the province with a pulse, the BC Liberals rolled out their re-election strategy this week: let the two Bernies kill each other with kindness.
Bernie Sanders, as everyone remembers, was the surprise hit of the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination race last year, outshining establishment favourite Hillary Clinton by tapping into public anger over wealth inequality and appealing especially to younger voters with promises of life-altering freebies.
The B.C. election began this week with Premier Christy Clark announcing an unapologetically “modest” and “cautious” $157-million package of prudent expenditures backed by a four-year freeze on personal income taxes, while already issuing dire warnings about NDP Leader John Horgan’s Bernie-like extravagance.
Before the NDP platform had even been announced, Horgan had promised to hike the minimum wage, which currently sits below $11 an hour, to $15 an hour; give up an estimated $200 million a year by cancelling bridge tolls in Metro Vancouver (compared to Clark’s “moderate” $30-million-a-year toll cap plan); freeze hydro rates; eliminate MSP premiums; offer $10-a-day child care; and provide every renter in the province with a $400 rebate. The chicken in every pot hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s early days.
Not to be outdone, Green Leader Andrew Weaver is promising free pre-school for three- and four-year-old children, free day care for children up to three with working parents and $500 a month for a child under two with a stay-at-home parent; raising social assistance and disability rates by 10 per cent this year and 50 per cent by 2020; working with Ottawa to create a monthly benefit for low-income families; providing tuition-fee debt relief to post-secondary students; and designing a basic income pilot.
With all this socialism in the air, the Liberals are no doubt delighted to be going up against the tag team of Horgan and Weaver. It allows Clark to play the fiscal grownup in the room while the two Bernies slug it out for, and conveniently split, the free-stuff vote.
It might not work out that way, however. B.C. voters could be fed enough by the Liberals’ Wild West cronyism and chicanery, the low-information TV commercials, the cosmetically balanced budgets, the LNG flop and all the other sins that Rafe Mair yells about, to go full Alberta on May 9.
We could even wind up with one Bernie in government and the other in opposition.
It’s an election and anything can happen when you throw two Bernies into the mix.
