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“It’s a tug and pull, it’s a push,” Horgan said at a joint new conference with Weaver recently. “Sometimes we’re on one side, sometimes we’re on the other. But that’s what life is about. I’m so proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, with some ups and downs, again we don’t hide from that. That’s just the way it goes.”

Weaver said he doesn’t have buyer’s remorse in choosing to support a new NDP government over the Liberals. Relegating the Liberals to opposition after 16 years in power was, he said, “the single best thing we did.”

Photo by B.C. Hydro / PNG

Still, in an interview, Weaver admitted that if he could do it all over again, he would have negotiated a tougher agreement with the NDP in one area: the Site C dam.

The $10.7-billion hydroelectric dam on the Peace River near Fort St. John was a marquee project for Clark’s Liberals. The Greens wanted it stopped. The NDP promised the Greens it would send Site C to an independent review by the B.C. Utilities Commission. Many people, including Weaver, felt the review was a way for the NDP to get the justification it needed to kill the project. Instead, Horgan in December stunned the Greens by announcing the dam would proceed.

“The Site C one is one that I think we could have in retrospect been a little stronger on,” said Weaver, adding he should have just made the cancellation of the dam an explicit part of the deal.

“We were led to believe, and I think the B.C. NDP will say this is true, that they needed the information on which to make the decision they wanted to make, and they needed the political cover from that information to make that decision. … So we felt, OK, the BCUC are going to give you this information and you can make the right decision. They made the wrong decision.