Children were conceived and born since the British Columbia legislature last convened.
Last time MLAs met, BC United was in opposition, the BC Conservatives were a duo, Joe Biden was confident of re-election, and Canucks’ JT Miller and Elias Pettersson were on acceptable speaking terms.
Makes sense, then, that Tuesday’s Speech from the Throne was a reflection replete with beginnings: new Lt.-Gov. Wendy Cocchia in the legislative house, with a new opposition party of the BC Conservatives, and a BC NDP government facing new, rather profound challenges we expect it to answer. (In case you wondered, BC United is gone, as is Miller, and Biden’s U.S. presidential successor is really what the ceremonial speech was about.)
None of us may have voted for U.S. President Donald Trump, but he is in our minds like an earworm and soon in our economy like a tapeworm. B.C. Premier David Eby, who couldn’t be much different than Trump unless he was one of Elon Musk’s foundlings on Mars, has a task on his hands that will either sink or sail his ship.
It has not helped that, even without Trump, Eby has captained his vessel into rough waters: with an inherited surplus turned into the country’s largest provincial deficit, an inherited housing crisis that he has not subdued, a bloated public sector, an investment problem, a per-capita GDP decline, and a per-capita income gap with neighbouring Washington state of (you’ll read this correctly) $40,000. That’s the shortened version.
And along has come a world leader Bhuddists and Taoists – and Vancouver’s Dr. Gabor Mate – would call a “hungry ghost” of insatiable desire suffering from unfulfilled cravings due to phenomenal greed arising in no small measure from existential emptiness.
What this little ol’ B.C. government wants to do is calm the raging storm before it washes us back out to sea in a leaky boat. To that end the throne speech was the first opportunity to fix the busted compass.
Cocchia, reading the words of Eby for the ceremonial address, warned about the swells of the waves, the headwinds and the unpredictability of the forecasts. Nothing was said about the crew.
What the speech provided was largely what we have heard in the last month: the shared history with the United States, how we have fought alongside (except in hockey games, it seems), how we work better together as a team (ditto), and how “our country is not for sale.”
Eby has had to acquire some new muscle groups in considering how to grow the economy and not just distribute its yield. It is fair to say that he has an emerging relationship – maybe even a dialogue instead of his famed monologue – with business. Labour and First Nations are already at that table, and Eby through Cocchia might have been talking about himself when the speech mentioned the need “to summon the courage to do things differently.”
The speech had wartime allusions of a province facing its “most consequential time” since the Second World War, of using references to Winston Churchill, D-Day and Nazism to characterize this fight “firmly and forcefully if required” against impending U.S. tariffs.
But it got a little carried away by claiming “the trust has been broken and will not easily be repaired” with America. He made the simplistic mistake of considering the U.S. a monolith, of forgetting that there are Blue States and not just Red States, and that many of Canada’s greatest allies are there – if a bit cowered when we could use them.
Throne speeches are never even close to specific, and this one didn’t digress.
His prosperity plan, if you can call it that, is to get some giddy-up to the lame horse of permitting, particularly in cleaner forms of energy. There were allusions to consumer legislation on credit card and phone costs, and health-care cheats. And there seems to be a concept to speed the pathways for students into some skilled jobs, but we’ll hear about all of this next month in a provincial budget.
As we move into this era of trading punches with our best customers, the speech notes, B.C. continues to have better trade with Washington state than neighbouring Alberta.
“This has to change, and change it will.”
And, naturally, we heard our own new earworm: “We will never become the 51st state.”
Nor, on the basis of what we heard, will the skipper make us a much more compelling province.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism.
