Editor:
In Gordon Wilson’s response (“Green breach of trust,” Letters, June 30) to Kim Darwin’s letter of June 23, he makes a number of contentious points, and a few in particular are worth challenging.
Firstly, there is nothing undemocratic about the Green Party’s choice to support the BC NDP over the Liberals. The Liberals did not elect a majority. A democratic arrangement was made between the two other parties to form that majority instead. There are ample precedents in Canada, 19 in fact, among past federal and provincial governments.
Secondly, Wilson labels the Green/NDP agreement a “backroom deal.” The agreement was negotiated in private – as were the Liberals’ negotiations with the Greens, by the way. No one would reasonably expect such bargaining to be conducted in an open forum. All kinds of politics are done behind closed doors, for obvious reasons, which Wilson knows quite well. As he also knows, the details of the Green/NDP agreement were quickly made public. To resort to a pejorative like “backroom deal” brings to mind another cliche: sour grapes.
How could the Greens, in any case, ever ally themselves with the BC Liberals, the party of Site C, LNG, Kinder Morgan, uncontrolled and shameless election fundraising and complete silence on other initiatives of democratic reform, namely proportional representation? The Greens could never have supported such a resource-looting group of neo-conservatives, and we all knew it.
The Liberals then tried a tactic of epic desperation with a Throne Speech that the party will spend years living down, one in which it adopted more than two dozen NDP and Green platform planks. Wilson speaks proudly of the speech now, but the ripple effect of that monumentally cynical document has barely begun to be felt within the BC Liberal Party. It could cost Christy Clark the leadership and pave the way to a policy convention where the party can shake off its sham progressive pose and return to form – conspiring to filch money from social programs to feed the wealthy.
The Wilsons and other BC Liberals should be thankful that the lieutenant-governor did not opt to force an election. Can you imagine the leadership debates? Or Liberals at all-candidates meetings and on doorsteps trying to explain – especially to the Liberal base – the monumental flip-flops that Throne Speech contained? The campaign would have been a travesty and the Liberals might well have lost badly in a general vote.
As for social media in the campaign, I was one of three people who had administrative responsibility for the local NDP Facebook page and website. It was our explicit intent and our practice prior to and throughout the campaign to run closely moderated, informative and upbeat social media pages. If some supporters on other pages resorted to innuendo or crass posts, that’s the downside of free speech in the 21st century and was not our doing nor in our control. One can add that there was no shortage of anti-NDP slurs in local social media, but I won’t try to hold the Liberal campaign responsible.
Rik Jespersen, Roberts Creek
