Premier David Eby’s New Democratic Party has signed a “stable governance” agreement with the B.C. Green Party. The agreement aims at keeping the NDP, with a majority of just one, in office with the support of the Green Party’s two MLAs.
The arrangement is similar to the 2017 “confidence and supply” agreement through which John Horgan’s minority government was propped up by three Green Party MLAs.
However Rob Botterell, MLA for Saanich North and the Islands, says this new agreement differs in that it includes specific accountability measures such as defined goals with deliverable results.
Among those deliverables are a commitment to build 30,000 units of affordable housing over the next four years, take steps to establish community health centres, and expand public coverage of psychologists.
Eby noted that the Greens remain free to disagree with his government on matters not included in the deal.
There is, however, a troubling proviso in the agreement. The two parties have committed to “review and consider preferred methods of proportional representation.”
This despite the fact that there were referendums on electoral reform in 2005, 2009 and 2018. All of them which failed, the latter two by wide margins.
In one respect, this is no surprise. Minority parties like the Greens are heavily attracted to proportional representation, which promises to win them more seats.
And Eby, who led the 2018 campaign, argues that electoral reform will lead to more accountable government, and reduce the current level of polarization that infects our politics.
More likely, though, it will do neither. What it most probably will do is result in near-permanent minority administrations, as fringe parties proliferate.
We might end up with a legislature split between half a dozen parties. And that must inevitably lead to deal-making behind the scenes, as the larger parties scramble for the support of fringe groups.
In that sense, everyone in a minority government has power, yet no-one has final power. Even the most wayward MPs or MLAs, knowing that with their vote they can bring down the government, are able to extort policies that the public as a whole do not support.
This is not, as Eby has suggested, the way to end polarization. More likely, it will have the opposite effect. By enfeebling whoever is in office, the path is opened to constant manoeuvring, enabling fringe parties and scrambling priorities.
We’ve seen that in Ottawa, as the minority Liberal government pours money on NDP projects to remain in office.
This month that led the federal finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, to quit the cabinet in disgust, calling some of the gestures made to retain NDP support “costly political gimmicks.”
What we need instead from Eby and his team is a plan to retire, over the next two years, the whopping $9.4 billion deficit forecast for this year. That should be followed by a credible and sustained effort to reduce the provincial debt.
Currently, net debt (total debt minus assets) stands at $91 billion, an increase of 130 per cent since the NDP took office in 2017.
Eby may say he’s taking care of much-needed services like community living programs. Yet interest charges on the public debt have climbed to $4.1 billion, more than twice the amount spent on community living, and equal to the entire budgets of several ministries.
This is the price of deficit financing, and it is this burden that Eby must find a way to resolve.
In the recent election, his government came within a hair’s breadth of being defeated by a Conservative Party that arrived out of nowhere.
That should be all the signal Eby needs that financial management is now his priority.
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