Alexander Brown: Little fires, everywhere
It can no longer be all quiet on the Western Front from a Conservative Party of British Columbia in transition.
On weeks like this, when smoke blankets the sky and the bone-dry land beneath British Columbians’ feet has been pitched into further uncertainty through more dodgy land deals struck behind closed doors (this time in Victoria’s idyllic Inner Harbour), it can no longer be all quiet on the Western Front from a B.C. Conservative Party in transition.
Let us not forget that at a time of Ottawa and Victoria’s supposed and expressed interest in a kind of pseudo-economic recovery, David Eby has repeatedly and explicitly blamed our ecological footprints and oil and gas for the increasing scale of disaster seasons, noting that the ‘ferocity of the fires’ and ‘historic nature of the forest fires’ are ‘without a doubt . . . clearly linked to human-caused climate change’. And he has stated that recent federal concessions to Alberta’s oil interests amounted to rewarding ‘bad behaviour’.
Never mind that firebugs or human negligence are responsible for as many as 60 percent of British Columbia’s fires annually; the political world abhors a communications vacuum as much as nature abhors dry Okanagan timber, meaning these are the weeks when the Findlay administration must shift out of second gear to project sensibility and security in the face of natural disasters, while defending the province’s delicate social license against a resurgent NDP mud-hut encroachment.
After months of messaging omnipresence leading into May’s leadership result, it’s been an undeniably inauspicious period for a group short on goodwill, culminating in the unpopular pushing out of Executive Director Angelo Isidorou and Managing Director Phil Dippenaar to end July.
