Rugby game revealed who would govern B.C. in 2017. What about in 2024?

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It was a picture that told a thousand words back in the spring of 2017.

The B.C. election on May 9 that year had ended in a dead heat, leaving voters with no idea what their next provincial government would look like.

Then a photo, taken on May 28, showed NDP Leader John Horgan and Green Leader Andrew Weaver sporting big smiles while sitting together at a rugby game in Langford.

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Both Horgan and then-Liberal Premier Christy Clark had been courting Weaver, whose Greens had won three seats in the legislature — just the number each of the other parties needed to form a government after the election ended with no clear victor.

“There was that famous picture, which I recall seeing and getting a real punch-in-the-gut feeling, of John Horgan and Andrew Weaver at the game,” recalled Stephen Smart, Clark’s press secretary at the time.

Clark hadn’t been invited to the rugby match — a bad sign for the Liberals that the Greens were more interested in a political marriage with the NDP, Smart said.

Weaver chuckled when asked this week about the picture, remembering it was snapped shortly before the public found out that the Greens had inked a deal to allow Horgan to form the government.

“That was the night before the announcement that we had signed the confidence and supply agreement. So, yes, Stephen Smart was absolutely right,” Weaver said. “The writing was on the wall at that stage.”

Until Weaver threw that lifeline to the NDP, there was no clear path for either Clark or Horgan to form government. Neither party collected a majority of seats in the 2017 contest.

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The situation has nearly repeated itself in 2024.

Premier David Eby’s NDP are leading or elected in 46 seats, John Rustad’s Conservatives’ are leading or elected in 45, and the Green party has won two ridings. A party must have at least 47 seats to form a majority government.

By late Monday, recounts are to be completed in two close ridings and 65,000 mail-in and absentee ballots should be tallied, although many experts don’t anticipate the seat counts to change.

Eby said this week he had reached out to the Greens, but the party is “not ready yet” to discuss some type of co-operation in the legislature.

Rustad told Global TV that although his party and the Greens had many differences in their platforms, there were some issues they could work on together, but did not say what they were.

The two parties are far apart on issues such as drug decriminalization, supervised consumption sites, fossil fuel development, the carbon tax, health privatization and LBGTQ+ curriculum materials in schools.

Furstenau said Wednesday that Rustad had phoned her, but she didn’t pick up the call. “I didn’t recognize the phone number.”

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When asked whether she would consider a deal with Rustad, she answered that she is concerned about inappropriate statements made by some Conservative candidates and about the party’s stand on climate change. She said Rustad needs to show leadership by addressing those issues.

Furstenau, who remains Green leader despite losing her seat, did speak with Eby on Wednesday, but revealed no other details.

Finding a resolution soon is important to British Columbians who need a functioning government to address their key concerns: affordable housing, cost of living, health care and public safety.

Will there be another aha! moment in the coming days that will reveal who will become the next premier and which parties will share power?

Can the next minority government, however it is structured, successfully pass legislation to start solving problems raised by voters during the campaign?

The answers may depend on the personalities at the negotiating tables, at a time when politics in B.C. is even more divided, say experts interviewed for this story.

“This time it seems like the polarization around some of the issues that the Greens care about is a little more stark,” said Mike McDonald, Clark’s former chief of staff.

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McDonald was part of the team that tried, but failed, to woo the Greens in 2017 on behalf of the Liberals, the party that had been in power for 16 years. Since then, the party rebranded as B.C. United and later withdrew from the 2024 election to avoid a centre-right vote split with the Conservatives.

“From a B.C. Liberal perspective, I think we thought we had a shot at making something work with (the Greens). This time, it appears from the outset that the Greens have less alignment with the Conservatives than they might have had with the B.C. Liberals seven years ago,” he said.

But the Greens may be “scarred” by Horgan prematurely ending their agreement in 2020 to call an early election, and be hesitant to enter such an arrangement again, McDonald said.

However, assuming the Greens do not want to trigger another election right away, they may agree to an informal deal to support the NDP on an issue-by-issue basis.

That could allow Eby to govern, as Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper did from 2006 to 2011 — leading two minority governments with cobbled-together backing from opposition parties, McDonald said.

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Geoff Meggs, who was in the opposite camp from McDonald in 2017, agreed the NDP and Greens could work together again, but that any new deal may be less structured and more ad hoc.

“It would probably look quite different than what we had last time,” said Meggs, who was Horgan’s chief of staff.

There was enough alignment between the parties in 2017 on health care, child care, Indigenous rights and other issues, Meggs said. This time, Eby’s NDP and Furstenau’s Greens may not pursue a formal agreement because of differences on the carbon tax, drug policy, involuntary care, LNG and old-growth logging, Meggs said.

Eby’s biggest challenge, should he hang onto his job, may be how he responds to the lessons learned on election night, Meggs said.

“That’s going to be important in terms of who he puts on the front bench, how he decides to structure a legislative agenda.”

The Green party will enter any negotiations in a different position than it was in seven years ago. Weaver held on to his riding in 2017, but Furstenau just lost her seat and her two MLAs have no experience in Victoria, said political strategist Norman Spector.

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Spector, who was at the 2017 negotiating table as an adviser to the Greens, recalls the NDP being far more eager to strike a deal, while the Liberal team was “stone-faced” and unwilling to make concessions. He added that Furstenau, then one of Weaver’s two Green colleagues, had also made it clear she was opposed to any type of deal with the Liberals.

Spector is not advising the Greens this time, but he thinks Furstenau should entertain offers from both Eby and Rustad, predicting the neophyte Conservatives will be hungrier to make a deal than Clark’s Liberals were.

The Greens could maintain some independence, and possibly exert more power this time, if they commit only to support the NDP on their first confidence vote in the legislature, in return for certain pieces of legislation that are important to the party, such as housing and health care, Spector said.

“If they’re really smart, the Greens will just say, ‘Well, all we’re prepared to offer anybody is one vote in return for X, Y, Z.”

The precedent for that type of arrangement, he said, is former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s successful “gentleman’s understanding” with the federal NDP to support his minority government in 1972.

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In the short-term, Eby remains the premier and Eby’s ministers maintain their portfolios, even the ones who lost their seats, such as Education Minister Rachna Singh, said Philippe Lagassé, an associate professor of international affairs at Carleton University and an expert on how governments work.

They are in “caretaker” mode, but there if an emergency arises that needs addressing, Lagassé said.

That will change in the coming days or weeks, of course, but how it changes depends on a series of questions that are not yet answered.

• Eby, as the current premier, gets the first crack to convince the lieutenant-governor that he can form a government, but he’ll need some type of agreement — either formal or informal — with the Greens to make that happen. And what trade-offs would Furstenau expect in return?

• What will happen in the two NDP seats under recount, Surrey City Centre and Juan de Fuca-Malahat, where the margins of victory were less than 100 votes? If the NDP holds on to the seats, and gets the backing of the two Greens, it would give them 48 people on their side — just enough to appoint one of those MLAs as speaker and still maintain a razor-thin majority of 47 votes.

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• If the NDP loses one seat but still strikes a deal with the Greens, their combined seats equal 47 and it leaves no extra person to appoint as speaker. This tenuous scenario could trigger an early election, observers say.

• If the Conservatives manage to steal both seats under recount, it gives that party a bare-bones majority with 47 seats. But they would also struggle to appoint a speaker and Furstenau has not signalled she’d be willing to support the Conservatives.

In 2017, Liberal MLA Darryl Plecas crossed the floor to be Horgan’s speaker, a huge boost to the NDP-Green government.

Opinions are mixed on whether that could happen again.

It’s possible, Lagassé said, that a newly elected Conservative, maybe one who won his or her riding by a narrow margin and doesn’t relish the thought of another election, might be convinced by an NDP-Green government to take the speaker job, which comes with more pay and perks.

“Stranger things have happened,” he said. “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Such a move, though, can be toxic for relationships in the legislature, Lagassé said, noting the situation in Ottawa where the federal Conservatives have repeatedly attacked Speaker Greg Fergus, accusing him of being too partisan.

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McDonald said it is unlikely Rustad would allow one of his Conservatives to consider the speaker job, because he was a member of the Liberal caucus when it was blindsided by Plecas’s decision.

“They’ll be wise to it this time,” he said.

It was Meggs’s colleagues who persuaded Plecas to jump ship, but he is equally skeptical a newly elected B.C. United-turned-Conservative MLA would entertain such a move this year.

“Having managed to step off a sinking Titanic and get onto a life raft and paddle to shore, to now say, ‘Actually, I’m going to do the biggest favour I could possibly do for the NDP,’ is kind of a career-limiting move,” Meggs said.

While many speculate an informal arrangement between the NDP and Greens is the most likely outcome, Lagassé said a structured deal like the 2017 one would bring more stability to the legislature.

Otherwise, the next premier runs the risk of becoming another Joe Clark, whose tenure as prime minister was brief after his minority Conservative government ended in 1979 when he failed to get enough votes to pass his first budget.

Given the polarized climate in B.C., whatever deal is made to form the next government may not be as cohesive as the 2017 pact, which lasted three years, Lagassé said.

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“I think there’s still a heightened risk that the legislature won’t last as long.”

Lagassé also wouldn’t rule out the formation of a coalition government, if the Greens merge with one of the other parties in exchange for a Green MLA being in cabinet.

Furstenau wouldn’t comment Wednesday on whether she’d push for one of her colleagues in cabinet. She said she was focused only on supporting the two new Green MLAs, and declined to say what issues her party could pursue with the NDP or Conservatives to find common ground.

Eby has spoken with both new Green MLAs, Jeremy Valeriote and Rob Botterell, and said Tuesday he looked forward to working with them.

Rustad, on CBC Radio earlier this week, said he hopes the results of the recounts and the mail-in ballots will propel his party into a majority.

“Should we still be in a minority situation, we will be looking and working with other MLAs, Green party or others, to look at an opportunity to be able to govern in this province,” he added.

Should voters fear this uncertainty, that a minority government won’t get anything done to address their pressing issues, such as being unable to find a family doctor or to afford groceries?

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Weaver said the NDP and Greens did work collaboratively during the 2017-2020 minority government to pass significant legislation, such as CleanBC to address climate change and putting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into law. These were important to Weaver, even if the Greens were rarely recognized for their impact on these bills.

“You can sleep well at night knowing that lots of good stuff happened, even though the Greens may not have actually got any credit for it,” he said.

The secret to working effectively with the NDP, he said, was finding similarities in his Green platform and Horgan’s platform, and having the government focus on those issues.

He’s skeptical, though, that could be repeated as successfully today with Eby and Furstenau as the leaders.

“John (Horgan) and I are very similar people, and it was almost natural that we were able to work together. I’m not sure Sonia and David are very similar people.”

A good start in 2024, he said, would be for the two Green MLAs to have input on Eby’s throne speech and to agree to pass it, allowing the government to temporarily continue while they figure out their new jobs and what legislation to pursue with the NDP, Weaver said.

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While it appears the Greens have more in common with the NDP, they might not be willing “to sign over a blank cheque” like they did in 2017, said Smart.

While not involved in this year’s negotiations, Smart argued the Conservatives’ platform was wide-ranging enough that the Greens could find some shared areas of interest.

Ultimately, he said, these negotiations often come down to the personal relationships between people at the table.

“The Greens are going to have to decide who it is they can work with, who they think will keep their word for the whole term of the agreement, and how they can best achieve at least parts of their agenda,” Smart said.

Reaching a pact with the Greens would not be the end of the hard work for the next governing party. Carrying out the 2017 deal involved almost daily sessions between NDP and Green staff, frequent meetings between political leaders, and the public service consulting and negotiating with the Greens on all proposed legislation, said Meggs.

“It required a secretariat of three people just to manage the meeting schedule and the delivery of the right obligations to the Greens,” he said.

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“It required full participation of everybody — from the premier and Andrew Weaver down through to people in the ministries.

“(The Greens’) very small caucus and staff team were overrun by the time requirements of being engaged across the whole spectrum of government.”

Regardless of who forms the next government, support from the Greens may not be required to pass every piece of legislation — if it’s something the NDP and Conservatives can agree on, said McDonald.

During the NDP minority government, it was the opposition Liberals, rather than the Greens, who backed the Horgan government to proceed with an LNG project.

Rustad, though, signalled on election night that he didn’t want to work with the NDP, but to bring down a future Eby government, and force a new election. But that sentiment could change, McDonald said, for an issue that is important to the Conservative voter base.

Should Rustad emerge as premier, one of his biggest challenges will be to corral his group of mostly inexperienced MLAs, who range from true-blue conservatives to more centrist former B.C. United members.

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This was the hurdle faced by Gordon Wilson in 1991, who took the Liberal party from zero to 17 seats but then had to get his MLAs to learn how to work together, McDonald said.

Both the NDP and Conservative leaders will have to keep all members of their caucuses happy, since neither party has any MLAs they can afford to alienate. That may impact any deals either of them try to make with each other or the Greens.

“If each of those respective caucuses flex their muscles with leadership, you know that will have to be factored in as to what any arrangements are made,” McDonald said.

Those arrangements, and frankly the makeup of the next provincial government, are in the hands of Furstenau and her Green team.

She said “meaningful conversations” will start after all the recounts and outstanding ballots are tallied. And, she added, she possesses special knowledge about the talks that will unfold over the coming days.

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to be the only person involved in these negotiations that was involved in the negotiations seven years ago. And I bring seven years of experience in the legislature of working across party lines,” she said, “and that’s what I will be bringing to the work ahead of us.”

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With files from Alec Lazenby and Vaughn Palmer

lculbert@postmedia.com

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