It’s the B.C. Day long weekend once again.

We can thank B.C.’s New Democrats, whose then-Surrey MLA, Ernie Hall, introduced the private member’s bill 43 years ago to establish that annual holiday.

Dave Barrett’s NDP government supported the bill, which was given royal assent on June 5, 1974. B.C. was the last province in Canada to get a monthly holiday in August.

Hall’s bill passed with all-party support, albeit with the usual partisan jabs from the likes of Socred MLA Don (“Leather lungs”) Phillips. He joked “there should be another section in this bill which, on this day, would give all British Columbians the freedom they had before the socialists moved in, in September of 1972."

What goes around, comes around, and here we are again, with a new NDP government in power.

For most British Columbians, this weekend will be a time to whoop it up. It all kicks off on Friday (August 4), when Christy Clark officially resigns her post as B.C. Liberal leader.

New Democrats, Greens, and even B.C. Liberals all have new reason to celebrate.

John Horgan’s NDP government has new breathing room, with an unexpected new two-seat majority that should ensure it remains in office for several years, possibly until the fall of 2021.

Andrew Weaver’s B.C. Green party also has new cause for optimism. The referendum on proportional representation should now proceed as planned, with less chance of being derailed. The Greens will also have more desperately needed time to replenish their campaign coffers, perhaps supported by some new form of public financing.

As for the B.C. Liberals, they won’t have to face another election with their now wholly discredited leader at the helm.

Clark’s “unforced” exit gives them a new lease on life. The leadership race also gives them new licence to vent their frustrations and to disavow the clone speech that all of their elected members so proudly supported, committing political hara-kari in the process.

In short, for every party, it’s party time.

On Saturday night, New Democrats already have a ready-made event to celebrate their good fortune with a bang.

What better way to rejoice than by watching Canada’s Royal Pyrotechnie team close out the Honda Celebration of Light? Should work for the Greens, too, if they can overlook the associated carbon emissions.

But what about the Liberals?

How might they embrace the moment, to move beyond their failings, and party like there’s no tomorrow? Because there won’t be, if they continue to wallow in the muck of their own undoing.

So far, the Liberals’ silence has been deafening.

Cheers of silence, as it were, from Clark’s ecstatic detractors, whose eyes belied their mouths at their Penticton caucus meeting and quietly screamed, “for godsake, just GO already—don’t make us say it, Christy!”

I know the look. I saw it in many of those same individuals’ eyes, as they previously pledged their fealty to Gordon Campbell in the summer of 2010, only a few short weeks before they started burning up the phone lines to plot his forced departure.

Sometimes words mean the opposite of body language and what is left unsaid. I suspect that was the case in Penticton to her subsequent bombshell announcement. It directly contradicted her earlier repeated pledges to carry on as opposition leader, as it also blindsided her rapidly dwindling coterie of devout supporters and political staffers.

Hence the embarrassingly tiny smattering of B.C. Liberal MLAs and usual suspects who have deigned to sing Clark’s praises and publicly thank her for all she did for them—and to their party.

The latter overwhelms, and it’s devastating.

What Clark did to that party’s brand and reputation in her final weeks in office will take many years to repair. Far from being down or depressed by her decision to resign, you can bet that most Liberals are overjoyed and raring to rip loose.

How to pay homage to B.C.’s all-time queen of big bashes, as the Province’s Mike Smyth so aptly described?

How to do justice to her legacy, forever defined as it also was, by the aborted "Om the Bridge” debacle? Yogagate was not her finest moment, but it was an apt inspiration for a party worthy of her leadership.

I’m thinking…Toga on the Bridge, maybe?

Images of Animal House spring to mind. The movie that conjures the party that she ran amuk, which now exists as a fraternity of outcasts who only want a party that’s fun again.

Forget the crocodile tears. I’m picturing Rich Coleman as John Belushi’s "Bluto" Blutarsky character. Or maybe Mike de Jong. Toga! Toga! Are you feeling it?

Hell, who would begrudge shutting down the Port Mann Bridge for a few hours, to let Surrey’s most beloved Conservative, Dianne Watts, kick-start her Liberal leadership campaign?

Can’t think of a better place for a party, given the significance of that bridge that Gordon Campbell built and that Kevin Falcon tolled, which played such a large role in Christy Clark’s political undoing.

Then again, perhaps they could have a toga party on Kelowna’s toll-free William R. Bennett bridge. It’s another gift to British Columbia from Campbell and Falcon. It might be a perfect place for the latter to throw his hat into the leadership ring, just in time for B.C. Day.

Or how about Toga in the Tunnel? Specifically, the Massey tunnel.

Perhaps Richmond-Queensborough MLA Jas Johal might think that was a great place for a Liberal party, given that Clark’s cherished new toll bridge will likely now never see the light of day.

I mean, just about all of the most prominent Liberals have gone deep underground anyway. Ever since Clark’s disastrous trip to the lieutenant-governor’s, they have been virtually invisible.

Sure, there are lots of Liberals who are likely thinking about going for the brass ring, which now looks so horribly tarnished.

The speculation is rampant: Andrew Wilkinson, Todd Stone, Sam Sullivan, Mike Bernier, Mike de Jong. They’re also on the who’s who list.

If the Liberals are smart, they will choose someone who hasn’t been sullied by association with the Clark government.

That would rule out all of those possible contenders, with the exception of Watts, who is nevertheless burdened by her past connection to so many of Clark’s “backroom boys”.

Some have speculated about past “stars” in the Campbell government, like Carole Taylor and, ahem, Gary Collins. Give your head a shake.

I can’t imagine that either of them would ever want to invite the scrutiny and risks that a leadership campaign entails, for very different reasons.

So, party on, Team Coleman. Go out and drown your sorrows, as you try to come to grip with the hard reality that you have seen the enemy, and it is you.

Reading between the lines, I think your former leader finally figured that out, too. In her last press conference, Clark said this about her MLAs:

“You know, six years of looking these guys in the eye, I knew it was time for me to go…I knew it. You can just tell… They were grieving, not being in government anymore. And they were having trouble moving on. And what they need is they need a leadership campaign to refresh and energize and get everybody thinking about what’s next.”

Translation: they knew that it was way past time for her to go and they were having trouble moving on because she hadn’t already moved on.

What they wanted was the leadership campaign that she should have facilitated as soon as it was clear that she was not going to form the government.

Clark said that she knew “in her heart” that it was time to go after the results came in on election night, on May 9. She said she considered resigning, but decided not to, after being unanimously asked by her caucus to stay on as leader.

She said “the night the lieutenant-governor decided not to call an election I was going to go out and [announce] that I was going to step down, but I was persuaded not to do that. And it was the right thing to do because it would have just been chaos for the party. There’s a good time to go and a bad time to go and that would have been a bad time to go.

“And a leader should know when it’s her time to leave. I just don’t admire people who hang on because they believe they are irreplaceable. Because nobody is irreplaceable.”

Spare me.

Fact is, as a leader, Clark fundamentally did not know when it was her time to leave.

Indeed, theBreaker's Bob Mackin's exclusive inside account of how Clark's last caucus meeting really went down makes a mockery of her version of that pivotal event.

She did hang on even when she knew in her heart it was time to go, driven as she was to do absolutely anything she could think of to hang onto power and keep her job. She had no compunctions about selling out her party’s principles, policies, and values, with a throne speech that stood for so much of all she railed against in the campaign.

It was her decision to stay on and to table a throne speech that made a laughing stock of both her and her government that created “chaos for the party”.

It was her misreading of the Green party and her desperate and dishonest statements that proved she had no genuine interest in working cooperatively with the other parties to form a stable government and to keep the speaker’s office free of controversy.

It was her bungling of her constitutional responsibility as a premier, in failing to properly advise the lieutenant-governor of what was clearly in the province’s best interests, that made Clark’s own survival as party leader so much less politically tenable.

For Clark, the “good time to go” would have been before—not after—the opposition leader’s office was filled with new staffers. She should have allowed her interim successor to make those picks, well before the rest of the political staffers were sent packing.

In retrospect, the best time to go probably would have been sometime shortly after the Yogagate fiasco. By then it was already clear that her LNG pipe dream was just that—a sham that would hurt her party in the next election.

By then, it was already clear as well that she herself was also out of gas, a power-monger in search of a reason to govern, with no compelling agenda.

It was Clark’s lack of vision, her lack of any driving argument for continuing to lead the province, and her increasingly transparent failures of leadership that all argued for her to go back then, while she still had a shred of credibility.

Trouble is, she wasn’t honest with British Columbians on so many issues and in so many ways. She rapidly wore out her welcome after her “miracle win” in 2013.

That campaign was run and won on a lie, from start to finish, just as Clark’s painfully ridiculous fall from power over the last three months was unhinged from the truth, which she apparently sensed on election night.

C’est la vie. It’s all over now but the shouting, so happy to say.

The only thing yet left to discover is when Clark will resign as an MLA.

Assuming she actually keeps that commitment, it will be a ready seat for an outsider like Watts or perhaps some other person to fill, if the party wisely goes that route.

Ben Stewart resigned his seat in 2013 for Clark, after she was defeated in her own seat in that election by David Eby. Apparently, Stewart is contemplating another run to regain his old job.

Not smart, for him or for the Liberals.

The longer Clark delays her resignation as an MLA, the longer her party has before the six-month clock starts ticking on Horgan to hold a by-election. Given the extra seat that vacancy gives his government in the legislature, he will wait as long as possible to do call the vote.

We know that under the party constitution rules, the Liberals will have to choose their new leader by the end of February. So the effective date that Clark chooses to resign her seat is material to that leadership vote date, especially if the new leader is not already in the legislature.

Westside-Kelowna is as safe a seat for the Liberals as just about any seat in the province. Neither the NDP nor the Greens stand a prayer of winning that by-election, especially if the Liberals have parachuted their new leader into the riding, as they did with Clark.

If Clark really wants to stick it to her would-be leadership contenders from caucus, and also help her party, she could opt not to resign her seat until the House reconvenes. Which today we learned will happen on September 8.

That would give her party potentially another month’s planning room, to take the likely date for the by-election to early March—after the leadership vote. It would also give Clark an extra month’s pay for doing nothing. Just saying.

Then again, something tells me that Clark’s surprise resignation was not entirely an act of love and mercy.

The way she did it struck me more as a petulant and grudging response to an air of stifled hostility in caucus than the merciful gesture should intimated. My guess is, she will go sooner rather than later, as her last press conference seemed to suggest.

Either way, her decision to quit before she was fired is a happy day for B.C. It will make this B.C. Day weekend all the more memorable and enjoyable for people of all political persuasions.

Time to paint the town orange, green, or even red, as is your want and way.

Time to celebrate the new future that awaits us all in British Columbia, led by a progressive new GreeNDP alliance that promises to do a lot of good that is long overdue.

It’s party time, B.C. Should be fun.