Parting Words

Earlier this week Melanie Mark announced in the legislature that she is leaving her job as a provincial NDP MLA, but she did not officially resign. Resignation of sitting MLAs is effective immediately and requires a particular wording, or protocol, if you will, and like NDP Premier John Horgan, who departed similarly, it was likely planned that way. In fact, I'm sure it was planned that way. As in the corporate world, politics is entirely planned, lest someone say something wrong and the opposition pounce on you, rip you to shreds for the benefit of the media, who convey such horrors in the name of news.

Before this latest announcement, Melanie Mark resigned from her position as the Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport shortly after the NDP's announcement of a $789M redevelopment of the Royal B.C Museum was attacked by the opposition Liberal government for being "tone deaf." Never mind that maintaining an existing museum that has for years promoted the reduction if not the erasure of Indigenous peoples is in itself a tone deaf gesture, the Liberals' version of tone deafness applies not to the symbolic but to the economic (housing, health care, disaster relief, etc.), that aspect of civilization that those on the "right" claim they know more about than those they dismiss as "socialists".

The new Royal B.C. Museum was to be outgoing Premier Horgan's legacy monument, with Mark its inaugural greeter. Yet what was an understandably welcome idea in the years between the Truth & Reconciliation Call to Action and COVID was off the mark in 2022, and the way it was handled by the Horgan era NDP government left Mark unprotected. In that sense, her most recent description of the legislature as a "torture chamber" is apt.

Though Mark did thank Horgan (twice) for her time in office, it's who she didn't thank that leads one to wonder about the extent of her ordeal. It's always easy to blame the opposition in these situations, and she did, but surely there are those in her own party who let her down, not to mention those in the civil service, some of whom have been holding power longer than any sitting MLA. Will Mark, like former Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Reybould, write a book about her life and her time in public office? I expect so. Mark's story is not uncommon. Book buyers today consume grief like they once did Horror and Romance.

For more on the Royal B.C. Museum, click here for a February 9, 2023 "Future of the Royal B.C. Museum Dialogue".