$100-MILLION MAN — Premier John Horgan has a favourite origin story that describes his conversion to the camp of proportional representation enthusiasts.
He’s repeatedly cited his first term as an opposition MLA, when he says he spent four years offering useful suggestions to the government, bringing up his own ideas and those from constituents.
“And I got zero response from the government.” They had 100 per cent of the power, so they “had the ability to say that my views didn’t matter and my constituents’ views didn’t matter…”
So after that futile, barren, empty stretch, he became an ardent fan of electoral reform.
But B.C. Liberals say he’s overstating how useless he was, to an extraordinarily bashful degree.
They’ve tallied how much the Liberal government poured into his riding over 16 years in power (it was held by a Liberal for the first four, then by Horgan for 12) and arrived at a total that suggests the current system doesn’t make an opposition MLA as useless as Horgan says it does.
They say his riding got $105 million, including $54 million for a new Belmont Secondary School. They’ve been reading a list of spending in his riding into the record to disprove his theory about the existing voting system’s drawbacks, even though it builds up his reputation as an effective MLA.
TUNNEL PLUMBERS — Everybody knows plumbers are expensive. Liberal MLA Jas Johal said it’s the NDP government’s fault. They’ve been under fire in Metro Vancouver’s southern suburbs for the long, leisurely review of whether the new bridge the B.C. Liberals started to replace the Massey Tunnel is really needed.
Johal said a plumbing company in his riding has a policy that proves the review is a waste of time. When the company gets a call south of the Fraser River, “they send two plumbers. Not because the job requires it but because with two plumbers they can at least use the HOV lane to get through the tunnel. That’s how badly things have deteriorated.”
THE CATCH — The ultimate achievement in copy-editing was noted in the legislature this week, a catch that rivals Willie Mays’ legendary snag in the 1954 World Series.
A miscellaneous statutes amendment bill that corrects minor typos and errors in existing laws includes a change to an assessment authority law. The date “Dec. 3l” is changed to “Dec. 31.”
It’s imperceptible on many computer fonts, but somebody noticed that the original date was “Dec. 3 [lowercase L]” when it should have been “Dec. 3 [numeral one].”
B.C. Green Leader Andrew Weaver was amazed. “There’s just no way you could tell that. I have no idea, because they are identical, how somebody was able to find that.”
He said the official who discovered the slip, which has been on the books for decades, needs a pay raise “because this is just unbelievable, the level of accuracy.”
