Former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt supported Mike Farnworth, right, during the NDP’s 2011 leadership battle, then endorsed NDP leader Adrian Dix in the final stages of the election campaign in May 2013. He’s now on the party sidelines and calls Dix’s Kinder Morgan flip-flop - which he supported at the time - an ‘astonishingly stupid decision.’ Photograph by: DARRYL DYCK , THE CANADIAN PRESS

VICTORIA — The eve of the last provincial election brought an intervention by former premier Mike Harcourt, who issued a last-minute endorsement of New Democratic Party leader Adrian Dix and his mid-campaign flip-flop on the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

“Adrian Dix is the right choice for B.C. at this very important time,” Harcourt declared in an opinion piece published in The Vancouver Sun the day before the May 14 election. “He is a strong and intelligent leader who will tackle the difficult issues facing our province thoughtfully and with purpose.”

“I’ve known Adrian Dix a long time,” he continued, “and I know Adrian Dix to be a strong leader who will make a great premier.”

This being a full-service endorsement, Harcourt also lined up behind his man on the most controversial move of the campaign: the Dix decision to abandon the NDP’s carefully crafted wait-and-see stance on the proposed twinning of the Kinder Morgan oil pipeline and come out against the project without consulting his own members.

“Only Adrian Dix has had the principle to stand up and say our coastlines are too important to put at risk with a nine-fold increase in tanker traffic,” said Harcourt, echoing Dix’s own rationale for the reversal.

Harcourt also disagreed that Dix had committed a gaffe by changing position in mid-campaign. “That’s not the issue,” he told host Bill Good on radio station CKNW. “The issue is, is this a good idea for an inner-city port in Vancouver, and the answer is no ... putting a major oil export port there is, I think, a bad idea and you might as well let people know where you stand on that sooner rather than later.”

Harcourt, to be sure, was speaking as a former NDP premier and party leader. Still the endorsement was noteworthy because he’d been seen as a bit of a fence-sitter on Dix’s suitability for high office.

In the 2011 leadership race won by Dix, Harcourt supported the more moderate Mike Farnworth for the top job, endorsing him with a line — “if you go left, you get left out” — that was readily interpreted as a swipe at hardliner Dix.

But with voting day approaching in 2013, Harcourt was galvanized into action by the prospect of a rising vote for the Greens, working against NDP chances in key ridings.

“I know that there are many British Columbians who share my values, but who are still thinking about how to vote,” wrote Harcourt. “By voting for any party other than the NDP, in an election where every seat counts, they may be electing another B.C. Liberal government. On May 14, let’s come together and vote for Adrian Dix and the B.C. NDP.”

Looking back on that campaign a year later, Harcourt has revised his estimate of the party he once led, of Dix the leader, and the stance he took on Kinder Morgan.

“Coming out against Kinder Morgan just finally did it for me,” Harcourt told reporter Ian Bailey for the Globe and Mail this week. “I thought that was just stupid and unnecessary.” Elsewhere in the interview he downgraded Dix’s switch to an “astonishingly stupid decision.”