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VICTORIA — When NDP activists first saw the headline this week, they couldn’t believe their good fortune.

“Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson pans speculation tax at West Vancouver yacht club chat,” reported the North Shore News Thursday atop a report on his speech to the local chamber of commerce.

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An Opposition leader who the populist-led New Democrats have framed as an elitist. Who played into the stereotype with a comment on the “wacky fun” of renting, which he later had to repudiate.

Now he chooses to deliver a speech on the admittedly half-baked speculation tax at the yacht club in West Vancouver of all places?

“Surprisingly, this isn’t satire written by me,” wrote Jeffrey Ferrier, a self-styled “progressive” and one of several who posted the story on Twitter.

“Wow,” returned Global TV correspondent Keith Baldrey, himself a columnist in the North Shore News. “Does no one do advance work for the Libs any more? A yacht club — especially the West Van one — is the last place a politician with an elitist image problem should go anywhere near.”