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A B.C. Liberal Minority Government? Not So Fast

Carol Linnitt — Wed, 10 May 2017 21:50:04 +0000

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning major news outlets like the CBC made the official call: the B.C. Liberals had won a minority government in the 2017 provincial election.

Except they haven’t … quite … yet.

Here’s how the numbers are currently being reported: B.C. Liberals 43 seats, NDP 41 seats, Greens 3 seats.

These numbers are far from final. As Elections B.C. states right up there on its website, these are primary voting results from an initial count. “Final voting results will not be available until after the conclusion of final count, which will commence on May 22, 2017,” the site states.

There are about 160,000 absentee ballots waiting to be counted and some too-close-to-call ridings like Courtenay-Comox are facing a recount.

But, as Simon Fraser University student Steve Tweedale put it, we don’t need a final count to know it’s false to report the election resulted in a B.C. Liberal minority government.

“Assuming the preliminary count holds up, the outcome of the election is a hung parliament (sometimes called a minority parliament), meaning that no single party has a majority of seats. Under B.C.’s parliamentary system of government, elections determine the composition of the Legislative Assembly; they do not determine the composition of the government,” Tweedale writes.

The B.C. Liberals won 43 seats, just one seat shy of a majority. It is true that Clark will remain premier for the timebeing but she must retain the confidence of the house to continue as premier. If she cannot, one of several things can happen.

In this hung parliament situation, “the norm is the current premier gets the first shot at it, gets the first opportunity to form government,” UBC political scientist Kathryn Harrison told DeSmog Canada.

Clark could try her hand at governing with a minority government but in each act of convening the house she would run the risk of losing its confidence.

“One option would be for the Liberals to take their chances, stake out their positions, the route they would propose to go in government in a throne speech and invite other parties to defeat them which is an interesting option — it’s a bit of a game of chicken,” Harrison said.

“They won’t expect the popular vote.”

Or Clark could choose to step down.

“Sometimes it’s in the interest of a government to control the terms of their defeat,” Harrison said.

If Clark did announce her resignation to the Lieutenant Governor the buck would pass to NDP leader John Horgan to become premier with a minority government. Horgan, like Clark, would need to maintain the confidence of the house to carry this out.

But the B.C. Liberals and the NDP might also jockey for the support of the Green party's three MLAs in the hopes of forming either formal or informal coalitions.

As Clark said last night, “I will work with the other parties to do what needs to be done to keep fighting to protect” B.C.

Here’s where things get very interesting. If you watched coverage of the election last night you may have heard that Andrew Weaver’s Green party “held the balance of power” meaning the Greens have the option to formally (by forming a coalition government) or informally (by maintaining confidence through the support of policy measures and budgets, for example) prop up either the Liberals or the NDP.

“In the days ahead there will be plenty of discussions taking place between all parties,” Weaver told a room of supporters last night.

A BC Liberal Minority Government? Not So Fast https://t.co/CHmRlPXpub #bcpoli #bcelxn2017 @BCGreens #electoralreform @bcndp

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 10, 2017

A Liberal/Green Coalition?

It’s likely Clark will invite the Greens to join her cabinet, which they can do as Greens without crossing the aisle. But it is also likely that there will be some irreconcilable political differences that keep the Liberal and Green MLAs at loggerheads.

Weaver has yet to signal what his intentions are (although he did seem to suggest a preference for working with Clark in a controversial Global News interview) but throughout his campaign he stated banning big money in B.C. politics and electoral reform were up top on his list of priorities.

For years Weaver has campaigned to strengthen B.C.’s political donation rules, which currently allow unlimited amounts of foreign, corporate and union donations. The Green party has taken a strong stance on this issue by refusing to accept any corporate or union funds.

"Without any question, that's a deal breaker,” he said last week. “We've got to get the money out of politics.”

This could make the formation of a coalition government with the Liberals — a party awash in corporate cash — difficult.

The Green party is also committed to electoral reform, pushing for proportional representation in B.C. rather than the current first-past-the-post system.

“We support proportional representation because it is a fairer voting system, which encourages democratic participation and accurately reflects voters’ choices in the make-up of government,” Weaver said.

“It’s not obvious what the deal there would be,” Harrison said. “These are not issues that will be easy for Liberals and Greens to come to agreement upon.”

“Maybe financial reform,” Harrison said, “but electoral reform does not serve the Liberals' interests.”

On election night Weaver also stated his position on LNG is non-negotiable. Two LNG projects are approved in British Columbia — Woodfibre LNG in Howe Sound and Pacific Northwest LNG near Prince Rupert, which is projected to be one of the single largest source points of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, making it impossible for B.C. to meet its climate targets.

The Green party also pledged to cancel the controversial Site C dam, a crowning achievement and non-negotiable project for the B.C. Liberals.

So the differences in the Liberal and Green platforms seem pretty vast.

A NDP/Green Coalition?

As certainly as the Liberals will go courting the Greens, so will the NDP.

At a rally last night, John Horgan said a new government is in order.

“British Columbians have waited 16 years for a government that works for them, and we are going to have to ask you to wait a little bit longer until all the votes are counted and the final results of this election are known,” he said.

“But this is what we do know: A majority of British Columbians voted for a new government and I believe that’s what they deserve.”

A coalition between the NDP and the Greens seems easier to accomplish at least on the surface as the two parties share more general alignment on policies.

Of greatest significance is the NDP-Green alignment on two policies that would change B.C. elections forever.

The NDP commitment to ban corporate and union donations falls squarely in line with one of the Green’s top priorities.

On electoral form, the NDP have also spoken in favour, vowing to send the issue to a referendum and campaign in favour of reform if if elected — also in line with the Green platform.

The NDP have also explicitly spoken out against the Pacific Northwest LNG project, due to significant greenhouse gas emissions and threats to the Skeena River salmon runs. So the NDP and Greens will likely have an easier time finding common ground when it comes to the LNG industry.

On Site C, the NDP have promised to send the Site C dam for an expedited review by the B.C. Utilities Commission, so it's also not hard to imagine the Greens and NDP finding common ground on this issue.

It’s possible a coalition with the Greens will give the NDP the political cover necessary to make several bold moves including banning big money in politics, moving to some form of proportional representation and possibly even scrapping the Site C dam altogether.

Coalition a ‘Risky Proposition’ for Greens

The Greens will want to proceed carefully in their discussions with either the Liberals or the NDP, Harrison said.

“Coalitions governments are risky for junior partners,” she said.

“I think for the Greens to enter a formal or informal coalition with either the NDP or the Liberals is a risky proposition because the junior partners in those coalitions tends to not fare well in the next election.”

The Green party will need to decide what its hardline tradeoff will be for supporting another party.

“Green parties internationally have a tendency to insist on some policy like a carbon tax — we already have one — as a condition for participation in the coalition and then get wiped off the map in the next election.”

Yet there may be one key condition the Greens could place on their support: the promise of electoral reform.

“In this case I think the big win, the Holy Grail for the Greens would be a commitment to electoral reform for the system,” Harrison said.

The Green vote is depressed by the first-past-the-post system, Harrison said.

“It’s not that they don’t win seats, it’s that a lot of voters aren’t voting Green because they know their vote won’t count.”

A change in B.C.'s electoral system would both transform electoral politics in B.C. and would also change prospects for the Green party in the future, Harrison added.

“But it’s hard for me to imagine the Greens getting that concession from the Liberals because the Liberals have been the biggest beneficiary of the current electoral system.”

Image: Premier Christy Clark and Lieutenant Governor of B.C., the Honourable Judith Guichon, dissolve parliament for the 2017 election period. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr

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Study: Google Trends Show Climate Search Decline, Need for Solutions

Tim McSorley — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 17:56:49 +0000

Climate scientists and environmentalists need to revamp their messaging and get more involved in public debate if they want to stop what appears to be a plunging online interest in global warming, say observers of internet research trends across Canada and worldwide. "Many in the public feel tired of hearing about global warming because they feel unempowered by how they can deal with it," Andrew Weaver, leading Canadian climate scientist and B.C. Green MLA, told DeSmog Canada. "We need more reporting on the solutions, but in order to have more reporting on the solutions, we need those solutions to be out there for people to actually see and discuss. And to do that we require people, we require a political will to allow these to come forward." Weaver was responding to a new study, "Public interest in climate change over the past decade and the effects of the ‘climategate’ media event," that shows a marked decline in worldwide public interest in global warming during the past seven years.

Downward Google trends

Researchers at Princeton and Oxford looked at Google Trends, which measures global searches through Google's search engine. They found that since 2007 there has been an ongoing decrease in online searches via Google for terms such as climate change and global warming, both around the world and in the United States. A preliminary search on Google Trends shows similar results for Canada. Google Trends tracks more than 80 per cent of the world's web searches and is being used more and more in science and business to track global trends, from flu outbreaks to public opinion on corporate brands. GRAPH: Princeton University and University of Oxford researchers found that overall public interest in the topic of climate change has steadily waned since 2007. To gauge public interest, the researchers used Google Trends to document the Internet search-engine activity for "global warming" (red line) and "climate change" (blue line) from 2004 to 2013. They examined activity both globally (top) and in the United States (bottom). The numbers on the left indicate how often people looked up each term based on its percentage of the maximum search volume at any given point in time. Image courtesy of William Anderegg. "I do find the results concerning," said William Anderegg, a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Environmental Institute, one of two authors of the study. "It's concerning that [the impact of climate change] is not clear, that people do not necessarily connect climate change to what is happening around them…[and] that we are having trouble connecting with the public." In their analysis, the researchers found that online searches for terms like "global warming" and "climate change" in English, Chinese and Spanish (the three most commonly used languages on the internet) peaked in 2007 and have been in steady decline ever since. Another study last week from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that Americans respond much more viscerally to the term "global warming," than the term "climate change." That study, which also tracked public information searches online, found a similar decline:

"The largest upward spike in Google searches for global warming occurred just after Earth Day in April, 2007, a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide to protect human health, and two months after the film “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Since 2007, however, Google searches for the term global warming have declined to almost the same flat, relatively low level of searches for climate change."

The years 2006 and 2007 were a landmark period in the debate around climate change and global warming. Alongside the release of "An Incovenient Truth" and new EPA powers to regulation emissions, 2007 marked the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fourth report, which garnered major public attention. Both helped secure climate change in the public eye.

Has climate become 'background' noise?

Since then the drop in online public interest has been steady. Although, climate related information searches have spiked around the release of subsequent IPCC reports, as well as during so-called climate 'scandals,' such as the 2009 "Climategate" when hacked e-mails purported to show IPCC scientists purposefully ignored research that undermined their findings (the scientists wrongfully accused have since been cleared of any wrongdoing through several investigations). But neither these positive nor negative stories displayed any long-lasting impact on online interest in climate. The Oxford researchers were particularly concerned about the impact of stories negating climate change science, and whether those had a long-lasting impact on public opinion. But they found that, while climate scientists feared denier stories would radically shift public opinion, their impact (as measured by online searches for terms such as "climate change hoax") dropped quickly, lasting less than a month. While Anderegg and his co-author, Oxford's Gregory Goldsmith, point out that while this was good news on the stage of public opinion, overshadowing that finding is the concern that climate change is becoming more background noise than a pressing concern. Their findings are supported by other observers. Weaver confirmed that his own research into media coverage of climate change in Canada has shown similar trends. In parallel, Influence Communications, which monitors global news trends, has found that worldwide coverage of environmental issues, including climate change, has dropped from a significant peak of five per cent of media coverage around 2005, to around 1.2 per cent today, said company president Jean-François Dumas in an interview. While all have seen similar trends, ideas about the causes and possible solutions differ. For Anderegg and Goldsmith, the results suggest climate scientists need to communicate their findings more effectively with the public over the long-term, and not take too much time to simply counter attacks on climate change science. Others may speculate a lack of political leadership may contribute to a wider social disconnect. Recent polling shows Canadians strongly support government action to limit futher global warming, although belief the government actually will take action is disconcertingly low. Other recent polls show the majority of British Columbians fully support a transition away from fossil fuels and that Albertans strongly support tougher regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector. But, while public support is high, political will remains low.

Overcoming crisis fatigue

Weaver, though, feels recent studies may have "missed the boat" on something deeper. "Global warming is a pervasive issue that is not going away, but the media cycle is always looking for a new angle on a new story," he said. "It's hard when you have the Ukraine crisis, the Iraq crisis, the Syria crisis, to have this pervasive crisis get extensive coverage." To Weaver, the problem isn't so much about how climate scientists communicate their current work, but rather making the issue one that cannot be ignored in public and political spheres. More scientists need to step out and engage in the debate more vocally, he said. Doing so, he added, could rekindle more interest in the media, sparking renewed public interest. From his work studying major newspapers in Canada, Weaver feels that the Canadian media is interested in covering climate change, if only more people had the political will to make it a story. "So maybe a few more climate scientists will join me in actually taking public discourse into the political level, by actually running," he said. "After a certain point, complaining is just that — complaining. If you want to faciliate change, get involved in the process. I'd be delighted to see more of my colleagues stand up for what they believe in." Influence Communications' data seems to back him up. Coverage of environmental issues is higher in Canada and Quebec than the world average, although still lower than it was in 2005. What their data shows, Dumas said, is that climate change is becoming a background issue, like health care and education: issues that are always there, but don't necessarily grab headlines or create a buzz. Dumas says that this could be due in part to the dire warnings of climate scientists becoming a kind of broken record: people have heard the warnings so often, but do not feel they've seen events that meet the concern, so they don't pay much attention anymore. Likely complicating the issue is the lack of political leadership in major polluting countries like Canada and the U.S. Weaver said he recently saw this play out in a primary school classroom he visited. When talking with children about climate change, they all said they knew what it was, but they looked tired of it. "I asked them why they are sick of hearing about it," he said, "and they are sick of hearing about it because all it is is bad news, no one is talking about the solutions and no one is doing anything about it. So it leads to a sense of hopelessness." While wording it differently, study author Anderegg said he will be applying a similar concern to his future work, one that other climate scientists could apply as well. "It leaves me with a sense that we need to better connect our work with people. People see climate change impacts happening in their back yards," he says, pointing to his life growing up in a region of Colorado prone to wildfires, which have become more severe in recent years. "It's important to connect people to the issues around them." To start a new trend, climate scientists and advocates need to do a better job of connecting long-term and often abstract climate warnings to tangible impacts on people's day-to-day lives. The scientific and environmental communities also need to start holding political leaders to account when it comes to climate policy. Beyond that, there is a tangible need to bring solutions — a strong clean energy sector, improved public transit and city infrastructure, meaningful emissions regulations and the transition away from fossil fuels — into the foreground. Image Credit: Eric Parker via Flickr

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