Clark has BC behaving like a prostitute on Enbridge, only dickering over price

I wonder how many of you have come away from making a speech – perhaps the toast to the bride, being presented an award or perhaps just an after dinner speech and said to yourself, “damn … I should have said etc., etc.? I must admit that I’ve often felt that way and, even worse, I suppose, I’ve said to myself, what an idiot I was to say that!
 
In my recent blog on The Common Sense Canadian, I wrote about Premier Clark’s slow turnaround on the Enbridge pipeline case and in a moment I’ll tell you what I should have added.
 
The inadequacies of Clark’s leadership are exposed once more; she cannot bring herself to talk about the tanker traffic in the Inside Passage from Kitimat - or the close to 400 tankers a year through Vancouver harbour and the Salish Sea through the Straits of Juan de Fuca that would result from the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion. Clearly the tanker issue must be dealt with at the same time as Enbridge since, as the song says, “You can’t have one without the other.”
 
Clearly, Premier Clark just doesn’t have the courage to have a position on the issue as a whole.
 
It is not as if this was a complex issue. We know by Enbridge’s own admission that we will have spills from pipelines and common sense and statistics tell us that there will be tanker spills.
 
In the face of these certainties, Premier Clark is talking about insufficient financial benefits, on the assumption that money will compensate us for huge, ongoing tragedies over the 1,100 km of the pipeline and tanker spills – in short, our very soul is at stake and Clark is talking money.
 
Here comes the line I should have used…Premier Clark reminds me of the story where a man asks a lady if she will go to bed with him for $100,000 and she hems and haws, speaks of her needy children and, with apparent reluctance agrees.
 
The man then asks, “Will you then go to bed with me for $100?”
 
The lady is outraged and asks, “What do you think I am, a common prostitute?”
 
“We’ve already established that, ma’am,” says the man. “Now we’re dickering over the price.”
 
Thus the missing line: Premier Clark has declared British Columbia to be a common prostitute and is now ready to dicker.

Rafe Mair was a B.C. MLA 1975 to 1981, Minister of Environment from late 1978 through 1979. Since 1981 he has been a radio talk show host, and is recognized as one of B.C.'s pre-eminent journalists. This column originally appeared in the Common Sense Canadian. Reprinted with permission.