The Burnaby NOW has named Terry Beech, the city’s newest MP, as our newsmaker of the year. Beech rode into NDP-dominated Burnaby on a Liberal wave that swept the nation, changing the face of Burnaby politics and the city’s connection to Ottawa.
Things have been rather quiet since Beech took office in Burnaby North-Seymour, the city’s newest riding. He’s been acclimatizing to the role, setting up in Ottawa and learning the ropes.
But Beech is no stranger to politics. In fact, he was elected to Nanaimo’s city council in 1999, at age 18, making him the youngest British Columbian to be elected as a city councillor at the time. Beech has working class roots and practical business and academic experience. He’s young, he’s driven and he’s eager to get to work.
That said, municipal and federal politics are worlds apart. The feds uses the whip system, where MPs who don’t toe the party line are punished.
This creates two types of politicians. The first (and most common) impose their party’s policies on their riding, sometimes against the wishes of the electorate and sometimes at great risk of losing the next election.
Then there are the mavericks, the Svend Robinsons. They can be a strong voice in Ottawa, even when their constituents’ desires conflict with party plans, but they often pay the price.
We’ll be keeping our eyes on Beech to see what kind of role he chooses, and there’s no better issue to illustrate this than the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Will he be the ambitious type, who follows party orders while climbing the Liberal ladder to a more prominent post? Or will he take local residents’ concerns about the pipeline to the powerful elite in Ottawa? And what happens if the Liberals back the pipeline? Will Beech try to sell it to the naysayers, or will he represent their concerns in Parliament?
We’ll also be watching how his party handles the NEB review process. The Liberals promised to toughen environmental standards, and both Beech and Trudeau indicated the pipeline application wouldn’t proceed as planned. But does that mean the Trans Mountain expansion is dead in the water? We doubt it. We’ll probably see is some kind of enhanced review, where Kinder Morgan has more hoops to jump through, and the NEB will likely approve the project with an extensive list of conditions, as was the case with Enbridge.
