Category Archives: Canada

Mayors Approve Tax Hike to Fund Transit Improvements, Including Evergreen Line

Canada, Politics, Urban & Transport,
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Read this article from News 1130 on the historic vote by Metro Vancouver mayors to approve a package of minor tax increases to fund a package of transit solutions for the region, including the long-awaited Evergreen Line to the northeast corridor.

“Mayors approved the two-cents per litre gas tax hike, set to come in
April 2012, as well as a $23 property tax hike for 2013 if they can’t
find another additional funding source before then. Langley City Mayor Peter Fassbender, who voted in favour, says the plan isn’t perfect but it is a good first step. ‘For the first time in a number of years we see dedicated increase[s] in
hours, the rapid buses on Highway 1 when it opens, and improvements to
the major road network,’ he says. The vote was 81-34, weighted by population. The gas tax itself is
projected to bring in about $40 million, but they still need to find
another $30 million.”

http://www.news1130.com/news/local/article/286131–mayors-approve-two-cent-gas-tax-hike-to-pay-for-transit-plan

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BC Auditor General John Doyle

AG Slams BC Liberals’ Bogus Accounting, Massive Hidden Debt

Canada, Economics, Politics, WATER, Western Canada,
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Forward by Rafe Mair

We now know that the BC Campbell/Clark government has deceived the public hugely in their financial statements. Below is a blog from our expert independent economist, Erik Andersen. BC Auditor General John Doyle has exposed this deceit and Mr. Andersen sums it up thusly:

“This is serial lying and a practice regular financial institutions would be fined and/or go to jail for. In your personal life you would not tolerate receiving financial statements that are either deliberately incomplete or deliberately misleading.”

Mr. Andersen writes below, “The burning issue here is why should taxpayers expect or tolerate anything less from those who collect and disburse those taxes?”

Supporters of the Liberals continue to plead the case that the NDP government of 1991-2001 were horrible managers of our money and that they, the Campbell Government, being great managers of business, have put things right – so, they say, don’t let the NDP get in and ruin us ahead.

Erik Andersen is too polite a man to say it but I will: This is a goddamned lie, for the facts released by the Auditor General show that since the Liberals came to power they have tripled the provincial debt!

How have they been able to do that?

By hiding debt in Public-Private Partnerships, a system that both Premier Campbell and then-Finance Minister Colin Hansen – in a conflict of interest that takes the breath away – helped to manage and who received honours from these same private sector partner organizations. That amount plus the hidden costs of private power contracts has enabled the government to hide its debts in a manner that the Auditor General has roundly criticized.

It is of interest and importance that Erik Andersen has been talking about this and been in touch with the AG for several months on this and related issues.

Erik Andersen has no political ties whatever.

Now, over to Mr Andersen…

——————————————————————————————

For those in government responsible for causing the Auditor General to have to write his recent damning report, “Observations on Financial Reporting: Summary Financial Statement 2010/11”, it must be embarrassing. What he and his team have written is a documentation of deliberate acts by folks we think are working in the public’s interest and who even sometimes think they are entitled to bonuses and great pensions.

The following quotations from the full report have been selected to illustrate two conditions. First is that the government’s financial statements are deceits. Second is that these deceits are deliberate.

From his letter of transmission to the Speaker of the House, Bill Barisoff, the AG writes the following:

“This report explains why I had to qualify my opinion on government’s Summary Financial Statement, as well as why I removed two of the three qualifications that were in my prior year’s audit report, despite the fact that government has not corrected these errors.”

Just to not have the reader miss the point, “qualify my opinion” is a polite way of describing a condition that is quite unacceptable to a person with high professional standards – you know, the kind of person you want looking after your personal financial affairs.

From page 5 one can read the following remarks as to how matters financial came to be in such a sorry state in BC:

“My audit opinion for the 2010/11 fiscal year contains one audit reservation, indicating that the financial statements are not in compliance with Canadian generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). This is one of the three audit reservations that featured in my 2009/10 opinion.”

Mr. Doyle goes on to write, “Government had amended the Budget Transparency and Accountability Act (BTAA). The amendments set the stage for the B.C. government to depart from reporting its financial statements under Canadian GAAP. Recently government took the next step by amending the BTAA to change its future definition of GAAP for BC Hydro’s rate regulated balances, which are very significant. I remain very concerned that government is choosing to override the independent standard-setting process.”

So to rephrase, government has used its legislative power to redefine accounting standards to accommodate its deceit. The principal beneficiary of this accounting trickery is BC Hydro. I hope no one is prepared to suggest that by this deliberate act of deception the people of BC, who own and guarantee the debts of BC Hydro, are better off – because if there is such a person out there we all want to know of you.

On page 7, the “recommendations” to government are presented.

It starts off asking for honesty in disclosure of debts. Featured further on is a concern about contracts that need full disclosure.

Featured on page 15 is a discussion on the use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The AG points out that IFRS does not permit the use of rate-regulated accounting as has and is being done at BC Hydro. In fact the rate-regulated assets at BC Hydro in Mach 2011 totaled a breathtaking $2.160 billion! This account was zero as recently as 2005.

To put the cap on what is so horribly wrong with BC and BC Hydro’s finances, read page 17:

“As a result of this legislation, government has taken it upon itself to define GAAP, rather than following the standards set by the Canadian Accounting Standards Board. It concerns us that government is willing to override the due process that is involved in the setting of Canadian accounting standards, and instead legislate an accounting result that will have a significant effect on the financial statements of BC Hydro and the Province’s Summary Financial Statements.”

Our Auditor General has given us “smoking gun” evidence that proves our government is addicted to deception. What are you going to do about it?

Perhaps now folks will take seriously the representation that government has crafted a design to take BC Hydro private. How much more legislation needs to be presented as evidence in support of such an assertion before the media and public finally deal with what is so obviously occurring right under our noses?

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NDP Leadership Candidate Brian Topp Takes on Tar Sands, Loss of Local Jobs to Foreign Refineries

Canada, Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas, Politics, Tar Sands, ,
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Check out this must-read piece from the Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith on NDP federal leadership candidate Brian Topp’s critique of the Tar Sands and the woeful economics of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline – which would ship raw bitumen and jobs from Alberta to refineries in Texas.

“I think it is a fundamentally wrong economic choice and a wrong
environmental choice with enormous consequences on the streets of
Vancouver and all across the country…[Canada is] throwing a raw resource to somebody else’s industrial economy for them to get the value and the benefit from. We’re robbing our children of the value of this resource.” (September 29, 2011)

http://www.straight.com/article-472791/vancouver/ndp-candidate-targets-tarsands-economics

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A Warning From the People to Christy Clark

Canada, Energy and Resources, Pipelines and Supertankers, Politics, WATER, Western Canada, , ,
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This is not a threat – just a warning to both senior governments. Something is happening in this province that I’ve warned about for a couple of years – let me explain.
 
For years governments have brought in environmental policy, especially as it relates to fish, rivers, wildlife areas and the like which divides the environmental community.
 
In the fishing area, the federal government, in particular, has encouraged all manner of interest groups – some based upon geography, some on species of fish, some professional fishermen, some sports, and on it goes. Divide and rule.
 
With wildlife issues, it’s been much of the same approach.
 
Starting about five years ago something happened that I and others in the environmental field noticed and reported on – a great number of what I will call well-off people from West Vancouver who had fought to save Eagleridge Bluffs from the rape the tractors of the uncaring and stubborn Transportation minister, Kevin Falcon; who went en masse to Delta to help local people fight the desecration on their area, also by the same Transportation Minister who, incidentally, has complained that we’re not like China, which couldn’t care less about the environment and brooks no dissent.
 
The “better-off” communities getting seriously involved in environmental issues was demonstrated by the good citizens of Tsawwassen fighting the overhead power lines, a battle that again brought people from other communities into the ring. These were not the first times environmental groups have helped one another but it showed that environmental concerns had crossed, for want of a better word, “class” lines.
 
Then, Delta did the unbelievable – it voted in an independent MLA who defeated the Attorney-General of the province – didn’t you notice that, Premier?
 
The good folks in the Kootenays have risen as one against the Glacier-Howser private river power project and have made it plain that it just is not going to happen!

All around BC, people are rising against their political masters and saying, “No damned way.”

The BC government has seemed anxious to piss off as many citizens as they can, as their policies destroyed our salmon and traumatized our rivers. They clearly didn’t give a fiddler’s fart for our wilderness or farmland – our precious “Supernatural BC”, as Grace McCarthy aptly named it.
 
In my travels around the province doing speeches, I noticed people there I would not have expected. The mail I get is short on the old chants of days of yore and long on impatience with both senior governments – and they’re deadly serious about stopping them.
 
Now we have both senior governments in favour of pipelines across our wilderness, carrying Tar Sands sludge, called “bitumen” in polite society, and putting this highly toxic petrochemical into huge tankers to move it down the world’s most dangerous (and perhaps most beautiful) coastline.
 
Very early we’ve seen how the feds will fight – as dirty as the shit in their much loved pipelines. They have set up a federal panel review but, get this, you only have until next week to file your intention to attend but they’re not going to tell you when and where the hearings will be held until sometime in 2012! This is the sort of merry little trick the Private Power bastards work – hold the obligatory, fixed, in-advance hearing at as inconvenient a time as you can, in a place too small for the expected crowd and as far as possible from where most people live.
 
Now let’s issue the fair warning to both governments. Premier Photo-op and Prime Minister Harper – he who so nicely rewarded the worst polluter in BC history with the softest and most pleasant diplomatic post in the world – listen carefully!
 
The public of BC is no longer disputing amongst themselves. All of us now support one another, speak at each other’s gatherings and in every way possible, help each other fight our battles, shoulder to shoulder. We will no longer be divided and, to put it plainly – there’s going to be hell to pay.

Yes, there will be civil disobedience and lots of it if these pipelines are approved or there is one more river dammed. For example, with the Enbridge Pipeline, if the governments are sufficiently unfeeling and arrogant to proceed, there will be agro virtually every meter of the way.
 
It’s clear that BC First Nations, many of them hard-up, will be a huge part of the battle.
 
I might just add for Premier Clark: You’re toast unless you have a Damascus-like conversion – and I say that without a care about when you hold the next election. I also warn you that the polls you will get do not ask the right questions – I know because I’ve been questioned. You and your economic pals at the Fraser Institute are passé – you’ve disgraced yourselves from that deadly day in 2001 when you were elected, and unless there is a miraculous change, you will get your comeuppance on the next chance we have to send you back into radio, where you won’t have a government’s ass to kiss as before.
 
No one I know in the environmental movement wants trouble but that can’t and won’t stop us if you don’t stop ravaging our province. People now understand that pipelines and oil tankers are not risks at all but dead certainties.
 
You see, Premier, no one believes a single word you or the corporations say.
          
 

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Campbell/Clark’s $100 Billion in New Debt for BC!

Canada, Politics, WATER, Western Canada,
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Read this stunning piece from Gabriel Yiu in the Georgia Straight, exploding the myth of BC Liberal economic superiority. Learn how the Campbell/Clark government has secretly hidden over $100 Billion in long-term liabilities for the people of BC.

“The biggest deficits in BC’s history were recorded during the decade of the Liberals’ governance. On the debt front, the Liberals’ record is very scary. In 2011, the
traditional debt on the books is $53.4 billion—that is, an increase of
$19.6 billion in the years after they formed government. It’s 42 percent
higher than the NDP government’s debt increase in the 1990s. Nevertheless, behind the image of adroit fiscal management, the
Liberals have another ledger that they’re unwilling to account for. The
debt load in this ledger is a staggering $80.2 billion!” (Sept 25, 2011)

http://www.straight.com/article-470026/vancouver/gabriel-yiu-gordon-campbells-100billion-legacy

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Clark’s Answer to Deepening Debt: Pretend Shipping Tar Sands to China Means “Jobs” for BC

Canada, Energy and Resources, Fracking, Mining, Pipelines and Supertankers, Politics, Water and Hydrocarbons, Western Canada, , , , , ,
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Christy Clark, aka Premier Photo-Op, has a big mess on her hands – but, fear not, she’ll let us all muck about in it.
 
The government is in deepening debt and Ms. Clark can’t pretend that it’s a mystery how that came about. While there are many causes the principal one is that the government didn’t see the Recession coming and, when it came, went into denial. The budget of 2009 with which they proudly went to the polls was an utter and deliberate sham. Ditto the HST.
 
How is Clark going to deal with this?
 
Easy – Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
 
And where will those jobs come from?
 
In part from exports to China. Apparently Premier Clark hasn’t heard that China has its own Recession going, Big Time. Their banking system is essentially the government and only looks good on paper because the US owes them so much. Their mega-projects, especially the Three Gorges Dam, have become serious fiscal problems.
 
What is truly worrying is that Ms. Clark will try to create employment, preparatory to election time, on her own mega-projects such as the proposed Enbridge pipeline to Kitimat and the related tanker traffic down our treacherous coast. Environmental rules, such as they are, will become a chimera – a cynical gesture of contempt to citizens who put protection of our environment ahead of Ms. Clark’s election prospects. Fracking, the natural gas extraction which pollutes huge amounts of water, will be hugely encouraged.
 
The entire policy of the Campbell/Clark government will be to have in place a policy which she believes will mesmerize the public into believing that prosperity is just around the corner.
 
If the genie gave me but one wish it would be that everyone understands that pipelines and tanker traffic don’t pose risks but certainties. We must hammer this home as the corporations move into high gear with their high paid flacks to convince the public that they really do care about the environment. The fact is that they couldn’t care less about the environment or any social values. Oil spills are not seen for the ugly destruction they bring but merely the cost of doing business.
 
We environmentalists have to face facts – we haven’t the money to match the outputs of both government and industry. We must get down to basics – the issue is not money or jobs but the preservation of our very soul. We must care for our fish not because we fish but because when we lose them we lose a part of us. When we lose our wilderness we don’t do so just in some sort of abstract way but in the real sense that we, each and every one of us, have sustained a wound that will never go away.
 
There is no “safe” way you can construct and maintain pipelines or transfer oil on tankers. You can’t, in that most weasely of weasel words, “mitigate” the damage. We have to understand that from the moment you start the first pipe installation, the first step on the road to certain environmental devastation has been taken. When the first barrel of oil starts through the pipe, catastrophe has become merely a question of “when”.
 
The arguments we make are never met head-on. The answer will be, “aw hell, you don’t really believe those eco-freaks, do you?” “Jeez, this is the 21st century, sure we can do these things with little or no risk these days”, “Let those goddam tree huggers talk to the guys out of work”. “If you don’t move forward, you’ll end up going backwards”. There are plenty more one-liners.
 
There is no doubt that society must change; our ambitions must take into account a different society. For if we permit the destruction of our environment, what do we have left of the beautiful province we all love so much. The unemployed are not so because of environmentalists but because of a society that finds it easier to destroy than create.

While I do not let religion get in the way of rational debate, surely it’s utterly apropos to remember Jesus’s words, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

And, folks, it’s our soul that’s at stake here.

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NDP Challenging Campbell’s Order of BC

Canada, Politics, Western Canada
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Read this story from the Globe and Mail about the BC NDP’s decision to challenge the appointment of former BC Premier Gordon Campbell to the Order of BC, as a backlash grows to the recent announcement.

“Although a number of former politicians have received the order,
those still holding public office are ineligible for appointment,
according to the law that governs the process. Nominations closed
on March 12, just days before Mr. Campbell officially vacated his seat.
The appointment was announced on Sept. 3. ‘That strikes me as out of order,’ [NDP Deputy Leader John] Horgan said.” (Sept 6, 2011)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/new-democrats-challenge-campbells-appointment-to-order-of-british-columbia/article2155616/

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Petition to Rescind Gordon Campbell’s Order of BC

Canada, Politics, Western Canada
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Check out this new online petition to rescind Gordon Campbell’s Order of BC.

“How is it possible that Gordon Campbell, ex-Premier of BC, even be
nominated to receive the 2011 Order of BC, never mind be chosen as a
recipient? According to the Government of BC’s own Order of BC website, nominations
for the 2011 awards closed March 10, 2011, and ‘your nominee must not
currently be an elected person with federal, provincial or municipal
governments’. Gordon Campbell did not step down as MLA, clearing the way for Christy
Clark to run in his riding of Vancouver-Point Gray, until March 14th.
Thus, at the close of nominations he was ‘currently an elected person’.” (Sept. 4, 2011)

Read and sign petition here: http://www.petitiononlinecanada.com/petition/gordon-campbell-is-ineligible-to-receive-the-2011-order-of-bc/309

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Vancouver City Councillor and Former Hydro Engineer George Chow Questions “Smart” Meters

Canada, Politics, WATER, Western Canada, , ,
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Read this story form the Georgia Straight on Vancouver City Councillor and former BC Hydro engineer George Chow’s criticism of the Province’s “smart” meter program.

“The two-term Vision Vancouver councillor suggests that the installation
of these wireless digital devices may result in consumers being charged
more when they use energy during peak hours…’I mean, you come home from work, you have to cook, you get up in the
morning, you have to cook, so the demand side of this so-called
management in order to save energy, I think, is quite questionable,’
Chow told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. (Sept 2, 2011)

http://www.straight.com/article-444131/vancouver/chow-questions-hydro-smartmeter-program

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Nebraska Governor Calls on Obama Administration to Reject Keystone XL

Canada, Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas, Politics, Tar Sands, , ,
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Read this report from USA today on Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman’s call for President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to reject the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands to refineries on the US Gulf Coast.

“Heineman said he supports pipeline projects but
opposes the proposed TransCanada’s Keystone XL route that would cross
the vast Ogallala aquifer. In a letter to
Obama and Clinton, the Republican governor said he was concerned about
the potential threat to the crucial water source for Nebraska’s farmers
and ranchers.” (Sept 1, 2011)

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2011-08-31/Neb-governor-urges-Obama-to-deny-pipeline-permit/50204660/1?fb_ref=.Tl-MPJ7D1VY.like&fb_source=profile_oneline

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