Why we're not hearing much from conservatives about Christy Clark's political 180

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      This morning, I went looking on the Internet for outrage from right wingers over the B.C. Liberals' apparent turn left.

      You know what? I couldn't find much.

      Normally, conservatives would be going berserk over promises to spend $1 billion on childcare, increase welfare spending, and free postsecondary tuition for kids coming out of government care.

      Sure, the B.C. Blue tweeter in Vernon, Dean Skoreyko, was raising objections.

      However, he was critical of the Clark Liberals before the election, so this is no surprise.

      Vancouver cartoonist and writer J.J. McCullough also sounded off a bit about the Clark flip-flop.

      But the big names in Canada's conservative movement have held their powder, even as Clark has pledged to double arts spending and boost legal aid funding by 25 percent.

      Right-wing rabble-rouser Ezra Levant has been preoccupied with Justin Trudeau, allegations about Bernie Sanders's wife, and other issues.

      Former Conservative MP James Moore and columnists Andrew Coyne and Jonathan Kay are more worked up about political correctness on Twitter than anything the B.C. Liberals are doing.

      One of the country's most ardent right-wing writers, Terence Corcoran, is flogging his favourite hobby horse, "junk science". In his mind this includes most of the research into climate change.

      There hasn't been a peep out of the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, which is a bastion of free-market zealotry.

      We can only conclude that as long as Clark backs the Kinder Morgan pipeline, she'll continue receiving a free pass from the Canadian right, no matter how many NDP promises she steals.

      The pipeline is that important to right wingers.

      It shows once again that the political axis in B.C. is shifting from a right-left dichotomy to the importance that people place on addressing greenhouse gases.

      The B.C. Liberals, the Fraser Institute, and most of Canada's media establishment don't view climate change as something requiring serious and immediate action.

      A significant segment of the urban and suburban voting public, on the other hand, has deep concerns about climate change and sees the Kinder Morgan pipeline as a threat to their beaches, waterways, and tourism-based economy. 

      As long as that divide remains, expect huge numbers of Metro Vancouver voters to continue tuning out the B.C. Liberals and their apologists in the national media.

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