What do families have to do with the
environment?

Quite a bit, actually.

The Campbell/Clark government is
looking for an issue to run on and the Family is the answer the backroom boys
and girls have decided is the best one.

This decision is sure as hell not
based upon the government’s great successes in this ministry. In fact
they have been a near disaster if not a full one. Mind you, in fairness, this
isn’t the area that’s good to any government and the NDP had its
share of problems but the point is simple – why would the C/C government
run on a failure?

Easy – everything else has been
worse.

Let’s start with law and order,
a favourite for all rightwing governments. The major problem here is BC Rail.
This is where the Government put the fix in and settled the Basi-Virk bribe
case just as Gordon Campbell and former Finance Minister Gary Collins were to
give evidence.

The first version by crown counsel
Bill Berardino was that he had made the deal all on its own, then it was with
the Deputy Attorney-General – then it had the Deputy Finance Minister
involved and before you knew it, it was obvious that the whole cabinet had to
be in the know. Crown Counsel looked bad thus so did the entire A/G ministry.

What then about fiscal probity?
Surely the Liberals could claim that here’s where the Campbell/Clark
government shone as it made the NDP era look so bad.

Unfortunately for them, it did the
opposite as all the yardsticks by which you gauge these matters, the NDP look
like paragons of fiscal prudence by comparison. The only evidence that the
Liberals did well was the bullshit they peddled.

Let’s look at two areas, the
2009 fudge-it budget.

You will recall that in 2009 the
Liberals presented a nice rosy “election budget” which went a long
way towards painting themselves as fiscal geniuses especially compared to that
wastrel NDP. The trouble was that the budget was a falsehood by over $1 BILLION
dollars.

And how they explained it took the
breath away. Why, how were they to know that there was a world wide recession?

Apparently they hadn’t heard of
the financial meltdown the previous year including a stock market crash.

To fudge a budget then win an
election based upon their ignorance of what the rest crown counsel is one thing – to pretend that
you, a self declared fiscal genius, didn’t know what everyone else in the
world knew takes the breath away.

The HST scarcely needs further
comment except that the Campbell/Clark government lied through its teeth as
became obvious when we learned that then Finance Minister Colin Hansen had, two
months previous, been given a report by his ministry telling the minister what
a bad deal it was.

What about “health” as an
issue?

Every opposition loves this issue
because they would have been much better but governments know better and avoid
the issue like the plague.

Well, then, what about the
environment? Surely Pat Kinsella and the boys have lots to work with here?

Everywhere in this broad field has
been a self created disaster for the C/C government starting with fish farms.
Ignoring all the scientific evidence, the government took its advice from a
discredited DFO “scientist” and fish farms prospered decimating
wild salmon runs in the bargain. While the debate from our side of the issue
talked about penned fish escaping and the horrendous damage done to migrating
wild salmon now an even bigger threat has appeared – disease from
contaminated eggs from Norway which all but wiped out the fish farm industry in
Chile. The Campbell/Clark government have made a bad idea into a catastrophe.
Not a good election issue.

Then there is the energy plan which
gives the creation of power to private companies that not only bugger up the
rivers used, but have the sole power to make electricity which BC Hydro must
buy at a time they don’t need and loses huge sums of money, $600,000,000
last year alone. In the bargain, this policy has all but bankrupted BC Hydro and
bids fair to do that in the near future.

This doesn’t look much like a
good election for the C/C government does it?

Then we have the matter of the
installation of Smart Meters by BC Hydro which will spend a billion dollars on
it – in essence using taxpayer’s money without their MLAs having the
right to ask questions. In addition to the cost, and indeed more importantly,
there is a substantial health risk which, again, will not be debated in the
Legislature. The Campbell/Clark government shows as much concern about the
health of citizens on this issue as it did for the folks in Tsawwassen with
overhead power lines.

Then there are the Sea-to-Sky and
Gateway projects where the Ministry of Transportation has been aggravated by
the government’s haughty attitude which was so well articulated by then
Transport Minister Kevin Falcon (who is the second most powerful in the
government) when he said: the Chinese “don’t have the labour or
environmental restrictions we do. It’s not like they have to do community
consultations. They just say ‘we’re building a bridge’ and they move everyone
out of there and get going within two weeks. Could you imagine if we could
build like that?”

With
the Sea-to-Sky upgrading, Falcon rode roughshod over the protests of citizens
of Eagleridge who wanted to preserve significant and sensitive wild preserves.
With the Gateway Project, the C/C government has not only endangered wildlife
preserves and Burns Bog, it’s taken whatever farmland they want without a
care.

You ask, then, why is the
“family” according to Premier Clark the big election
issue?

Because no matter how lousy this
issue is for the government, the others are all worse.