Category Archives: Western Canada

Horgan’s right on Kinder Morgan, even if he got Site C wrong

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On Kinder Morgan, John Horgan is standing up for British Columbians — as he should (BCNDP/Flickr)

Dear Premier Horgan,

I’m still mad at you for carrying on with Site C Dam, based on the utterly bogus reasons you offered the public. But when it comes to Kinder Morgan, I’ve got your back, because you clearly have mine — along with all British Columbians determined to protect our precious air, land, and water in what we are proud to call Super, Natural BC. You’re on the right track — stay the course.

I’m proud of the well-reasoned, principled stance you’ve taken in the face of unconscionable bullying and bluster from your Alberta counterpart, Rachel Notley, and our Prime Minister.

As you’ve stated, the Royal Society, a preeminent collective of Canadian scientists, has identified significant knowledge gaps with regards to how diluted bitumen behaves when it’s spilled into our environment. You’ve said that until we get answers to these questions we should not be expanding the flow of this gunk through our waters. I agree.

Some have accused you of using this issue to delay the project — I don’t believe that, but even if I did, that wouldn’t change my opinion. For reasons of climate, ecology, Indigenous rights, and protecting BC’s economy, this pipeline should not be built, period.

I’ve read lots of comments on stories about this bizarre Alberta-led “Trade War” calling you and Rachel both children. There are two children in this fiasco — one’s name is Rachel and the other’s Justin. You are not among them.

When Little Rachel doesn’t get her way, she indulges in petulant retaliation, like depriving her own citizens of delicious BC wines, making idle threats and pouty faces. When Justin feels disrespected by the very people he’s running roughshod over, he throws temper tantrums — “Aw, come on! Really? Really!” He turns into a playground bully. As I’m sure you know, John, the last thing you do with bullies is give into them.

New BC Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson dog-piled on you today, saying “Premier John Horgan has decided to pick a fight with Alberta that is probably going to lead to a constitutional challenge and in which British Columbia will probably lose in the courts.” How is this your fault, John? For listening to science when no other leader seems interested? For standing up for the people who elected you? For refusing to be cowed into submission? No, you’re doing your job, as you should.

Rachel picked this fight and Justin’s egging her on. Andrew doesn’t seem to understand the people he is now seeking to lead. We’re not going to roll over and allow ourselves to become the doormat for Asia-bound heavy oil that threatens our economy and environment while further destroying our planet’s climate — all while getting nothing in return (unless he counts 50 jobs at the new Kinder Morgan terminal). Why on earth would we ever do that?

It is unfortunate that Rachel made BC’s winemakers innocent victims of her retaliation. Thankfully many British Columbians are pulling up their socks to make them whole. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to drink all those nicely balanced Chardonnays and full-bodied, complex Cab-Savs — and we British Columbians, with our newfound friends in Quebec, are up to the task. Sooner or later, Rachel’s own citizens — some of whom actually own vineyards in BC or whose establishments depend on BC wines — will get fed up with this futile campaign.

Will this end up in the courts? Who knows. Justin maintains a Texas pipeline company’s project, designed to benefit big oil companies who continue cutting local jobs while keeping profits to their shareholders and foreign owners, is in the “National Interest.” John, you and I know that’s a load of hooey and proving it in court, in order to invoke Sections 91 and 92 of our constitution, is a far bigger challenge than Justin would care to admit.

We also both know there is far more to this story — like the Indigenous rights Justin (and you) have pledged to respect. The courts haven’t yet had their say on that matter. Then there are the moral and political calculations at hand. Justin needs BC’s 17 Liberal seats far more than he does his 4 in Alberta. He’s carefully cultivated a youthful, Sunny Ways brand in the eyes of local and international media. How does that square with calling in jackbooted RCMP or soldiers to stomp all over First Nations grandmothers, youth, decent British Columbians — all captured on social media for the world to see?

Rachel’s on the way out — anyone can see that this is merely a desperate last-ditch ploy for her to cling to power. But for you and Justin, how you carry yourselves on this file could have a decisive impact on your reelection. Your position is politically wise. You have much ground to make up from your disastrous Site C decision. This won’t fix that problem (what would fix it is reversing that call — it’s not too late). But it helps.

Justin, on the other hand, has now painted himself into a corner. It’s hard for him to walk back these strong declarations he and his government have made about getting the pipeline built. Yet it’s impossible for him to carry on this logical fallacy that we can’t meet his climate goals or protect the coast from oil spills without building another pipeline and exporting more oil! Moreover, with these heavy-handed tactics against BC citizens and First Nations, he stands to smear his own brand with Tar Sands goop and lose a lot of key seats in BC.

Justin needs to decide between the oil lobbyists who have clearly captured his government and his own political future.

As for your political future, John, that’s an open question, but it can only benefit from staying the course on Kinder Morgan. Rachel and Justin will keep bullying you. The Old Media pundits and business lobbyists will push you to question yourself. Right-wing British Columbians who would never in a million years vote for you anyway will slag you on social media. Pay no mind.

The rest of us are raising a glass of the Okanagan’s finest in your name.

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Rafe: Christy, Libs let off hook for ruining Hydro, ICBC, failing on LNG

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Christy Clark and Rich Coleman (center) meeting with Malaysian LNG officials in 2014 (BC Govt photo)

I have a bit of a knack for remembering doggerel as part of my brain’s principal function as a storehouse of useless information. Ergo this:

[quote]You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God, the British Journalist.
Considering what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.[/quote]

It seems that this applies equally to our political writers with the odd, very odd exception, right here in Lotusland.

In 1986, Bill Bennett retired after 10 years as premier through some tough economic times with the province in good shape financially. He had managed public money carefully, been a builder with the odd overrun which were laughably tiny compared to those since, especially the whoppers of the Campbell/Clark bunch, and he gave us Expo 86, for which the boo-birds predicted a catastrophe but which turned out to be a huge win that’s still paying off. In a very careful move, he demurred on Site C after a referral to the BC Utilities Commission and even though in those days there was not the prospect of backup from alternative sources, there are, in fast growing terms, today. Yet many people bid Bennett goodbye with a shout of “good riddance”.

Liberals’ ruinous legacy

Christy Clark leaves government after playing a major role in an immense increase of the BC public debt. BC Hydro, once the jewel in BC’s crowns has been guided into virtual bankruptcy during good times, despite lots of customers all able to pay, no disaster like a burst dam, while ruining scores of rivers let out to private companies, charging Hydro triple the market price. These independent power producers (IPPs), by an amazing coincidence, poured money into the BC Liberal Party.

Ms. Clark leaves us with Site C, a $10 billion (at least) ad-on to the already bankrupt BC Hydro, a project for which there is no domestic need (filling that happens to be BCH’s mandate) and no customers, unless the  LNG mirage becomes a reality in time to take the power and convert it into massive atmospheric pollution and climate destruction.

ICBC is a hard company to lose money on given it has a virtual monopoly on car insurance, but it’s in deep trouble because of holding rates down to buy votes and pocketing a cool half a billion dollars as a dividend to government. This is an accounting masterpiece invented by the Campbell/Clark wizards, where you cure huge losses in Crown Corps like Hydro and ICBC by pilfering huge sums from their already deeply indebted treasuries. As The Tyee reports, “Last November, ICBC admitted that it would require the equivalent of a cumulative 117 per cent increase in basic insurance revenue to keep its capital reserves from falling below the government’s regulatory minimum levels.”

Then we have the huge bonanza brought to you by Christy Clark and the brains of the outfit, Rich Coleman, and with a roll of the drums I give you BC’s majestic LNG industry. The Christy and Rich Show kept up an almost never-ending sales extravaganza round and round the world selling LNG we didn’t have to countries that didn’t need it at prices they couldn’t afford. But prosperity was right around the corner said Christy who won the 2013 election because voters accepted her solemn promise of multiple new LNG plants, 100,000 jobs and enough money to fill a $100-billion prosperity fund to erase B.C.’s debt and lower taxes.

Surely Christy and The Brains didn’t lie to us, did they?

BC Premier Christy Clark touring Petronas’ operations in Malaysia (BC Govt / Flickr CC licence)

I’ll answer that question. Writer after writer, scientist after scientist, every international economist you can think of said that this was all nonsense. Mind you, to get this bitter truth you had to read The Common Sense Canadian or The Tyee, not the government organs of Postmedia. It was sheer drivel, yet the more Clark was told this, the more she and The Brains jumped into the 1st Class section and visited their valuable contacts in Asia – the ones not in jail – and got more assurances of even more sales. Somehow, at the end of the day, the multiple new plants came to ZERO, the 100,000 jobs came to NONE and, golly gee whiz, that $100 billion Prosperity Fund fell just $100 billion short.

But, in fairness to Christy, maybe the government overspent on health, education, welfare, help to children, assistance to women in distress, the homeless, the mentally ill, and those of our fellow citizens in distress who needed our help.

No, I can’t tease on this issue because this government was far and away the cruelest in modern history to those in need. I, for one, am ashamed – good God, if this is how we treat those in need during prosperous times, what will happen when the inevitable recession or depression comes?

As I close, I must comment that one well-known journalist, who ought to know better, lauds the government for 5 straight “balanced budgets”. What a crock of barnyard droppings. It’s not hard to balance your budgets if you get to leave all the bad stuff “off budget”. I am surprised that anyone would believe that bullshit from Finance Minister DeJong, much less an award-winning political journalist.

Now my question: Given the record above, which is scarcely complete, and given that one of the obligations of high office is a reasonable proximity to truthfulness, why in the name of God are you singing the praises of a woman who has driven the province into a huge financial mess, destroyed money-making public companies, spent millions flogging a product we didn’t have to people who didn’t want it while lying through her teeth at every turn, and let down the very neediest of our fellow citizens? Didn’t you do harm enough by failing in your duty to hold her to account while she was in office?

I hate to say it but my brand of journalism was both honest and accurate when I summed up her leave-taking in two words: Good riddance.

*********************************************************************

A short note on Gordon Wilson who just got canned from his ill-gotten sinecure flogging LNG, with singular lack of success after being vehemently opposed to the stuff until he needed the money.

From 1987-93 Wilson led the BC Liberals and surprised all by taking them from zero seats to Official Opposition in 1991. He badly mishandled his relationship with his House Leader, whom he married, and politically it was all downhill after that as he formed a new party after Gordon Campbell took the Liberal leadership away from him, moved over to the NDP for a cabinet post in the disastrous Dosanjh Government, and lost his seat in 2001. In 2013 Wilson completed the circle by becoming a right-winger again, supported Clark and, after she won, he became an LNG salesman.

I remember through all this a very courageous Gordon Wilson.

Wilson became Liberal Leader at the same time as the Meech Lake Accord. In spite of serious opposition from influential backbencher David Mitchell and other prominent Liberals, Wilson opposed Meech Lake and gave hearty and welcome support to Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells. At the same time, I was vigorously opposing Meech on my morning show on CKNW.

Wilson brought Premier Wells on my show where he became almost a regular and gained enormous popularity. By 1990, Meech was dead, Wells was, under duress, switching sides and we were into the Charlottetown Accord. In spite of losing his Newfoundland ally, Gordon Wilson stayed the course and supplied much assistance to me on my show.

I can’t help but remember Wilson’s fall from grace but I know what courage it took for him to stand by his convictions too. Luck, raw luck, has a lot to do with the seminal events of life. When I, as a cabinet minister, had an affair of the heart, such things were considered to be private matters and ignored. When I went hugely broke, was desperate and probably would have taken any job that came my way, I met CKNW’s John Plul at a party and a few days later was hired by CKNW, leading to a 19 year career, a Michener Award and the Hall of Fame. All just plain good luck. Similar circumstances, but Gordon Wilson didn’t have my luck.

It makes you think a bit when you assess what others do when they’re in a jam and makes it easier and appropriate to say “good luck” Gordon, good things could happen, for, as Margaret Thatcher, in one of her wiser moments, once said, “It’s a funny old world.”

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Rafe to Horgan: Get Serious about Kinder Morgan, Woodfibre LNG

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John Horgan being sworn in as Premier, with Environment Minister George Heyman looking on (Photo: Flickr/Province of British Columbia)

Dear Premier Horgan,

My congratulations to you and your new government. I can tell you that a great many British Columbians who do not usually support your party voted for you on May 9 last with the same feelings as Dr. Johnson ascribed to second marriages – a triumph of hope over experience.

I realize that over the past few years I have not been flavour of the month for either you or Dr. Andrew Weaver but I know that you would think even less of me if I allowed that to bother me. It doesn’t.

Until the Liberals came to power, it was not customary for the mainstream media to shower governments with praise. I intend to practice my profession the traditional way – the way I was treated when when I was in government.

Allow me a short anecdote, Premier. In 1975, during the Dave Barrett NDP years, I was the nominated candidate for the Social Credit Party for Kamloops. Each evening I would faithfully read the late Sun Columnist, Marjorie Nichols, chortling with glee as she regularly kicked hell out Barrett. Night after night I listened, enjoying every syllable. On December 11, I won a seat in the general election and on the 22nd, was sworn into cabinet. It wasn’t long before Marjorie, good old Marjorie, was kicking hell out of Bill Bennett! Then me! What the devil had caused her to change?

Well, she hadn’t – it was the government that changed!

M.r Premier, I have two points today. The first is on LNG – you seem to have a blind spot about Woodfibre LNG proposed for Squamish.

Do you not know Howe Sound, Premier? Allow me to introduce you to some of my neighbours in Howe Sound, my backyard.

Next to the beautiful Chinook Salmon, or Spring as we used to call them, those are Orca, commonly called Killer Whales, which abounded in Howe Sound when I was a young boy in the 30s, along with humpback whales, seals, porpoise, dolphin, all 7 species of Pacific salmon native to BC – and herring.

They all gradually disappeared from much of Howe Sound, largely due to industrial development. Some 20 years ago, the government, with massive involvement of ordinary people, went to work and began cleaning up the old pulp mill site in Squamish and the mine site at Britannia. Slowly but steadily nature healed and our friends were all back. Surely you have a soul, Mr Premier, and can understand what this means. Well, the biologists tell us that with an LNG facility in Squamish, with their discharges and tankers, we’ll almost certainly lose it all again.

Do you know, Premier, that the environmental process held for Woodfibre LNG was as phoney as Confederate money, having been conducted, so to speak, by the National Energy Board in hearings so roundly criticized by Prime Minister Trudeau, who now relies upon them?

Did you know, Mr. Premier, that Howe Sound is too narrow for LNG Tanker traffic by world standards, US EPA standards and – get this, Mr. Horgan – by the standards of SIGTTO, the Society of International Gas Tanker and Terminal Operators (the Industry’s own organization) and that the Federal Liberal government hasn’t taken this into account? You are our premier, Mr. Horgan, and Howe Sound, the most southern fjord in Canada, an internationally renowned beauty spot, is on the brink of ruin by the LNG industry, and you are on record as supporting Woodfibre LNG!

Why, Premier, in the name of God, why?

Now I turn to the Kinder Morgan pipeline, over which both you and your Attorney-General David Eby were dressed down by Justin Trudeau and you hung your heads like naughty schoolboys. I can’t speak for others, Mr. Premier, but I watched conference after conference attended by Premier Bill Bennett with Justin’s father – twice the man – time and time again standing up to him and for British Columbia. I have little doubt that Dave Barrett would have done likewise. You cringe because if, as you first suggested, BC works to rule, thereby delaying provincial permits for Kinder Morgan, BC will be sued.

I hate to mention this because he is a fine man, lawyer, accomplished author, teacher, civil rights advocate and activist – all accomplishments I admire and indeed he’s a man I admire – but David Eby is not a British Columbian of sufficient length to have all the assets, especially the animal life of Howe Sound and the Salish Sea, engrained in his psyche as is necessary for a BC warrior to be prepared to go to the wall for this province.

A man who has the commitment I’m talking about is Grand Chief Stewart Philip, President of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs; others include Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who is personally prepared to go to jail; a man like Mayor Derek Corrigan of Burnaby; Vicki Huntington, former MLA; Kai Nagata, communications director for the Dogwood Initiative; Vancouver City Councillor Adriane Carr; but more than this, Premier, while your Central Canada-loyal Attorney-General is quaking in his boots because someone might sue us, for using the obvious “work-to-rule” tactic of delaying provincial approvals, you’ve also chickened out.

For God’s sake, Mr. Horgan, thousands of British Columbians are prepared to go to jail while you and the Attorney-General, leaders of the party of protest, heirs to the men and women of the people whose names you still mention in hushed terms of reverence, are afraid that if you stand up for our sacred environment, that nasty man Trudeau Minor or big, bad Kinder Morgan might sue us!

Do you think that real British Columbians ready to risk going to jail are going to be pushed around by a coward from Ottawa, propped by the oil industry, just as you apparently are?

Time is short, Mr. Horgan, and I suggest that you and the Kid from Kitchener, David Eby, look in the mirror at two politicians prepared to sell out their province, so that the Tar Sands can hum away, polluting the earth’s atmosphere and so Justin will be nice to you as he goes back to chasing old Tory seats in Alberta.

If Kinder Morgan happens on your watch, do you think voters will forgive you because some lawsuits were threatened? I tell you plain, Premier, it won’t be a mere 16 years next time if Kinder Morgan is forced on British Columbians who marched and went to jail while the quislings in Victoria skulked in their offices and sent obsequious emails to Kinder Morgan and Justin.

Yes, Mr Horgan, l’ll stand up to Ottawa for British Columbia. So, I suspect will most British Columbians. And what are you going to do when Ottawa shoves another environmental catastrophe under your nose and says, “Here, Premier Pussycat, sign or by golly you’ll be sued?”

Not a very good start, Mr. Horgan, not a good start at all.

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Rafe to NDP: Now you’re the government…here’s what to expect that you’re not expecting

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NDP Premier John Horgan and his cabinet being sworn in by Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon (Photo: Province of BC / Flickr)

In politics, speculation is half the fun – the other half is figuring out how, with all your experience in the field, you could have been so bloody wrong.

Actually, for the new minister, the reasons he or she is usually wrong are predictable as hell to a guy like me – not because I’m smart, but because I was there once myself. I went into my new Ministry office back on December 22, 1975, full of piss and vinegar, not to mention urgent plans. After all, I had 3 1/2 years of mismanagement to clean up and there’s no time to start like right now.

Well, yes, there is, you quickly find out from your Deputy Minister, because there are several decisions to make first. Not that they’re earth-shattering, just that not making them means you’re going to be pestered until you do. You need a good parking spot, preferably better than Vander Zalm’s, a key to your private loo lost by your predecessor, and clear instructions on how to replenish your liquor cabinet.

This turns out to be a good thing because you quickly learn that you need to take a bit longer getting acquainted, but it will have to wait a few days because, at the Premier’s request – well, not really a request – you’re flying out to Ottawa that afternoon with two colleagues to meet federal counterparts to straighten out an issue that the Premier pledged to clean up personally the moment he was sworn in.

When you get back to your office four days later, you discover that priorities you were going to deal with up front will have to come even later because you have a cabinet meeting you’re already late for and, afterwards, your deputy has arranged for you to tour your offices, show the flag, and meet the people who work for you. Cabinet runs late and you’re off to meet the 120 pissed off employees that didn’t leave at quitting time. Welcome to government, Mr. Minister.

A sticky problem

Former Minister and friend, Dr. Tom Perry and I were talking about this not long ago and agreed that if you’re lucky, you run into a sticky, double-headed problem right off the bat because it re-occurs with nauseating frequency and best you get used to it and have some practice dealing with it. I’ll make up an example because it’s just the kind that happened to me and, later, Tom.

A rancher is irate and won’t leave your office. Once a year he must drive his cattle over a faraway piece of unused land but the Agricultural Land Commission won’t permit it. Exceptions are routinely made in cases like this, so my Deputy Minister tells me, but they won’t budge. He is sure that a nudge from me will get the job done.

Then, prepare a suitable letter and I’ll sign it, I say. “Minister,” my deputy replies, “the trouble is he’s a regional director of the opposition party, hated by your party, and we know that if you do him a favour he’s going to raise hell with your party for doing him, the enemy, a favour you were under no obligation to do. Your cabinet colleagues will shun you, your constituency president will give you hell, and the Land Commission members will badly lose face and accuse you of usurping their sworn jurisdiction.” Shit!

The other scenario is exactly the same except the rancher is a bagman for your party, is the premier’s wife’s second cousin, and the Opposition is just waiting to pounce, big time! Shit!

If you don’t think this happens, you’ve never been in politics.

Out to get you

Actually, we’re all in for a huge adjustment and we should get ready – a good, stiff, single malt whiskey should do it.

Are you ready?

The Postmedia papers, the Sun and the Province, will have columnists, editorial writers, the editor of the Op-Ed page, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the Fraser Institute on high alert to pour it on this pack of Reds now running things and, at the suggestion of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, there will be a new feature in the Sun called “Oil and the Sun for everyone”. Resource Works – the BC LNG booster – will have a feature in the Province, their formal partners, called “Hey, hee, golly gee, LNG is good for ye, hotter weather for me and thee!”

Phil Hochstein will have a feature called  “Breaking the Union for Sun and Fun”, but Jimmy Pattison, having killed all the salmon, in a public display of contrition, will set up a benevolent society called Jimmy Pattison Pals in Poverty for fishermen, last place car salesmen and talk show hosts he’s known.

The biggest change will come in the media, of course, where the Masthead of the Vancouver Sun will holler, “Hating Horrible Horgan helps keep the climate crummy and casts comforting kisses to Coleman and Christy.”

The last big change may come when Damien sees this and puts his own masthead saying “Rafe’s Ready for Retirement”. [Publisher’s Note: You’re not getting off that easy, Rafe]

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Rafe: Liberal Opposition will make life very difficult for NDP-Greens

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BC Liberal MLAs in the Legislature (Province of BC / Flickr)

I wish John Horgan and his new government well. He has his work cut out for him.

There has been a load of pollyannish bullshit spouted by the media about what will and what will not happen to his shaky government when it finally gets going. And that’s my first note. As soon as the LG called upon him to form a government, Mr. Horgan should have done so. After his time watching his colleagues in opposition, surely be could have have presented a Council to Her Honour in 24 hours.

Is the answer to the delay perhaps that this matter had not yet been settled with Dr. Weaver? That’s an unnerving thought and raises the first worry wart. Just what is the arrangement?

The Deal with Weaver

NDP Leader John Horgan and Green Leader Andrew Weaver sealing their pact (Photo: @jjhorgan/Twitter)

I must confess that I thought he’d get a cabinet post but that would really have necessitated a coalition government and neither party is prepared for that.

So, what does Weaver get? A right to approve/disapprove selections? That, I should think, would be too much, but just the right to be consulted? That would be mighty thin gruel.

Horgan not only must run a government but must appear to the voters to be doing so and if he has to raise his hand and get permission to go to the loo, he will hardly look like a man in charge. But at the same time Weaver has to show his little pack that he really matters in the process of governance or else, who needs him?

The words “politician” and “prickly” are synonyms and both Horgan and Weaver have egos that at this point vastly exceed their accomplishments They are required by the circumstances to like each other yet apparently don’t, and are partners, senior and junior, as curators of a nest of adders.

It is bound to be interesting.

Opposition can make life difficult

I’ve seen no media analyses of the main problem Horgan faces because they’ve never been there. Even media with experience watching and reporting have never lived in the monkey house.  Indeed, neither really has Horgan, but being Opposition leader should have prepared him for a legislature of high tension. And this one should be a lulu.

I have no idea what tactics the Liberals in opposition will use and they probably won’t know themselves until their leadership question is settled and they analyze their options. But I can tell you that they can make the government’s existence all but unbearable when the House is sitting.

The House operates out of a small red rulebook but that is backed by two volumes of practice and precedents:  Beauchesne and Sir Erskine May, with sufficient nitpicking material therein for days of delaying tactics. I don’t say that the Liberals will employ these tactics but both the NDP and the Socreds did in their days. In fact, the Socred gambit of “not a dime without debate” in 1974, quite unfairly, portrayed the NDP as wastrels. It was phoney as hell, but, more than anything else, cost the NDP the 1975 election.

Before going on, let me say that in a parliamentary system it is, as Lord Randolph Churchill said nearly 150 years ago, “the duty of the opposition to oppose”. Even though it can get ridiculous, I support that aphorism. The Opposition, however, must always be wary, lest they go too far and piss off the populace.

Almost everything the government does can give rise to an objection, a point of order that isn’t one. Same with a point of privilege – whatever the devil that is – a lengthy and often ridiculous argument unto a shouting match, a routine Speaker’s ruling usually just approved on a voice vote – “all in favour”. But to further delay, the Opposition will call for a “division”, meaning a 10-minute delay as bells summon members to the Chamber for a formal vote. I recall one day Gary Lauk, before the session had been called to order, stood up and asked the Speaker to adjourn because he didn’t think that there were an appropriate number of Ministers there for Question Period. A thoroughly specious position, out of order if only because the session had not even been called to order, but an ingenious delaying tactic.

Question Period is 15 minutes and I can remember many that ran over an hour with objections, followed by a division vote. I remember one afternoon a member drew the Speaker’s attention to the clock, the formal way of ending at 6 pm for the dinner break. Objection was taken, and it was after 7 pm before the Speaker could declare the time to be 6 pm!

The opposition usually extends a promise to the premier or minister not to call any formal vote while they are away on business but in nastier times, that might be withdrawn at the very last moment.

The ability of the Opposition to harass and delay is virtually limitless and it can be very hard on government morale.

Teetering on a one-vote edge

The government, with a one vote edge, can never be certain it has enough bodies available, and while a vote lost, if not a confidence vote, won’t bring the government down, again, it’s embarrassing and bad for morale.

As I said, I have no idea what tactics the Liberals will employ but you can be certain that good sportsmanship and accommodating the government will not be considerations. Mr. Horgan says he will govern for four years before an election is called and I must ask him if he’s a betting man.

In all these considerations, one must speculate on the NDP/Green pact. There are a lot more ways it can fold than stay together.

The Green Team

Sonia Furstenau and Adam Olsen sign letter to the Lieutenant Governor confirming NDP and BC Green Party partnership (Flickr / BC NDP Caucus)

Let’s talk about Sonia Furstenau and Adam Olsen, the other Green MLAs. What does Weaver do to keep them amused? They are not real opposition members so can’t join in on the mischief. Being a backbencher at the best of times is an exercise in overcoming world-class boredom. They all carry briefcases full of unnecessary pieces of paper and the leader spends much of his time thinking up make-work projects to keep the idle hands from doing the Devil’s work.

These are bright, ambitious people and giving speeches to service clubs and snipping ribbons at the opening of the latest car dealership is scarcely enough to keep the mind alive, much less strut your stuff. .

Let’s not forget that while Dr. Weaver is the Green leader, he is not, by any means, representative of Green Party members, of whom there are many who don’t care for him or are only there because they’re pissed off with everyone else. Weaver is very good at getting up people’s noses – we saw plenty of that in the May election.

Dr. Weaver  will see his biggest responsibility to be keeping  himself as leader, which may not correspond with Ms. Furstenau and Mr Olsen’s evening vespers. The Liberals won’t have to remind them that there’s always a warm spot for them in front of the Liberal hearth.

Four more years?

The media have, since May 9 last, been crunching numbers and giving you their speculations. But until a reporter has been there a long time, drunk a lot of beer with disgruntled MLAs, watched a host of affairs start and marriages end, watched up close the emotions and ambitions they will be struggling with – only then can they give the public an accurate picture, and, even then, you really had to be there.

This government staying in power for four years?

And pigs can truly fly, your kids aren’t going “all the way”, and you’re a Toronto Blue Jays fan.

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Rafe: NDP-Green pact should mean good riddance to Kinder Morgan, but Liberal opposition won’t make life easy

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John Horgan and Andrew Weaver seal their pact (Photo: @jjhorgan/Twitter)

It will be a much postponed verdict but my initial reaction to the NDP-Green deal is positive.

Whether so motivated or not, Andrew Weaver has done the right politically moral thing – contradiction in terms though that is – by agreeing to support John Horgan and the NDP. It is particularly laudable in the form of being support not coalition. His obligation is twofold – first to the public, to give them the best possible governance option and secondly to the Green Party, which is the reason he has the options in the first place.

Dealing with the latter point, that’s a bigger obligation than might first appear. The Greens are a worldwide “movement” with obligations outside BC and Canada and have ambitions for political power with reasons to believe they can, with time, succeed. The political persuasion that supports Green certainly is not compatible with the BC variety of the Liberal Party and Dr. Weaver has correctly borne that in mind. We will always suspect, with good reason, that in rejecting Ms. Clark, he turned down a pretty good personal offer.

Environment now a serious political issue

On one major point, self-serving though it may be, the Liberals don’t appear no have noticed that environmentalism is no longer the private preserve of the left. In fact, the whole notion is tied in with traditional “conservatism” back to the time of Republican Teddy Roosevelt. The first Federal Environment Minister was Liberal Len Marchand in the 70s, the first for a Province was Jim Nielsen of the Socreds in 1975. It was not until more recent times that the general public became truly alerted and alarmed. For the Liberals to have overlooked that in their early years might be understood, given their newness, bur how they could have continued that policy to the bitter end may account for that end having occurred. It was eloquent testimony to the stranglehold big money had on Ms. Clark and one can forgive all us Kinder Morgan foes taking a bit of whiskey usually beyond our means tonight!

I don’t think for a moment that Dr. Weaver’s anomalous position as a Green can go unnoticed, but sooner or later – most likely later – his position on independent power producers will have to be reconciled with the general position of most British Columbians that they are an environmental catastrophe in addition to being financial disasters, with only the old Liberal hacks profiting handsomely.

Libs can still make trouble

Overlooked in these discussions has been the fact that the Liberals will have an extremely strong opposition and it will be well motivated, if only to make their opposition skills mask their appalling government. I have been in a government with a small majority and can tell you that the opposition can make governing extremely difficult if they understand parliamentary rules and procedures. They can also make new policies all but impossible. I do not believe this government can last anything like four years and would be surprised if it went more than 18 months.

Every time a new government takes over from a government of long standing, the new bunch goes on ad nauseam about the mess they were left by their predecessors. In this case, that case is already made beyond any reasonable doubt, not by good NDP opposition but a vigilant private sector (and here’s where you act surprised, folks) who went largely unreported by the oil-stained media in constant genuflection to the government.

NDP inherit Liberal legacy of debt

Christy Clark missed the boat with LNG (BC Govt / Flickr CC licence)

Here’s part of the story. The provincial debt has, in real dollars, in 15 years of Liberal misrule in prosperous times times, doubled. In that same period, the “great Liberal money managers” all but bankrupted our great power company, BC Hydro, have left it not only without money but bound it to a $10 BILLION expense on Site C; have left ICBC on the ropes; have turned the provincial financial mainstay, natural gas, into a weird pipe dream now floating  away into the great beyond, likely never ever to be seen again – called LNG. Were I a sarcastic person by nature – and heaven forfend I should ever be that – I would rejoice we have a trillion dollar Prosperity Fund, squirrelled away so skillfully it can’t be found, to tide us over until times gets better.

The chickens have come home to roost but, unfair though it is, they are no longer Farmer Christy’s responsibly. In fact, watch as these massive Liberal fuckups all become the NDP’s fault when they must be dealt with. 

In short, the new Horgan government is going to be fighting for physical survival from the beginning and will be a pretty soft target for the Liberal truth-benders who, already at this writing, just a few hours after the deal was struck, are flooding the social media with gloomy predictions that businesses will be fleeing British Columbia, leaving the unemployed writhing, hungry in the streets.

Horgan’s moment

We will soon see what sort of stuff Mr. Horgan is made of and my suspicion is that it is much sterner stuff than many, including myself, have projected. His principal tasks are two. First, the NDP must be much better prepared to meet the political bullshit that the Christy prevaricators will dish out starting in the first minute they’re in opposition and do so much better they did in 2001 when, contrary to the claims of new premier Campbell that the province was in a terrible fiscal mess, in fact the NDP had a left it with 1.5 BILLION cash in the bank.

The second and far more important task for Mr. Horgan will be to keep his cool. He is known to have a touch of volatility in his personality and while that sometimes serves one well in opposition, it’s very different in government where you must show coolness and firmness. The cabinet will mostly be rookies and be carefully led. I had lunch last week with a former NDP cabinet minister and agreed that the sooner a new minister learns that it’s a lot easier to run the government from the pub than the cabinet room, the better. Everyone arrives at their seat on Day One determined to cure the ills of government, only to find that it’s not quite that easy, as the government faces the reality of trying to make two dollars do the work of one.

It’s normal to close dissertations such as this with a pat on the back to the outgoing government, with words of bonhomie dripping from the lips. As someone who has, in Lyndon Johnson’s little aphorism, been inside the tent peeing out, and outside the tent peeing in, plus the passage of a lot of time, I tend to overlook these flattering obsequies, so my valedictory remarks can be summed up in two words: Good riddance.

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Rafe: Weaver would be crazy to make pact with Christy; NDP should have nailed Libs on economy, LNG

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The three BC leaders at the televised debate (Photo: Broadcast Consortium)

It’s May 10, 2017 as I write this, an appropriate date to examine the election, being the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of France and the Low Countries in 1940 and the day Winston Churchill came to the rescue. Like then, much of the information during the campaign was questionable and virtually all of the mainstream media suppositions by a lamentable herd of trained seals unable to report intelligibly or intelligently. The stage was set by 16 years of kissing the backside of the provincial government, the print media distinguishing itself by managing to avoid the number one story of the times – their own newspapers’ deal with the oil industry ensuring that the latter always looked good in the newspapers and governments that wanted good press would be kind to the fossil fuel industry.

How annoying it was to hear the Global gabbers pontificate that when one party, with 100 votes cast, had 46% and the other 44%, thus the former had a “two point lead” – a piddling, meaningless statement. They used the same method with 5000 votes cast where that 2% was a substantial and perhaps final margin. In baseball, it’s percentages of hits per at bat; in politics it’s the number of hits that count. One might have expected the political pundits might have picked that up somewhere along the way.

Clark’s true economic record should have been downfall

There can be no doubt that all three parties lost one way or another. The Clark Liberals, with enough money to launch a small country, couldn’t buy a majority. The NDP, with the manifest sins of the Liberals to work with, couldn’t get a majority. The Green party with an electorate in the mood for environmental reform, managed three seats, all on friendly Vancouver Island.

That the Liberals sort of won had far less to do with their good record than the gentleness of Mr. Horgan on issues he wasn’t comfortable with, like money. That analysis runs contrary to what the media has said which is strong, if not irrefutable evidence that I’m bang on.

Courtesy of Norm Farrell/In-sights

If I may be so bold – and this is my blog after all – I warned Horgan a couple of years ago that he was letting the Liberals off the hook in the very area they claimed a monopoly on wisdom, handling our money. Their constant fallback position was that the NDP always wantonly run up public debt and drive away business. This allegation doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny, so why did it prevail in the election?

The answer is that the issue has the NDP spooked. It’s been repeated so often they believe it themselves!

The list of Liberal fiscal shortcomings is lengthy but I would have thought that doubling the provincial debt in 16 years and essentially bankrupting BC Hydro in the bargain would have been enough. Liberal construction overruns alone make Glen Clark’s “fast ferry fiasco” look picayune by comparison; add Site C, the issue that dare not speak its name, and it’s a wonderment that the Liberals got any votes at all. In short, what the Liberals got was that which Mr. Horgan could have got had he campaigned on issues and not spent time showing what a sweet guy he really is, despite nasty Liberal rumours about a nasty disposition.

NDP dropped the ball on LNG

Harken back for a moment to the LNG issue, which is where Horgan went politically bonkers. In politics, you simply do not take an issue completely out of play in order to look like a candidate for political sainthood. LNG was an immense and highly embarrassing failure for Clark so why did Mr. Horgan not beat up the Liberals on that point?

“Why”, he said, “we can’t be against everything”. Any politician with the faintest idea of what he was doing would have said “we’re in favour of development of our natural resources consistent with sound environmental practices and evidence that each development is in the best interests of the public of British Columbia”.

If he had done that he could have won my riding for one. Moreover, it would’ve left it open to him to raise hell about massive expenses of the Liberal government in chasing this ever-disappearing will-o-the wisp, guaranteed by Christy, no less, which would make us rich and relieve us forever from all debt. He could then have shown Christy Clark to be a legitimate object of ridicule – and ridicule is one thing a politician cannot survive. Horgan and his party couldn’t employ this massive weapon because, of course, he could hardly attack Clark’s bumptious bullshit about something he and his party supported!

How the Greens lost too

The Greens lost in a rather different sense of the word. They were in a province which has become more alive environmentally in the last 10 years than anywhere else in Canada. Not only was there the LNG plant in Squamish but the huge issue of Kinder Morgan and related undertakings. And in this atmosphere they took three seats, all on Vancouver Island, the Green “stronghold”, and none even close to where many of the environmental desecrations are planned.

I have no doubt that had the Greens been able to whisk Elizabeth May away from Ottawa, they would not only have done better, they would have been serious contenders throughout the province.

The elephant in the room

When all’s said and done, the Liberals “won” because there were so many minor issues to divert attention from massive Liberal mismanagement, a diversion not achieved by Liberal cleverness but NDP cowardice, arising from their willingness to believe that their dealings with fiscal matters would be laughed at by voters conditioned to believe implicitly in NDP fiscal incompetence.

In addition, there was the lazy excuse that the public simply doesn’t understand big figures and colossal losses.

That may be partly so – but only partly. Had Mr. Horgan hammered at the absolute falsehood that the Liberals had actually balanced the budget, had he translated the tragedy of BC Hydro into huge rate increases, and had he expressed the doubling of the provincial debt in terms of higher taxes and diminished social services, spiced with that extraordinary YouTube presentation of Christy congratulating her parents for leaving their children no debt and promising the same fiscal rectitude for BC, then I have no doubt the public would have understood fully.

With the exception of independent papers, the media was appalling at presenting issues with coherent analysis. To think that the Campbell energy policy which ruined so many rivers and set BC Hydro on a path to bankruptcy went unmentioned in the mainstream media from its launch in 2003 until now, speaks volumes for the decline of that once-honourable profession.

Where do we go from here?

As to what will happen now, I have no more idea than anyone else except that I can say what should not happen. The Green party would be mad to unite with the Liberals, just as a suitable way for them to reward Dr. Weaver with a cabinet post for his all his political kindness to them. It’s to the left not right Greens must look if they are going to gather public support.

The Green party have a glorious opportunity to expand both in terms of numbers and appeal to thinking British Colombia if they avoid the future machinations of the BC Liberal party. It would make a great deal more sense if they were to support, short of a coalition, a minority NDP government, should that prove numerically possible.

I close with this observation – you might consider that any one of the three leaders was successful but that’s only because you’re comparing them to two losers. In their respective fields, they each failed by substantial underachievement, least so Weaver, who now must demonstrate that the Green Party can successfully move onto the Mainland and to other regions and his next move will tell.

I hope they can – and do.

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Green Party campaign manager quit over Andrew Weaver’s bullying, bad policies

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Andrew Weraver attacks BCNDP Leader John Horgan during the televised leaders’ debate

Updated May 8, 8 PM

On the eve of his candidate’s kick-off event, Green Party campaign manager Troy Grant reached his breaking point with Andrew Weaver, causing him to resign. “I can’t support the BC Green Party because of Andrew Weaver,” Grant now admits. Here’s why.

Troy Grant is a Vancouver Island resident and environmental activist who, up until a couple of months ago, was running the campaign of Green Party candidate Lia Versaevel. As part of his early groundwork on the campaign, Grant reached out to Common Sense Canadian lead columnist Rafe Mair, a man whose opinions Grant says he has always respected. Intrigued by what he heard about Versavel, Rafe proceeded to interview her, resulting in this relatively glowing review. Rafe being Rafe, though, couldn’t sign off on the piece without one caveat: his disdain for party leader Andrew Weaver’s ongoing support of IPPs (private power projects). After all, Rafe and this publication have been highly critical of IPPs going back to the Gordon Campbell era, when Weaver stumped for the BC Liberals as a UVic climate scientist.

Lia Versaevel (photo: BC Green Party)

By the time Grant showed up to a campaign launch for Versaevel in early February, he had already been berated over the phone by high level party operatives over the Mair article. They were incensed that Grant had reached out to Mair, a longtime critic of Weaver’s. Grant had no reason to expect what happened next, though. Weaver himself showed up to the event and proceeded to “rip into” Grant. So irate was the party leader that “minutes before the event was to start, I had to ask him to step outside,” Grant recalled for me in a phone interview this morning.

Two weeks later, Grant tendered his resignation from Versaevel’s campaign. Officially, it was for health reasons. Grant suffers from a serious disability and mobility challenges which, over the course of Versaevel’s early campaigning, grew worse. But, privately, the incident with Weaver was a big motivating factor for his departure – “the last straw”, he acknowledged. In an internal resignation letter he circulated to fellow Green Party members on February 27, Grant wrote:

[quote]After a bizarre tirade by Party Leader Andrew Weaver on Feb. 11, where I felt bullied and personally attacked, (about an article written by Rafe [Mair] that Weaver he blamed me for) I decided I could not in good conscience associate with an organization who’s Leader showed such lack of self control and decorum.[/quote]

More than Weaver’s angry treatment of Grant, his policies were also a serious concern. “I resigned because of a difference of opinion with the way the leader was leading the party,” Grant added. 

Writ large, Weaver’s strategy of sidling up to Liberal voters was a problem for Grant, who explained it this way:

[quote]Weaver believes he can pick up the Green Party, plop it in the middle, make it  “Liberal Light” and draw votes from both sides. It makes me angry when people minimize the urgency of our environmental challenges for political gain – and that’s what he’s done. It’s a travesty.[/quote]

Construction of a private power project on the Ashlu River (Photo: Range Life)

In terms of policy specifics, Grant shares many of the concerns Rafe and this publication have highlighted about Weaver, including his support for the Campbell/Clark private power program, which has meant widespread ecological devastation for many of BC’s rivers, but also resulted in well over $60 Billion worth of sweetheart contracts for private power players – many of them significant BC Liberal Party donors – unnecessarily driving up power bills for British Columbians and all but bankrupting our public utility. The Versaevel piece was far from the first time Rafe had taken on Weaver’s pro-IPP position.

In 2009, when Rafe I were both speaking out publicly against IPPs, we were dismayed to learn that Weaver wrote an op-ed and made robo-calls (listen for yourself) in favour of the Campbell Liberal Government, with supportive words for his energy program. Following that election, Weaver remained relatively silent about IPPs until, after becoming leader of the BC Greens, he was quizzed about his position by then-CFAX Radio host Ian Jessop. After hearing Weaver’s interview, Rafe wrote:

[quote]Dr. Weaver [is] still praising private power – only criticizing the Liberals’ lack of environmental monitoring and enforcement. What he fails to recognize or admit is that this industry has never been monitored, nor any protections enforced, since day one, which is precisely what we’ve been warning for nearly a decade now. This is not some mere wrinkle or oversight – it’s exactly how a privatized system is designed to work.[/quote]

Later writing about Green candidate Versaevel, Rafe included this line, which appears to have sparked the dust-up between Weaver and campaign manager Grant: “…Dr. Weaver [remains] an unrepentant supporter of IPPs without concern for the damage they do or the monetary wreckage they have visited on BC Hydro. If he is a ‘Green’, he needs a new paint job.”

But for critics of Weaver’s within the environmental community, IPPs are just one in a long list of gripes. Others include:

  • His support for David Black’s proposed oil refinery in Kitimat, on the grounds that it would result in tankers carrying a less-destructive product than bitumen on the BC Coast. Lost on Weaver, apparently, was the fact that this would still require Tar Sands extraction, intense carbon emissions, and a bitumen pipeline crossing BC’s rugged northern landscape, much the same as Enbridge would have done.
  • Weaver’s grizzly hunt policy, which only requires that hunters pack their meat out (as if anyone actually hunts grizzlies for food!). This would likely stop foreign hunters, but do nothing to stem the larger resident hunt. Weaver’s position has been ridiculed by bear advocacy groups and leading biologists, including Chris Darimont, an associate professor at UVic. Addressing some of Weaver’s most absurd comments on the subject, Darimont recently told The Vancouver Sun, “He is not only on the wrong side of history on the grizzly hunt issue, but he is also ‘dead’ wrong.” Adds Grant, “Weaver’s position should have been, ‘We’re against it, period.'”
  • Weaver’s refusal to support wastewater treatment in Victoria.

Grant also points Weaver’s bewildering relationship with the Liberal Party, as other critics have done of late. When Weaver distanced himself from popular federal party leader Elizabeth May over the BDS controversy, he told the media, “I’ve got a lot of federal Liberals on my team who are members of the federal Liberal party but also members of the B.C. Green Party.” If distance is what he sought, that’s apparently what he got. One would expect May to be all over the BC campaign trail, rallying her federal Green supporters in key ridings where the Greens are vying for seats on May 9. Aside from a few campaign stops early on, there’s been barely any mention of the country’s brightest Green star.

Then there’s the overt Liberal support for the Greens – which last election meant pro-Green ads paid for by the Liberal campaign. This time around, it’s more subtle. There’s Judi Tyabji – wife of Liberal LNG booster Gordon Wilson and mother of Liberal candidate Mathew Wilson – working with the Powell River Chamber of Commerce to host Andrew Weaver in the very riding her son’s campaigning in, then extolling the Green leader’s virtues on facebook.

Screen capture from Judi Tyabji’s facebook page.

And, of course, there’s Weaver portraying himself as ready to work with the Liberals – even ready to accept a cabinet position from them – yet dismissing John Horgan and the NDP. This particular incident drove ex-Liberal Chief of Staff Martyn Brown to come out publicly against Weaver and urge progressive voters to unite under the NDP:

[quote]It is beyond me how Weaver could ever contemplate supporting Clark’s government—a government that has eviscerated B.C.’s globally-lauded climate action plan and that is diametrically opposed to virtually every plank in the Green party’s platform.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom how the Green party leader could ever equivocate on which party he would support if he finds himself holding the balance of power, as he did in the televised leaders’ debate, and as he did again in Wednesday night’s interview on Global TV.

Which is why I will be casting my vote for the NDP — a party I spent nearly a quarter of a century fighting against.[/quote]

For his part, Troy Grant is clearly still torn about his recent experience with the Green Party, noting how badly he feels about having to step away from the campaign of  Versaevel, whom he holds in high regard. The same can be said for many of her fellow candidates and party supporters – but Weaver has jeopardized all that.

All these people have done so much work over the years to build the Green Party,” he told me, “but now he’s turned it into the ‘Andrew Weaver Party’.” 

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Why the BC Liberal economic record is actually worse than the NDP’s in 90’s

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Many people are ready for a change in Victoria. Christy Clark is one of the least popular candidates for premier in BC history and, after 16 years of scandal-filled rule, her Liberal Party has tried British Columbians’ patience to the extreme. Yet every day on social media, I run across a familiar refrain: “Better than going back to the NDP’s lost decade.” Clearly, that narrative is so deeply embedded that it threatens to keep the NDP out of government yet again.

But memory, science now teaches us, is unreliable. It can play tricks on us. In order to make an informed decision on May 9, voters need to know the hard facts about BC’s economic history – a straight up comparison between the two credible options in this election. A serious examination of the best available data on key metrics reveals that British Columbians have far more to fear from another four years of the Christy Clark Liberals running our economy than they do taking a chance on John Horgan and the NDP.

Debt Bomb

For a government that claims to “balance budgets”, it’s astounding to consider how much debt the Liberals have racked up on our behalf. While the NDP grew the provincial debt by roughly $17 Billion over their decade in power, the Liberals had added $33 Billion by the end of the last fiscal year. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They’ve saddled BC Hydro with $24 Billion in debt and “deferrals”, plus another $58 Billion in unnecessary, sweetheart private power contracts, on which we lose over a billion dollars every year. This also explains the almost doubling of your power bills during their reign. And that’s before the unnecessary Site C Dam, which won’t be paid off until at least 2094! Here’s what UBC’s Dr. Karen Bakker had to say on the subject after she and a team of researchers published their damning report on Site C’s economics:

[quote]Site C will be 100 per cent surplus when it’s finished in 2024. That surplus energy will have to be sold, will have to be exported, from the province and B.C. Hydro’s own numbers show that those exports will occur at a high loss. Our figures show that loss will be about $800 million and could be as high as $2 billion.[/quote]

That’s just if the Liberal Government manages to keep to its $9 Billion budget for the project – hard to conceive of when their top 5 capital projects to date have doubled in cost, going over budget by a whopping $3.3 Billion (compare that with the NDP’s fast ferries, which went over by $250 million).

Courtesy of Norm Farrell/In-sights

All this fiscal mismanagement has taken a huge toll. Add up our official provincial debt and liabilities ($84.3 Billion, according to the Comptroller General), then factor in hidden taxpayer obligations from private contracts for electricity and infrastructure building ($101 Billion, according to the Auditor General) and you get $185.7 Billion of real debt for BCup from $39 Billion when the Liberals took over from the NDP. That’s about $40,000 for every man, woman and child in the province – double the per capita debt of the next closest province, Ontario, even when you factor in their own “additional taxpayer obligations”.

The BC Liberals also sold off one strategically vital and financially healthy crown corporation, BC Rail, and ran two others – ICBC and Hydro – into the ground, taking half billion to a billion dollar annual profits and turning them into equally large deficits.

The inputs into BC’s tax coffers are declining in other places as well. For instance, huge royalty giveaways to the gas sector have sucked billions out of our provincial revenues. As renowned geologist and shale gas expert David Hughes explains, “[BC’s gas] production has doubled since 2005 whereas revenue is down 87%”. The same thing can be said for stumpage fees from logging, which have sunk to pathetic levels over the past decade.

Given all this, the only way the Liberals can lay any claim to “balanced budgets” is by shunting debt into other accounts and onto the backs of ratepayers and crown corporations, while cutting services to the public. The effects of these debts may not be immediately visible – but they are guaranteed to be borne by young British Columbians and future generations for decades to come. BC’s credit rating is now under threat due to BC Hydro’s shaky position, which means servicing that growing debt is going to become even more costly going forward.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

One of the most telling moments during the televised leaders’ debate was this exchange between moderator Jennifer Burke and Christy Clark:

Clark went on to her mantra that she’s created 226,000 jobs. Even if it were true that British Columbians don’t care about anything else, or that jobs are a panacea for all BC’s socioeconomic ills, how true is her claim that NDP were so much worse for jobs than her government is?

The NDP inherited a high unemployment rate of 10% from the Socreds and saw that decline fairly steadily to 7.2 % in 2000 (BC’s lowest rate since the early 80’s) – the last full year before they left office. Things got worse early on under the Campbell Liberals, but that can be partly attributed to the tech bust and other factors beyond their control.

Throughout Christy Clark’s tenure, BC’s unemployment rate has come down from 7.5% to around 6% today – on the surface, marginally better than then NDP in the late 90’s. But let’s also not forget that Christy came to power in 2011 on the heels of the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression – a natural period for job growth (the NDP faced their own challenges from the global economy int he 90’s). So how much credit can Christy take for these jobs? According to a group of leading BC economists, very little. “I would say the [increase in jobs] is mainly due to market forces,” said Helmut Pastrick, chief economist of Central 1 Credit Union.

It’s also important to consider the specific nature of the jobs we’re creating and losing. For instance, most of the new jobs under Christy’s reign have come in urban centres. “The rest of the economic regions in B.C.— the interior, the north, they are actually losing jobs, and that is worrisome,” says Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ economist Iglika Ivanova.

Rural British Columbians know all too well the harsh realities of the BC Liberal job record. On their watch we’ve gone from 100,000 jobs in forestry, wood product manufacturing and pulp and paper to just 60,000 – largely due to poor government management, mill closures and raw log exports.  And what of the 100,000 short term and 60,000 longterm LNG jobs Clark won the last election by promising? A handful of short term jobs on projects since shelved. Zero plants or longterm jobs on the horizon, as the bottom has predictably fallen out of the Asian LNG market.

Finally, many of the jobs Clark has created are low-wage, part-time, short-term, and without benefits. Here’s what a recent report from The Vancouver Sun had to say on the topic:

[quote]…an analysis of the federal labour force survey shows the share of part-time jobs has steadily grown here, from 15 per cent in 1976 to nearly a quarter of all jobs in 2016.

In fact, Statistics Canada data shows, of the 72,000 new jobs created in 2016, more than half were part-time. [/quote]

Adds UBC Sauder School of Business Professor Mark Thompson, “They overlook the fact that we lag the rest of the country in full-time jobs and that the rate of wage increases has been amongst the worst in Canada.”

Unliveable Costs

Even if Christy Clark was telling the truth about her job creation record, what good is a job if you can’t afford your rent and bills? This is why affordability has become the biggest issue of this election. When Christy’s predecessor Gordon Campbell took office, the average price of a detached home in Greater Vancouver was about $369,000. That peaked last year at over $1.8 million! And Christy owns this one much more than Campbell. Since her Johnny-come-lately foreign buyers’ tax, the market for detached homes has cooled a little, but now it’s condos on the rise. The most dramatic increases have happened on Christy’s watch, as a Global News story from a year ago explained:

[quote]…[The Real Estate Board of Vancouver’s] data shows the average price of a single-family detached home in the Greater Vancouver area has increased as much in the past five months as it did from 1981 to 2005.

The average price of a sold detached home was $1.4 million in September last year [2015] – but climbed to $1.6 million in October, $1.7 million in December, and $1.8 million last month – overall, an increase of $420,000.[/quote]

At the pocketbook level, what used to be among North America’s most affordable power bills have almost doubled since the Liberals came to power. ICBC premiums are headed in the same direction . In 2001, there were no bridge tolls in the Lower Mainland; today, people are being nickle-and-dimed to death, or driving extra distances to avoid tolled routes. Childcare costs have skyrocketed – which has even the Board of Trade raising alarms over the negative effect on our economy. Meanwhile, for BC’s least advantaged, disability and welfare rates have barely moved.

Time after time, we hear stories of bright tech employees turning down jobs in Vancouver or young, talented professionals fleeing the city for rural communities or other provinces. We don’t yet have a grasp on the real cost of this brain drain of the Liberals’ making.

One financial metric is way up under the Liberals’ reign: corporate donations to the Liberal Party. If we judge her on this factor alone, Christy Clark is a bona-fide financial wizard. But by many other measures, it’s high time British Columbians came to realize they have far less to fear with the NDP than they’ve been told and a whole lot to lose by sticking with the BC Liberals.

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Rafe: It’s got to be the NDP to replace Lyin’ Liberals…but LNG complicates matters

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NDP Leader John Horgan

Like a large number of people in the WestVancouver- Sea-To-Sky constituency, I am breaking the usual rules – I want the NDP to form the next government but I am passionately opposed to Woodfibre LNG which the NDP candidate supports. If I were to support her, my neighbours, with every justification in the world, would lynch me, as I would them were they to vote NDP.

Protection of Howe Sound is a huge issue and while our very strong position should, one would think, bring major party support, not so. This isn’t a NIMBY issue but a dedication to save BC’s most southern fjord and one of the worlds great natural beauty spots now recovered from past industrial waste thanks in large measure to citizen measures. Howe Sound, with its killer whales, humpback whales, salmon, herring, seals, sea-lions and other sea life back, is seen as a British Columbia treasure to be protected by all decent British Columbians.

Overall, I’m supporting the NDP

This is the 3rd election where I’ve publicly supported the NDP. I am still asked, weren’t you a Socred minister, an oppressor of the working folk and a greedy capitalist lining his own pockets at the expense of the poor?

Minus the hyperbole, yes. I ran for the Socreds in 1975 and again in 1979, won both elections, and spent over five years in the cabinet. During that period Premier Bill Bennett fully supported me and my deputy minister, Tex Enemark, as we modernized BC’s antediluvian consumer laws, completely overhauled the liquor laws, established the hugely successful cottage wine industry, and forced Chartered Banks, who claimed exemption because they were federally chartered, to obey our laws. When I moved to Environment, I negotiated with the City of Seattle, stopping them from raising the Ross Dam and saved our beautiful Skagit River from ruin, stopped the killing of wolves – which enraged all ranchers, nearly all of whom were Socreds – and, to the outrage of the mining industry, placed a moratorium on Uranium exploration and mining. As Health minister I brought in Homecare and Palliative care.

I assure you I relate all this only to show you my personal experience with the bad, old Socred capitalist pigs and tell you that under the present Liberals, such radical socialistic notions wouldn’t have stood a chance.

What’s really happened is that public attitudes towards former “lefty” issues like the environment, health, social services have changed dramatically and are no longer the private preserve of the left. At the same time, the heirs to the deceased Social Credit Party, the BC Liberals, have lurched to the right – far to the right of the Bill Bennett Socreds – while the NDP cast aside the old time rhetoric and stopped scaring people in the Centre. The Green Party has, sadly, moved from true Green to playing political spoiler hoping to win a balance of power.

Clark’s Keystone Kops have to go

Let’s get down to cases.

Courtesy of Norm Farrell/In-sights

I frankly cannot understand how anyone would want another four years of the gross incompetence and lack of truthfulness that we’ve endured since 2001. In my opinion, the Campbell/Clark bunch is the worst government I have ever seen in this province. The massive Keystone Kops bungling of the LNG mess in itself should be enough to see the back of them for quite a while. It all was so reminiscent of Peter Sellers and a Pink Panther classic farce. The Liberals’ 16 years are unblemished by a single success story.

What sticks out, however, is the good economic situation they inherited and the bloody awful mess they are leaving. They have doubled the provincial debt in 2016 $ and have so mismanaged BC Hydro that it’s a corporate tragedy that truly beggars description. The Independent Power Policy has been a huge political pay-off to wealthy supporters, all at the expense of the Public. The lingering memory I carry is of a premier whose mind is seldom, if ever, troubled by telling fibs, from small to big.

It may well be, of course, that many of you really don’t place clean government very high on the list. I happen to think it’s essential to good government. Perhaps the Liberal endemic dissembling comes from the docile unto supportive media, but that scarcely justifies the Liberal government under both Campbell and Clark – particularly the latter – being incapable of telling the truth. I’m not interested in perpetuating that sort of leadership.

LNG is NDP’s weak spot

The situation on the Kinder Morgan line and similar environmental intrusions by the federal government themselves are enough for me to vote for someone else. When it gets to BC Hydro and Site C, I run the risk of being rude by saying I can’t understand how anyone could vote for a government involved in such preposterous policies.

Yes, I support the NDP, with considerable reservation, which is dwarfed, however, by the brutal inadequacies of the Liberals – combined with their corruption.

Horgan has produced an idiotic policy of favouring LNG without any criticism and that has taken away a number of opposition opportunities, including the one in my riding, but elsewhere too.

No politician with half a brain would have said, “We can’t be against everything, so we’re for LNG” – a preposterous proposition when you think of it. The reason you are for a policy isn’t because it’s a good one but because you can’t be against everything! It wasn’t necessary that he be opposed, just committed to an open inquiring mind judging each proposal on its merits. In taking the position he has, Horgan has foreclosed some of the serious issues concerning LNG, such as fracking, for example, or discharges into the air or waterways, or tanker traffic, as in the case of Howe Sound, which, by every standard imposed, is too narrow for tanker traffic. As I write this, the polls show a small Liberal lead has overtaken a large NDP advantage, which may reflect a public not satisfied that Horgan has their confidence to even be more competent than Clark!

Horgan still the best choice

John Horgan meets Rob Ashton of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union at Lynnterm docks in North Vancouver (BCNDP/flickr cc licence)

For all that, politics is a comparative game and compared to the record of the Campbell/Clark government, particularly the financial wreckage they have piled up, with his shortcomings, to me John Horgan still looks like a much better choice to lead the province.

The Green party has been disappointing in my view. I find myself very attracted to the green concept and can only wish that my advice to Elizabeth May had been followed and that she had taken over the BC party, but that was not to be.

Dr. Weaver’s position on so-called “run of river” and IPPs has been so non-green as to disqualify him in my view from that appellation. He has done well in the debates and the party has gone from being one of principle to one of grabbing for seats, hoping to gain a place in a coalition government.

A disappointing campaign, all around

I must say that this entire campaign has been very disappointing in too many ways. The Liberals have not made any effort to justify their record, the NDP have shown very little ability to restore confidence and bring us a competent government and the Green party have switched from being idealists to opportunists.

I close very simply by saying one must deal with that and if one is adult, under these circumstances there is absolutely no way they could support a dishonest and utterly untruthful government.

I understand that politicians have been known to gild the lily on occasion. A certain amount of wriggle room between truth and falsehood is traditionally accepted. But with this premier it’s well beyond a joke. She seems temperamentally incapable of telling the truth and I’m not prepared to vote for such a person.

I’m not so naive as to think that political supporters don’t get perks or that if you’re bidding on a government contract, donations aren’t helpful. But this government, with its policy of Independent Power Producers, has taken graft to a new level and has all but bankrupted BC Hydro, doubled the provincial debt and ruined the jewel in our corporate crown. Are we to overlook this?

Finally, let me dispel two myths. The Liberal government is only not lying when they talk about balanced budgets – because no one likes to use that word but it’s as close to lying as “damn” is swearing. Ask yourself this: The government has gone further into the hole by $71 BILLION in the last four years – how in hell can you do that with balanced budgets?

Easy – don’t put the bad stuff like BC Hydro or ICBC into the budget balancing game! Their losses are part of the huge provincial debt but, using the old adage “figures don’t lie but liars can sure as hell figure”, you can work miracles with a balance sheet.

Given the fiscal catastrophe created by the Campbell/Clark government and their lie-infested corruption, I consider they have forfeited any right to a position of public trust.

The NDP are inexperienced in leadership but not in government, with a number of MLAs who are clearly Cabinet material, some with cabinet experience. If they do no more than restore truth and integrity, support of Horgan and Co will be worth it.

As an old friend used to say when wondering about taking a chance and approaching a comely lass, “what the hell, take a chance…Columbus did”.

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