Premier John Horgan has taken up his new post, and the cabinet he named Tuesday gives British Columbians some hints of what lies ahead. We already had the NDP platform and Horgan’s written agreement with the Green Party to set out the party’s priorities, but his cabinet picks tell us who is going to do the heavy lifting in turning those priorities into action.
With much of the Interior on fire, the Site C dam decision looming and promises to keep about stopping the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, the new government starts out with a daunting agenda. And after 16 years in opposition, the party has no recent experience of governing.
As expected, Horgan put together a cabinet that reflects the diversity of the province and is gender-balanced, with 11 men and 11 women. A strong contingent of Islanders is among them.
Lana Popham is agriculture minister, Rob Fleming gets education, Scott Fraser has Indigenous relations and reconciliation, and Claire Trevena is minister of transportation and infrastructure. Horgan, of course, represents Langford-Juan de Fuca, and former NDP leader Carole James, the MLA for Victoria-Beacon Hill, is minister of finance and deputy premier.
Next to Horgan, James has the portfolio that will be scrutinized most carefully, because everything revolves around money. Where the government gets its money and where it spends that money will likely determine the success or failure of the NDP’s program. And its prospects in the next election.
After so many years in opposition, the party has big plans, and the Greens, on whom it relies for a majority, have even more. Paying for things such as the promised $10-a-day daycare will not be easy — or it will be too easy, if the party embraces big deficits.
The B.C. Liberals have long and successfully painted previous NDP governments as wild spenders who racked up big deficits, even though the Liberals themselves have sent the accumulated debt through the roof. If the new government burns through the $2.5-billion surplus bequeathed to it by former finance minister Mike de Jong and goes back into deficit, it will hand the Liberals a cudgel they will use with pleasure.
James will sit down at the cabinet table with colleagues who are eager to advance a progressive agenda. If Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Judy Darcy, for instance, is to make any headway on those two issues, she will need a lot of money.
An effective finance minister has to say no — firmly and often. Can James do that in the face of the pressures from cabinet and caucus? Will Horgan back her up when she says no?
Does Horgan even want her to say no? Spending into deficit might be the instinctive wish of the caucus — not because they like deficits, but because they consider the whole matter of financial discipline a threat to progressive policies and a dark art imported from Wall Street.
Many who voted for the NDP and Greens likely share that perspective. They and many other British Columbians will be looking less at the money than at the effectiveness of the programs the money is spent on.
One message that all the parties seemed to take from the election results was that voters believed the Liberal government was so hung up on balancing the budget that it ignored the needs and wishes of ordinary people. Former premier Christy Clark had a last-minute conversion to that outlook, and tried to save her minority government by adopting many NDP and Green platform planks.
She failed, and now Horgan and his cabinet have their chance to turn those promises into reality.
