Imaginations are running wild in the legislature as politicians game out the implications of Premier David Eby’s bid to invent new powers for use during the U.S. tariff war.

His threat to levy new charges on Alaska-bound U.S. trucks transiting B.C., for instance, which the Economic Stability (Tariff Response) Act supports, spurred the opposition to picture the U.S. responding with something like the Marshall Plan. That was a post-World War II initiative where the U.S. supplied Western Europe with billions of dollars worth of goods to help its recovery and curb any tendencies toward communism.

The parallel is weak — keeping Walmarts in Anchorage stocked up is not the same as protecting a continent from Stalin. But the point the Conservative Party of B.C. was trying to make is that the U.S. could do an end run around any new provincial border toll.

As Prince George-North Cariboo MLA Sheldon Clare envisioned: “At the first sign of the premier obstructing the supply of essentials to the good people of Alaska… the U.S. would activate its considerable logistical arsenal - heavy cargo transports, helicopters,........

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