Voters in
the BC electoral riding of Port Moody-Coquitlam were unlucky, putting me in a
bind: the victorious New Democratic Party candidate and incumbent, Rick Glumac, has a relatively
low profile; the BC Liberal, James Robertson, served with the Special Forces in
Afghanistan (not my favourite occupation); and, the candidate for the Greens,
John Latimer, failed to show up for the debate.
Still, I
refused to vote NDP (though I never voted otherwise, provincially), because Premier
John Horgan had a monopoly on everyone’s goodwill despite their minority government,
and he took advantage of it in the most opportunistic fashion, with an unnecessary election, in the middle of
a pandemic when our minds were – and are - clearly elsewhere. Who knows what
else our Premier might monopolize now that he has his majority? (Full
disclosure: both Horgan and I attended Trent University in Ontario as
undergraduates, both in History, though he was one year ahead of me. I don’t
recall ever meeting him).
So what was
done with my vote? I still remember newly-minted
Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau’s performance at the provincial debate: for
the most part poetic and sometimes moving, she issued a challenge to British
Columbians to return us to a minority legislature. I took her message to heart and voted BC
Liberal for the first time. My advice to any wannabe’s is: if you put your name before the electorate, you gotta show up for the debate!
Perhaps, in
hindsight, I could have shown more appreciation for the Green Party’s own predicament. After all, Furstenau had been on the job for
one whole week. This is where Democracy Watch comes in: it has teamed up
with Integrity BC to challenge in court Horgan’s NDP for making an “illegal”
election call. What really is the point
of having fixed election dates if the government does not abide by them? And the Premier in his eagerness to sweep the vote was most unfair to the Greens, thus contributing to the paucity of my
choice. In effect, Horgan’s NDP revealed itself as not very democratic, and
nothing new.
