We're still here but challenges abound
By John Twigg
My goodness almost a month has passed since my last new post so I AM overdue for an update, but alas I have been preoccupied with some personal and family matters. And I notice certain other pundits have been taking downtime too.
I continue to monitor NW and all the TV newscasts plus The Sun and occasionally other papers but when I've been travelling I've desisted from updating this Blog and also from Twitter and Facebook, though I've still been receiving and sending lots of emails on notable topics, of which there are many.
Greece? Syria?? There is so much to watch and try to understand, but I do know this: British Columbia's people would be wise to ensure and increase its self-sufficiency in many many areas of policy and economics. Yes that includes food, clothing and shelter but we need more - such as having our own paper currency ready if the U.S. and Canadian dollars should suddenly fail or dry up. And having plans for social security in the event of a prolonged power outage.
I'm not saying a massive breakdown of B.C. society and economy is imminent but I will say that that is more or less inevitable, the latter happening only if millions of our citizens suddenly repented towards God and so became worthy of protection in the coming days of wrath.
The media and political fixation with global warming is a farce - it is NOT a crisis and never was but most of the false alarmists have too muchy ego invested to admit they were wrong. I posted some links to such articles on Twitter #bcpoli. But really it has been a deliberate distraction or smokescreen for much more serious and solvable problems.
Yes we should reduce pollution, get people and industries off oil (except in transportation where trucks need liquid fuels), and reduce GHG emissions (not only CO2) but simply trying to reduce all uses of all forms of carbon is simply sheer folly and nonsense - look at the minute proportions of it in the atmosphere even after the Industrial Revolution, look at the many wide variations in carbon and water in previous eons and centuries - then look at all the other problems in the present real world.
What B.C. needs is NOT merely a new approach to energy strategies but moreso a whole new approach to economic development and diversification, especially a full range of job creation initiatives (many self-financing, others saving government money in social programs) and probably a whole array of new forms of money: not just paper and metal (which we have in abundance) but also scanable (like lottery tickets) and electronic (credit card chips), and hence probably a revived central Bank of B.C. and a fleet of Treasury Branches too.
But alas very few people are daring to think along such fundamental lines, let alone talk about them.
Interestingly I`ve felt a few nibbles at my idea that Athabasca bitumen be sent by rail to Prince Rupert rather than pipeline to Kitimat, but no one has yet grabbed it and run. Perhaps it is too common-sense, and not capital-intensive enough for the big corporate investors who want to profiteer from what could become a monopoly pipeline (which is why the Chinese are investors too).
I also got some traction and a new hook for my idea that a new ferry crossing be developed between the Iona sewage outfall near Vancouver`s airport to Gabriola Island and a new bridge hop to the big island, designed for trucks and foot-passengers commuting to the airport and downtown via nearby SkyTrain. But the new hook is a brilliant idea: use the sewage that happens to be nearby in renewable abundance to generate energy for the ferries! It`s brilliant because MetroVancouver will soon have to spend billions of dollars to mitigate that growing pollution anyway! (The impacts on Gabriola citizens can be mitigated to whatever extent they wish, such as is done now at Duke Point and Yellowpoint.)
There`s more where that came from but meanwhile I must focus on some more basic exigencies.
But don`t you think that in a world producing Magnottas and with a war looming between Europe and Islam that we should be battening down our own hatches here in Beautiful B.C. ?
To get a better idea of what`s really going on out there, check out the massive conspiracy theory alleged by the Abel Danger group, a little taste of which can be had here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YGGIPFoR9M
Have a happy summer eh! And let`s all try to save our Province too.
---
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
An apology from Tsakumis??
BC Liberal outbursts were deliberate
I happened to visit Alex Tsakumis`s blog before shutting down for the night (after watching John Cummins with Vaughn Palmer on Voice of B.C. (no blood was shed, no blunders said)) and I was pleasantly surprised to see there a nice apology from Alex to me!
It was not about a nasty diatribe he vented at me a few weeks ago but nonetheless it was a gentlemanly admission that I was probably correct in asserting the Bloy and Krueger outbursts had been deliberate and part of a B.C. Liberal political strategy, as were Bob Mackin and John van Dongen, he said.
So anyway thank you Alex, we may not agree on everything but we do seem to be swimming in the same direction, namely trying to get rid of an incompetent and corrupt regime and replacing it with something better - and Alex`s work with the Basi-Virk documents deserves some kind of award, IMO.
Christy returning to CKNW??
And while I was at Alex`s site (or incite) I noticed and read another column on B.C. Liberal foibles which ended with a scoop from Alex to the effect that he had heard from radio industry sources that Premier Christy had sent an emissary to broach the idea of her returning to NW as a talk show host.
Below is what I posted on Tsakumis`s blog about that:
"The story of Christy sounding out CKNW about a job could be not about a post-election position but an immediate one - she resigns in a few weeks, takes some severance, then restarts anew at CKNW - clearing the way for the Liberals to select a new and better leader (hard to be worse).
The suits at NW might not like it but the corporate bosses of B.C. might tell NW`s owners it`s something they must do in the interests of B.C.`s private sector. And if NW doesn`t go along they`ll soon lose a whole bunch of major advertisers and have to lay off staff anyway."
That would be yet another amazing sharp turn in B.C.`s ever-turbulent politics but the latest opinion poll numbers certainly support the logic of such a move: the Dix New Dem`s are now at 50% so the idea of free-enterprise vote-splitting is NOT a factor - the problem is the Liberal brand itself, which has become irreparably tainted, due in considerable part to Tsakumis and MLA John van Dongen and others insisting that court documengts suggest she was involved in perverting the sale of BC Rail.
The HST schmozzle was unforgiveable, and the destruction of BC Hydro is unforgiveable but the one scandal that Clark herself wears to some degree is the corrupted sale of BC Rail.
So yes the no longer new Christy minstrel would be wise to leave now, or sooner rather than later, because if she clings to office until May 14, 2013 she and her party will be deservedly decimated.
I happened to visit Alex Tsakumis`s blog before shutting down for the night (after watching John Cummins with Vaughn Palmer on Voice of B.C. (no blood was shed, no blunders said)) and I was pleasantly surprised to see there a nice apology from Alex to me!
It was not about a nasty diatribe he vented at me a few weeks ago but nonetheless it was a gentlemanly admission that I was probably correct in asserting the Bloy and Krueger outbursts had been deliberate and part of a B.C. Liberal political strategy, as were Bob Mackin and John van Dongen, he said.
So anyway thank you Alex, we may not agree on everything but we do seem to be swimming in the same direction, namely trying to get rid of an incompetent and corrupt regime and replacing it with something better - and Alex`s work with the Basi-Virk documents deserves some kind of award, IMO.
Christy returning to CKNW??
And while I was at Alex`s site (or incite) I noticed and read another column on B.C. Liberal foibles which ended with a scoop from Alex to the effect that he had heard from radio industry sources that Premier Christy had sent an emissary to broach the idea of her returning to NW as a talk show host.
Below is what I posted on Tsakumis`s blog about that:
"The story of Christy sounding out CKNW about a job could be not about a post-election position but an immediate one - she resigns in a few weeks, takes some severance, then restarts anew at CKNW - clearing the way for the Liberals to select a new and better leader (hard to be worse).
The suits at NW might not like it but the corporate bosses of B.C. might tell NW`s owners it`s something they must do in the interests of B.C.`s private sector. And if NW doesn`t go along they`ll soon lose a whole bunch of major advertisers and have to lay off staff anyway."
That would be yet another amazing sharp turn in B.C.`s ever-turbulent politics but the latest opinion poll numbers certainly support the logic of such a move: the Dix New Dem`s are now at 50% so the idea of free-enterprise vote-splitting is NOT a factor - the problem is the Liberal brand itself, which has become irreparably tainted, due in considerable part to Tsakumis and MLA John van Dongen and others insisting that court documengts suggest she was involved in perverting the sale of BC Rail.
The HST schmozzle was unforgiveable, and the destruction of BC Hydro is unforgiveable but the one scandal that Clark herself wears to some degree is the corrupted sale of BC Rail.
So yes the no longer new Christy minstrel would be wise to leave now, or sooner rather than later, because if she clings to office until May 14, 2013 she and her party will be deservedly decimated.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Travesties in Leg. hide Liberal scandals
The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 44 May 15, 2012
Travesties against democracy in B.C. Legislature
meant to aid coverups of B.C. Liberals' scandals
By John Twigg
If you are a regular long-time follower of proceedings in the B.C. Legislative Assembly you may be aware of some recent events in there that are an extraordinary travesty of democracy, namely the government forcing through a tsunami of major social-engineering reforms with little time for debate and virtually no consultations with affected interest groups.
A remaking of the legal industry even while a policy review is ongoing, a new regime for settling civil disputes, a rewriting of the pre-election advertising rules to in part gag small voices, a new drunk driving law and other changes in ICBC, a re-regulating of B.C. ferry services, some Bills to fix previous mistakes, the massive reintroduction of a provincial sales tax system - and more, even a restructuring of how the legislature itself will operate.
But even regular watchers of B.C. politics may not realize that that odious railroading is also part of an even worse ploy to minimize the time and attention available for MLA questions about the Premier's Office budget and operations and for the B.C. Liberal Party government to thereby maintain coverups of numerous scandals involving Premier Christy Clark and other prominent supporters of her and her regime.
Now that former Liberal MLA John van Dongen has openly questioned in and outside the Legislature the mechanics and propriety of the government's $6-million payment of legal bills for former aides David Basi and Bob Virk in an apparent exchange for their guilty pleas in the BC Rail scandal it is a more open season for new questions about that old scandal and other questions about the former Gordon Campbell government's very tainted sale of BC Rail to Canadian National Railway, a company chaired by one of Campbell's most influential political supporters, and a deal consulted on to three competing interests at once by his most influential strategic advisor.
To be specific, blogger Alex Tsakumis apparently has documents from the Basi-Virk trial which reportedly demonstrate "a clear link between Christy Clark and her close friend, fellow federal Liberal operative and briber of public officials [name removed] (which) .... van Dongen tells me ... is PRECISELY the work that made him stand up and take notice of the OBVIOUS issues " - dating from when Clark was a senior minister in the Campbell regime.
Furthermore, van Dongen and Auditor General John Doyle are litigating to get their own copies of those and other court documents which apparently could implicate Premier Clark and other prominent Liberals in the perversion of the process to sell B.C. Rail, and in coming days in the Legislature van Dongen in theory as an now-Independent MLA could and arguably should get some opportunities to quiz Clark about those and other issues, such as exactly who, how and why the offer was made to Basi and Virk to plead guilty and shut down a trial just when it was about to involve senior players giving testimony.
Those would be fair questions for Estimates debate on Clark's budget but because the Clark Liberals are flooding the Legislature with last-minute Bills van Dongen may never get a chance to do so.
In the legislature the NDP Opposition tried to get a two-week extension to House sittings past the scheduled adjournment on May 31 but the government offered only the addition of a temporary third committee to simultaneously do House business and a few extra hours on four nights. And perversely the new provisions may prevent Independent MLAs from speaking in that new committee or perhaps any committee unless they first get permission from one or possibly both of the two party whips [which wasn't clear from the live broadcast of proceedings].
But there's lots more involved, including transcripts of wiretaps which include prominent business people and prominent journalists, particularly Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer who has been chastized by Tsakumis and others for allegedly having been somewhat less than zealous about digging in to and exposing the flaws in the BC Rail sale, such as in his column of May 12.
The way Tsakumis puts it, Palmer “ ADMITS on intercepted RCMP wiretap evidence from the ‘Basi-Virk’ trial (that the BC Rail sale) is “fixed” and appears “slanted” in favour of CN??? When he falls just short of admitting, on a different tape, that he was getting his information from [name removed], then Deputy Finance Minister to Gary Collins, and someone charged with the task of being head of the bid committee”.
So therein we have published allegations that the province's top politician and its top pundit are both allegedly named in police wiretap transcripts (along with many other people) and if that isn't something deserving some questions and answers in the Legislature then what does? But given the history of B.C. politics and media it's quite possible that all of that will get lost in the likely furores over other outrageous measures in the Liberals' flood of social and political reforms.
Of course there are lots of other sensitive issues on which Clark could and should be questioned, such as why there have been so many personnel changes in the Ministry of Attorney General (remembering that in B.C.'s system the deputy ministers all report directly to the Premier's Office), who does exactly what now in the Premier's Office and why (re importation of Harper Conservatives), whether she or someone close to her instigated the recent smears by MLAs Harry Bloy and Kevin Krueger against NDP Opposition leader Adrian Dix, how much her office is spending on polls and advertising and communications and why, what her relationships are now with strategist Patrick Kinsella, with certain government lawyers and other of her appointees, and so on. Not to mention federal-provincial relations and finances, resource development issues, job creation statistics, environmental cuts, income disparities, policing, municipal policies, health, welfare, education, forests and raw log exports, Crown corporations, water . . . . and various lawsuits against the government, not least of which are the Water War Crimes story and related litigation which may have precipitated recent personnel changes.
In fact there is a lot of dysfunction in and around the Clark Liberal government now, illustrated by the flood of late Bills, but it would be wrong to assume it's all due simply to incompetence, as Dix seemed to suggest in an eloquent speech earlier today (Tuesday May 15) on Motion 47, the unprecedented plan to split the Legislature into three simultaneous committees, in which Dix raked "the presidentialization of government in British Columbia".
That's because there is evidence suggesting that Bloy's remarks were deliberate (it looked like he was reading a script - see DT39), that Krueger's hallway remarks were deliberate (a colleague asked if it was a skit, then Krueger the next day did an almost word-for-word repeat of it on the Bill Good Show), and there is weapon, motive and opportunity to suggest that the Clark Liberals are deliberately avoiding a Fall sitting of the Legislature, or even an extension of the present sitting.
Their desire to avoid the legislature is not merely a fear of some embarrassing questions but even more it's a fear that the Liberals' majority in the seat count is decaying and soon could be precarious with only a few more defections or absences due to health or travel (such as Clark now being away in Asia on a hastily-arranged trade mission, which itself appears to be also part of the bad-news-avoidance strategy).
The NDP's two byelection wins give them 36 seats in an 85-seat House, with 3 Independents, 45 Liberals and 1 Liberal Speaker; in today's vote on Motion 47 the division produced 43 yeas and 38 nays. But if the Opposition mustered full attendance and full votes plus some defections while the government had some absences then the government could lose its majority and possibly trigger an early election call.
Though a fall of the Clark government is not yet likely, it should be noted that one Liberal MLA last week had a health emergency, and Tsakumis reports that when van Dongen rebelled against Campbell in 2010 he was part of a group of nine dissidents, so there are about as many reasons for Clark et al wanting to avoid a Fall sitting at all costs.
Travesties against democracy in B.C. Legislature
meant to aid coverups of B.C. Liberals' scandals
By John Twigg
If you are a regular long-time follower of proceedings in the B.C. Legislative Assembly you may be aware of some recent events in there that are an extraordinary travesty of democracy, namely the government forcing through a tsunami of major social-engineering reforms with little time for debate and virtually no consultations with affected interest groups.
A remaking of the legal industry even while a policy review is ongoing, a new regime for settling civil disputes, a rewriting of the pre-election advertising rules to in part gag small voices, a new drunk driving law and other changes in ICBC, a re-regulating of B.C. ferry services, some Bills to fix previous mistakes, the massive reintroduction of a provincial sales tax system - and more, even a restructuring of how the legislature itself will operate.
But even regular watchers of B.C. politics may not realize that that odious railroading is also part of an even worse ploy to minimize the time and attention available for MLA questions about the Premier's Office budget and operations and for the B.C. Liberal Party government to thereby maintain coverups of numerous scandals involving Premier Christy Clark and other prominent supporters of her and her regime.
Now that former Liberal MLA John van Dongen has openly questioned in and outside the Legislature the mechanics and propriety of the government's $6-million payment of legal bills for former aides David Basi and Bob Virk in an apparent exchange for their guilty pleas in the BC Rail scandal it is a more open season for new questions about that old scandal and other questions about the former Gordon Campbell government's very tainted sale of BC Rail to Canadian National Railway, a company chaired by one of Campbell's most influential political supporters, and a deal consulted on to three competing interests at once by his most influential strategic advisor.
To be specific, blogger Alex Tsakumis apparently has documents from the Basi-Virk trial which reportedly demonstrate "a clear link between Christy Clark and her close friend, fellow federal Liberal operative and briber of public officials [name removed] (which) .... van Dongen tells me ... is PRECISELY the work that made him stand up and take notice of the OBVIOUS issues " - dating from when Clark was a senior minister in the Campbell regime.
Furthermore, van Dongen and Auditor General John Doyle are litigating to get their own copies of those and other court documents which apparently could implicate Premier Clark and other prominent Liberals in the perversion of the process to sell B.C. Rail, and in coming days in the Legislature van Dongen in theory as an now-Independent MLA could and arguably should get some opportunities to quiz Clark about those and other issues, such as exactly who, how and why the offer was made to Basi and Virk to plead guilty and shut down a trial just when it was about to involve senior players giving testimony.
Those would be fair questions for Estimates debate on Clark's budget but because the Clark Liberals are flooding the Legislature with last-minute Bills van Dongen may never get a chance to do so.
In the legislature the NDP Opposition tried to get a two-week extension to House sittings past the scheduled adjournment on May 31 but the government offered only the addition of a temporary third committee to simultaneously do House business and a few extra hours on four nights. And perversely the new provisions may prevent Independent MLAs from speaking in that new committee or perhaps any committee unless they first get permission from one or possibly both of the two party whips [which wasn't clear from the live broadcast of proceedings].
But there's lots more involved, including transcripts of wiretaps which include prominent business people and prominent journalists, particularly Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer who has been chastized by Tsakumis and others for allegedly having been somewhat less than zealous about digging in to and exposing the flaws in the BC Rail sale, such as in his column of May 12.
The way Tsakumis puts it, Palmer “ ADMITS on intercepted RCMP wiretap evidence from the ‘Basi-Virk’ trial (that the BC Rail sale) is “fixed” and appears “slanted” in favour of CN??? When he falls just short of admitting, on a different tape, that he was getting his information from [name removed], then Deputy Finance Minister to Gary Collins, and someone charged with the task of being head of the bid committee”.
So therein we have published allegations that the province's top politician and its top pundit are both allegedly named in police wiretap transcripts (along with many other people) and if that isn't something deserving some questions and answers in the Legislature then what does? But given the history of B.C. politics and media it's quite possible that all of that will get lost in the likely furores over other outrageous measures in the Liberals' flood of social and political reforms.
Of course there are lots of other sensitive issues on which Clark could and should be questioned, such as why there have been so many personnel changes in the Ministry of Attorney General (remembering that in B.C.'s system the deputy ministers all report directly to the Premier's Office), who does exactly what now in the Premier's Office and why (re importation of Harper Conservatives), whether she or someone close to her instigated the recent smears by MLAs Harry Bloy and Kevin Krueger against NDP Opposition leader Adrian Dix, how much her office is spending on polls and advertising and communications and why, what her relationships are now with strategist Patrick Kinsella, with certain government lawyers and other of her appointees, and so on. Not to mention federal-provincial relations and finances, resource development issues, job creation statistics, environmental cuts, income disparities, policing, municipal policies, health, welfare, education, forests and raw log exports, Crown corporations, water . . . . and various lawsuits against the government, not least of which are the Water War Crimes story and related litigation which may have precipitated recent personnel changes.
In fact there is a lot of dysfunction in and around the Clark Liberal government now, illustrated by the flood of late Bills, but it would be wrong to assume it's all due simply to incompetence, as Dix seemed to suggest in an eloquent speech earlier today (Tuesday May 15) on Motion 47, the unprecedented plan to split the Legislature into three simultaneous committees, in which Dix raked "the presidentialization of government in British Columbia".
That's because there is evidence suggesting that Bloy's remarks were deliberate (it looked like he was reading a script - see DT39), that Krueger's hallway remarks were deliberate (a colleague asked if it was a skit, then Krueger the next day did an almost word-for-word repeat of it on the Bill Good Show), and there is weapon, motive and opportunity to suggest that the Clark Liberals are deliberately avoiding a Fall sitting of the Legislature, or even an extension of the present sitting.
Their desire to avoid the legislature is not merely a fear of some embarrassing questions but even more it's a fear that the Liberals' majority in the seat count is decaying and soon could be precarious with only a few more defections or absences due to health or travel (such as Clark now being away in Asia on a hastily-arranged trade mission, which itself appears to be also part of the bad-news-avoidance strategy).
The NDP's two byelection wins give them 36 seats in an 85-seat House, with 3 Independents, 45 Liberals and 1 Liberal Speaker; in today's vote on Motion 47 the division produced 43 yeas and 38 nays. But if the Opposition mustered full attendance and full votes plus some defections while the government had some absences then the government could lose its majority and possibly trigger an early election call.
Though a fall of the Clark government is not yet likely, it should be noted that one Liberal MLA last week had a health emergency, and Tsakumis reports that when van Dongen rebelled against Campbell in 2010 he was part of a group of nine dissidents, so there are about as many reasons for Clark et al wanting to avoid a Fall sitting at all costs.
BC Leg. travesties hide scandals
I'm working on an exposee of how the BC Liberals' abuses of the Legislature are part of a coverup of scandals involving themselves and their supporters, but meanwhile I'll direct visitors to a writeup by blogger Alex Tsakumis regarding some of those scandals, which drew this comment from me:
It’s all even worse than even most experts realize: the BC Liberals’ desire to rush thru a flood of Bills is designed to minimize and avoid questions about these very scandals and others, first during the pittance of time allowed for MLA questions about the Premier’s Office budget and operations, and then with the absence of a Fall sitting.
To put it simply, the New Christy Liberals are not only grossly abusing the democratic process, they are doing so to try to maintain a coverup of the BCR scandals and to maintain their coverups of numerous other potential bombshells, not to mention avoiding any tests of their decaying majority in the Legislature.
Those scandals involve wiretap transcripts and other documents which allegedly involve Christy Clark, lobbyists, prominent journalists and numerous others in machinations pointing towards a perversion of the B.C. government's process of selling BC Rail, and subsequent coverups of those perversions.
http://alexgtsakumis.com/2012/05/15/the-shame-and-disgrace-of-a-self-deluded-bc-mainstream-press-vaughn-palmer-paints-with-christy-clarks-brush/
It’s all even worse than even most experts realize: the BC Liberals’ desire to rush thru a flood of Bills is designed to minimize and avoid questions about these very scandals and others, first during the pittance of time allowed for MLA questions about the Premier’s Office budget and operations, and then with the absence of a Fall sitting.
To put it simply, the New Christy Liberals are not only grossly abusing the democratic process, they are doing so to try to maintain a coverup of the BCR scandals and to maintain their coverups of numerous other potential bombshells, not to mention avoiding any tests of their decaying majority in the Legislature.
Those scandals involve wiretap transcripts and other documents which allegedly involve Christy Clark, lobbyists, prominent journalists and numerous others in machinations pointing towards a perversion of the B.C. government's process of selling BC Rail, and subsequent coverups of those perversions.
http://alexgtsakumis.com/2012/05/15/the-shame-and-disgrace-of-a-self-deluded-bc-mainstream-press-vaughn-palmer-paints-with-christy-clarks-brush/
Thursday, May 10, 2012
More job creation could be done
The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 43 May 10, 2012
Job creation strategies emerge as Key Issue
in elections in B.C. and all around the world
By John Twigg
It is tempting for me to churn out some comments on B.C. politics, which these days are at a boiling churning tipping and turning point, and I will do something on that soon (I hope), but first I want to focus on something even more important: the future of B.C.'s economy in a turbulent troubled world.
The recent elections in France, Greece, England, Italy and other jurisdictions have all prominently featured employment policies and job-creation strategies, and job-related issues are emerging as key ones in many other jurisdictions too, such as U.S. President Barack Obama making it more or less the first plank in his re-election campaign and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper making employment issues a key theme in his Conservative Party government's recent budget.
"Next week I am going to urge Congress ... to take some action on some common sense ideas right now that can accelerate even more job growth," Obama said recently at an early campaign stop in Northern Virginia, said to be a key swing area in the Nov. 6 Presidential election. He was responding to employment statistics showing that U.S. jobs growth had been disappointingly slow.
The Harper government meanwhile has presented a massive budget bill that contains many employment engineering moves, including layoffs in the public service, prunings in the CBC's budget and new investments in skills training for young aboriginals - as well as pushing major resource projects through a faster review process ostensibly for their employment and investment attributes.
Closer to home, the security of public-sector jobs and private-sector investment was a significant factor in the unexpectedly-easy re-election of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party government and its new Premier Alison Redford [see Daily Twigg #42], and in B.C. the two recent byelections both involved employment issues at the doorsteps and in voter turnouts [see DT #40], with B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix strongly emphasizing the importance of assisting post-secondary education and training as a means of securing sustainable jobs.
Jobs a key issue in France
The jobs issue also was especially prominent in France's Presidential election, with openly socialist François Hollande winning with 52% on a platform that essentially would preserve the country's heavy intervention in employment standards and protectionism of jobs, such as retaining and adding some 60,000 jobs for teachers, and taxing the wealthy to pay for a more "robust" social system. He also wants to renegotiate France's role in a European fiscal arrangements pact to enable more economic stimulus and job creation, an idea opposed by conservative Germans but given some credence by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
That pattern was echoed in Greece where voters en masse rejected German-imposed austerity measures that included mass layoffs and instead supported a variety of socialist and "Radical Left" parties who apparently would rather see Greece default on its debts and get kicked out of the European Union than engage in cutting jobs and social programs, though exactly how it will be worked out remains to be seen and compromises are still possible.
A popular backlash against austerity also was seen in Britain's local elections to 181 councils, with Labour gaining 823 seats, Conservatives losing 405 and their coalition partner Liberal Democrats losing 336, reportedly because the centre-right coalition was "out of touch with voters struggling with high unemployment, price increases and low wages" (according to Reuters). British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for the defeat and blamed it on the need to reduce Britain's mountain of debt.
A remarkably similar outcome was seen in Italy's local elections where representatives of centre-right and centre-left parties that had signed on to the European austerity measures were widely replaced by anti-austerity parties including one led by a comedian that organized mainly through social media and won 20% support for Italy to exit using the euro.
But really the problem is not so much a bunch of angry voters as it is a sort of structural problem seen throughout Europe, such as Spain struggling with an unemployment rate of 25%, which includes 52% for workers under age 25, and Portugal and Ireland with similar problems, all facing heavy debt burdens requiring spending cuts by governments that tend to worsen unemployment.
Even nations with rapidly expanding economies, namely China, India and Brazil, are beset by employment challenges, such as China having to build dozens of whole new cities in order to accomodate the flood of people leaving rural farms in search of better jobs, which triggers protectionism, monetary gyrations and other responses related to employment issues.
A good example is Mexico, which has a rapidly-expanding economy and population but such a corrupt and dysfunctional society that it has become run by drug cartels, the system of justice is in disrepute and thousands of farm workers will travel all the way to Canada to find temporary jobs.
That surplus of labour and shortage of jobs also has greatly infected the United States, which has a huge underground economy involving drugs, guns, gangs, prostitution, pornography and money-laundering which among other ills starve governments of revenue and drive up operating costs. But the lack of good-paying legitimate jobs leads many young people into higher-paying untaxed illegal jobs, not only in the U.S. and Mexico but all around the world.
Many methods available for job creation
Perhaps this will not be new to most of my readers, who tend to be high-end consumers of news and public affairs, but the question is what should or could be done about it?
Advocates of Reaganomics will be quick to argue for further tax cuts for the rich and even more incentives for investors, but do those and other such measures really work? Perhaps they are merely a means for one jurisdiction to beggar its neighbours, such as Canada importing doctors and other professionals from third-world nations rather than paying to train more people already here.
Other analysts claim there are only two choices for governments facing fiscal and economic crunches, to raise taxes or cut spending, but really there are many other strategies available too, such as empowering new industries (e.g. water exports and medical marijuana), changing or even adding currencies and stock exchanges, redefining what constitutes paid work and taxable income, nationalizations and privatizations, encouraging credit unions and co-ops, investing in self-sufficiency to back out imports, subsidizing industries to stimulate exports, and more - such as mandating that waste products henceforth be recycled, and that logs being exported henceforth be held back for local processing.
Looking at British Columbia's employment trends [see DT #29], one sees that those usual free-enterprise incentives have failed (so far) to stimulate a wave of job creation and meanwhile B.C.'s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate is stuck around 7% - which is not the worst in Canada but is nowhere near zero either, and don't forget that that crude measure has been masking the fact that there are many thousands of discouraged workers who have dropped out of the official labour force but who would quickly take a job if one could be found that they could do.
[ For overviews of B.C.'s employment trends see http://www.gov.bc.ca/keyinitiatives/economic_indicators.html as well as http://www.central1.com/publications/economics/index.html and http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/BCEIndexv11n1.pdf ]
While it is apparent that quite a few resource megaprojects are about to start up in B.C., there is still no sign of any viable long-term strategy being developed for direct job creation and indeed one of the main running debate issues in the Legislature is the apparent shortage of funding and lack of training programs for skilled labour jobs such as heavy-duty mechanics, so the resource industries' needs for such workers are increasingly being met with imported workers.
For many years British Columbia had a healthy apprenticeship and internship program but it was one of the first items slashed when B.C. Liberal Party Premier Gordon Campbell took office in 2001, and only in recent years has effort been made to revive it - a small step in the right direction.
Current B.C. Liberal Party Premier Christy Clark of course talks about using job creation to support families but so far it has been more talk than action, with heavy reliance on private-sector initiatives to expand employment even while public-sector jobs are being capped and cut, which help explain why B.C.'s GDP statistics have been sluggish too (though the modest minimum wage hikes should boost them a bit).
Dix complained earlier this year that the Liberal government's job creation efforts have been focussed too much on existing powerful interests, which drew a response from Finance Minister Kevin Falcon that Dix fails to understand the importance of doing so.
"We've spent the last 10 years working hard to bring back high-paying jobs to British Columbia," said Falcon, but that seems to admit there has been a failure to also create more low-paying jobs for unskilled and entry-level workers, which of course is where a great many of the job-seekers are.
That view echoes of the famous New Deal of former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt who said "Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men."
The argument against such direct job creation of course is often that governments with onerous debt loads cannot afford to do so but the corollary to that may be that governments facing chronic high unemployment cannot afford to not engage in direct job creation too.
That's not a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't paradigm but it's more like a need to do both rather than one or the other, namely try to cap deficits and debt while still stimulating commerce and job creation with a full range of measures.
Indeed one of the merits of direct job creation like France suddenly hiring thousands of teachers (maybe think of them as skills trainers) is that those teachers not only pay income taxes on what they earn but also they pay sales taxes on what they spend and they stimulate other jobs in the process, such as on food, housing, transportation and other consumables. Such job creation may pay more dividends to the economy and the government than something like a subsidy for a green energy project such as B.C.'s Pacific Carbon Trust's dubious offsets which tax schools and hospitals on their emissions and give the proceeds to private-sector producers of natural gas.
B.C. lacks plan for direct job creation
Anyway it has become obvious now that B.C. for one (and many other jurisdictions too) needs a new vision for economic renewal that includes a full range of measures aiming towards full employment in a sustainable, self-sufficient and green economy.
With the global economy apparently facing worsening problems and the U.S. economy apparently being undermined by debt and crime and political corruption and the Canadian government being unable or unwilling to act in B.C.'s best interests it behooves the provincial government to become much more proactive and effective at economic development, job creation and social and economic engineering.
While it is attractive in various ways for governments to focus on encouraging a few large projects such as LNG plants or the Jumbo Glacier resort, the more beneficial and practical projects probably involve training street people to recycle street waste, training aboriginal youths to be parks workers, training welfare recipients to be caregivers for people with mental challenges (thereby enabling both groups to stay out of more costly institutions), and adopting strategies to reduce bed-blocking in high-cost hospitals and give seniors in need better qualities of life in assisted-living facilities.
In fact there are many many good things that could be done by a government with a stronger will to really make a positive difference, such as assisting in achieving self-sufficiency in food, energy and other essentials, encouraging prosperity and social progress, social security and safe streets and yes - full employment.
Former B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett was renowned for holding that job for 20 years and among the reasons he did so (apart from blatant partisan electioneering in office) was his policy focus on job creation even at the expense of the environment; he dismissed pulp mill emissions as "the smell of money" and his catch phrase was a high-pitched shriek of "Jobs!" .
That was a long time ago when B.C.'s population was only a fraction of what it is today but nonetheless the policy challenges remain much the same: to somehow create enough jobs that the economy and society can be considered prosperous and sustainable.
In a future issue I'll have a list of specific initiatives that B.C. could undertake if it wanted to be more aggressive at job creation.
Job creation strategies emerge as Key Issue
in elections in B.C. and all around the world
By John Twigg
It is tempting for me to churn out some comments on B.C. politics, which these days are at a boiling churning tipping and turning point, and I will do something on that soon (I hope), but first I want to focus on something even more important: the future of B.C.'s economy in a turbulent troubled world.
The recent elections in France, Greece, England, Italy and other jurisdictions have all prominently featured employment policies and job-creation strategies, and job-related issues are emerging as key ones in many other jurisdictions too, such as U.S. President Barack Obama making it more or less the first plank in his re-election campaign and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper making employment issues a key theme in his Conservative Party government's recent budget.
"Next week I am going to urge Congress ... to take some action on some common sense ideas right now that can accelerate even more job growth," Obama said recently at an early campaign stop in Northern Virginia, said to be a key swing area in the Nov. 6 Presidential election. He was responding to employment statistics showing that U.S. jobs growth had been disappointingly slow.
The Harper government meanwhile has presented a massive budget bill that contains many employment engineering moves, including layoffs in the public service, prunings in the CBC's budget and new investments in skills training for young aboriginals - as well as pushing major resource projects through a faster review process ostensibly for their employment and investment attributes.
Closer to home, the security of public-sector jobs and private-sector investment was a significant factor in the unexpectedly-easy re-election of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party government and its new Premier Alison Redford [see Daily Twigg #42], and in B.C. the two recent byelections both involved employment issues at the doorsteps and in voter turnouts [see DT #40], with B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix strongly emphasizing the importance of assisting post-secondary education and training as a means of securing sustainable jobs.
Jobs a key issue in France
The jobs issue also was especially prominent in France's Presidential election, with openly socialist François Hollande winning with 52% on a platform that essentially would preserve the country's heavy intervention in employment standards and protectionism of jobs, such as retaining and adding some 60,000 jobs for teachers, and taxing the wealthy to pay for a more "robust" social system. He also wants to renegotiate France's role in a European fiscal arrangements pact to enable more economic stimulus and job creation, an idea opposed by conservative Germans but given some credence by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
That pattern was echoed in Greece where voters en masse rejected German-imposed austerity measures that included mass layoffs and instead supported a variety of socialist and "Radical Left" parties who apparently would rather see Greece default on its debts and get kicked out of the European Union than engage in cutting jobs and social programs, though exactly how it will be worked out remains to be seen and compromises are still possible.
A popular backlash against austerity also was seen in Britain's local elections to 181 councils, with Labour gaining 823 seats, Conservatives losing 405 and their coalition partner Liberal Democrats losing 336, reportedly because the centre-right coalition was "out of touch with voters struggling with high unemployment, price increases and low wages" (according to Reuters). British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for the defeat and blamed it on the need to reduce Britain's mountain of debt.
A remarkably similar outcome was seen in Italy's local elections where representatives of centre-right and centre-left parties that had signed on to the European austerity measures were widely replaced by anti-austerity parties including one led by a comedian that organized mainly through social media and won 20% support for Italy to exit using the euro.
But really the problem is not so much a bunch of angry voters as it is a sort of structural problem seen throughout Europe, such as Spain struggling with an unemployment rate of 25%, which includes 52% for workers under age 25, and Portugal and Ireland with similar problems, all facing heavy debt burdens requiring spending cuts by governments that tend to worsen unemployment.
Even nations with rapidly expanding economies, namely China, India and Brazil, are beset by employment challenges, such as China having to build dozens of whole new cities in order to accomodate the flood of people leaving rural farms in search of better jobs, which triggers protectionism, monetary gyrations and other responses related to employment issues.
A good example is Mexico, which has a rapidly-expanding economy and population but such a corrupt and dysfunctional society that it has become run by drug cartels, the system of justice is in disrepute and thousands of farm workers will travel all the way to Canada to find temporary jobs.
That surplus of labour and shortage of jobs also has greatly infected the United States, which has a huge underground economy involving drugs, guns, gangs, prostitution, pornography and money-laundering which among other ills starve governments of revenue and drive up operating costs. But the lack of good-paying legitimate jobs leads many young people into higher-paying untaxed illegal jobs, not only in the U.S. and Mexico but all around the world.
Many methods available for job creation
Perhaps this will not be new to most of my readers, who tend to be high-end consumers of news and public affairs, but the question is what should or could be done about it?
Advocates of Reaganomics will be quick to argue for further tax cuts for the rich and even more incentives for investors, but do those and other such measures really work? Perhaps they are merely a means for one jurisdiction to beggar its neighbours, such as Canada importing doctors and other professionals from third-world nations rather than paying to train more people already here.
Other analysts claim there are only two choices for governments facing fiscal and economic crunches, to raise taxes or cut spending, but really there are many other strategies available too, such as empowering new industries (e.g. water exports and medical marijuana), changing or even adding currencies and stock exchanges, redefining what constitutes paid work and taxable income, nationalizations and privatizations, encouraging credit unions and co-ops, investing in self-sufficiency to back out imports, subsidizing industries to stimulate exports, and more - such as mandating that waste products henceforth be recycled, and that logs being exported henceforth be held back for local processing.
Looking at British Columbia's employment trends [see DT #29], one sees that those usual free-enterprise incentives have failed (so far) to stimulate a wave of job creation and meanwhile B.C.'s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate is stuck around 7% - which is not the worst in Canada but is nowhere near zero either, and don't forget that that crude measure has been masking the fact that there are many thousands of discouraged workers who have dropped out of the official labour force but who would quickly take a job if one could be found that they could do.
[ For overviews of B.C.'s employment trends see http://www.gov.bc.ca/keyinitiatives/economic_indicators.html as well as http://www.central1.com/publications/economics/index.html and http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/BCEIndexv11n1.pdf ]
While it is apparent that quite a few resource megaprojects are about to start up in B.C., there is still no sign of any viable long-term strategy being developed for direct job creation and indeed one of the main running debate issues in the Legislature is the apparent shortage of funding and lack of training programs for skilled labour jobs such as heavy-duty mechanics, so the resource industries' needs for such workers are increasingly being met with imported workers.
For many years British Columbia had a healthy apprenticeship and internship program but it was one of the first items slashed when B.C. Liberal Party Premier Gordon Campbell took office in 2001, and only in recent years has effort been made to revive it - a small step in the right direction.
Current B.C. Liberal Party Premier Christy Clark of course talks about using job creation to support families but so far it has been more talk than action, with heavy reliance on private-sector initiatives to expand employment even while public-sector jobs are being capped and cut, which help explain why B.C.'s GDP statistics have been sluggish too (though the modest minimum wage hikes should boost them a bit).
Dix complained earlier this year that the Liberal government's job creation efforts have been focussed too much on existing powerful interests, which drew a response from Finance Minister Kevin Falcon that Dix fails to understand the importance of doing so.
"We've spent the last 10 years working hard to bring back high-paying jobs to British Columbia," said Falcon, but that seems to admit there has been a failure to also create more low-paying jobs for unskilled and entry-level workers, which of course is where a great many of the job-seekers are.
That view echoes of the famous New Deal of former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt who said "Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men."
The argument against such direct job creation of course is often that governments with onerous debt loads cannot afford to do so but the corollary to that may be that governments facing chronic high unemployment cannot afford to not engage in direct job creation too.
That's not a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't paradigm but it's more like a need to do both rather than one or the other, namely try to cap deficits and debt while still stimulating commerce and job creation with a full range of measures.
Indeed one of the merits of direct job creation like France suddenly hiring thousands of teachers (maybe think of them as skills trainers) is that those teachers not only pay income taxes on what they earn but also they pay sales taxes on what they spend and they stimulate other jobs in the process, such as on food, housing, transportation and other consumables. Such job creation may pay more dividends to the economy and the government than something like a subsidy for a green energy project such as B.C.'s Pacific Carbon Trust's dubious offsets which tax schools and hospitals on their emissions and give the proceeds to private-sector producers of natural gas.
B.C. lacks plan for direct job creation
Anyway it has become obvious now that B.C. for one (and many other jurisdictions too) needs a new vision for economic renewal that includes a full range of measures aiming towards full employment in a sustainable, self-sufficient and green economy.
With the global economy apparently facing worsening problems and the U.S. economy apparently being undermined by debt and crime and political corruption and the Canadian government being unable or unwilling to act in B.C.'s best interests it behooves the provincial government to become much more proactive and effective at economic development, job creation and social and economic engineering.
While it is attractive in various ways for governments to focus on encouraging a few large projects such as LNG plants or the Jumbo Glacier resort, the more beneficial and practical projects probably involve training street people to recycle street waste, training aboriginal youths to be parks workers, training welfare recipients to be caregivers for people with mental challenges (thereby enabling both groups to stay out of more costly institutions), and adopting strategies to reduce bed-blocking in high-cost hospitals and give seniors in need better qualities of life in assisted-living facilities.
In fact there are many many good things that could be done by a government with a stronger will to really make a positive difference, such as assisting in achieving self-sufficiency in food, energy and other essentials, encouraging prosperity and social progress, social security and safe streets and yes - full employment.
Former B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett was renowned for holding that job for 20 years and among the reasons he did so (apart from blatant partisan electioneering in office) was his policy focus on job creation even at the expense of the environment; he dismissed pulp mill emissions as "the smell of money" and his catch phrase was a high-pitched shriek of "Jobs!" .
That was a long time ago when B.C.'s population was only a fraction of what it is today but nonetheless the policy challenges remain much the same: to somehow create enough jobs that the economy and society can be considered prosperous and sustainable.
In a future issue I'll have a list of specific initiatives that B.C. could undertake if it wanted to be more aggressive at job creation.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Analysis of Alberta election
The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 42 Apr. 30, 2012
B.C. Politics Trendwatch
Alberta's confounding election result
holds big lessons for B.C.'s parties too
By John Twigg
With the benefit of hindsight and the analyses of others I think I can say now what really happened in that weird Alberta provincial election in which Premier Alison Redford and the Progressive Conservatives confounded the pundits and pollsters by winning another large majority while the upstart Wildrose Alliance Party snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
It may be a bit late to be doing such analysis (the election was on April 23) but it's still important because some key aspects could well be repeated and/or avoided by several parties and players in British Columbia's general election scheduled for May 14, 2013 - and anyway lots of other media and pundits are still discussing the matter too.
In short, WRAP leader Danielle Smith blew it because in her inexperience she let herself become infected by the arrogance of Premier Stephen Harper and his majority Conservative government, many of whose members were openly backing WRAP candidates following Harper's unusual move to remove his ban on federal Tories engaging in provincial politics, which he did partly because so many of his Alberta colleagues wanted to support WRAP's hard-c conservative platform and partly because in the B.C. byelections on April 19 Harper and his colleagues realized or decided that the best or only way to stop a future New Democratic Party government was to support the coalition called B.C. Liberal Party and not support the upstart hard-c conservative party called B.C. Conservative Party.
Got all that? The party names may change from province to province but the ideological songs remain the same: paramount!
Many analysts with vested interests have been quick to conclude that the Alberta election turned on a dime due mainly to their own issues, so the environmental activists claim the key issue was Smith's arrogant complete denial of global warming and other related issues including her party leaflets sneering at "environmental extremists".
Similarly, gay activists claimed the key issue was the late-in-campaign revelations that a WRAP candidate who was also a pastor had claimed in a posted sermon that homosexuals would be punished by eternal torment in the lake of fire, which Smith vainly tried to defend as his right to say as a pastor even though politically it is stupid and scripturally it is wrong. (The punishment stated in the Bible in Rev. 21:8 is not eternal torment but is a so-called second death in a lake of fire and that is the same merciful quick death that billions of other non-homosexual sinners including false preachers will get, as opposed to qualifying for eternal life. There is some eternal torment mentioned in Revelation 14 but it will apply only to those humans who choose to worship a yet-to-be-seen beast power who will rise up in rebellion against God.)
But even those two hot-button issues were not the only main factors in WRAP's defeat, and Smith herself also cited poorly-explained plans for a provincial police force, a provincial pension plan, conscience rights and approaches to oil industry pollution. Plus there were other issues too such as fiddling with Medicare and planning to scrap the Human Rights Commission that contributed to an apparent turnaround by voters in the last few days of the campaign.
So how did Wildrose build up such a large lead in early opinion polls and then apparently squander it all in the latter days? Well after 11 consecutive majority governments for the Progressive Conservatives and their choice of a very moderate new leader (who happened to be a woman) there was understandably some desire for regime change, especially because there were questions about some mismanaged issues - and then out of the south there came a new reform movement (all puns intended!) espousing a form of populist conservatism that felt and sounded a lot like the Harper Conservatives' mantras and though the party had only a handful of candidates with elected experience they had several skilled backroom advisers and a photogenic leader who looked and sounded more than a bit like American Sarah Palin (though as journalist Andrew Nikiforuk pointed out Smith was only a pale imitation and showed none of Palin's willingness to challenge authorities such as Palin did in sometimes fighting the oil industry in Alaska).
The media soon got a hold of the story and suddenly a juggernaut was born: out of nowhere an upstart party was going to win a large majority - if the polls were to be believed, and why not when dozens of different polls all found more or less the same thing. But apparently almost everyone overlooked the fact found afterwards by Angus Reid pollsters that an amazing 39% of voters decided their choices in the last three days.
Though Wildrose started strongly, once the campaign reached the stage of all-candidates and leaders debates the wheels began getting wobbly under WRAP's cart and by voting day they had simply fallen off; their momentum was gone.
Reports suggest the beginning of the decline was Smith's failure to more firmly deal with the clearly anti-homosexual candidate; to her credit (in the eyes of some pundits such as Andrew Coyne and Michael Den Tandt) she did defend the right of free speech for theologians but to her debit she failed to convince Albertans that under her leadership there would be zero tolerance of discrimination or abuse of human rights. Then that controversy was quickly followed by one in which a WRAP candidate claimed he had an advantage because he was a white guy running against visible minorities, which she also mishandled by treating too lightly, mainly dismissing it as a mis-speak by a rookie politician.
The turning point though appeared to be the main leaders debate on the evening of Thursday April 19 before a live audience in the CBC's Edmonton studios - which is about as left-leaning as one can get in Alberta and sure enough featured a mob booing and almost wanting to lynch Smith because she dared to doubt the supposed science of global warming though she did advocate measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which NDP leader Brian Mason ridiculed with outrage while the urban audience cheered.
It didn't help that in the final days of the campaign Smith seemed to tour aimlessly by bus in a bubble through Conservative strongholds while the national media, especially the Toronto Globe and Mail, threw numerous smears at her, such as on April 21 with columnists Margaret Wente citing "a party full of bigots and climate-change deniers" and Jeffrey Simpson warning of plans "to build 'firewalls' around the province" - i.e. threats to cut off equalization payments.
Other notable media slams included a Den Tandt column on April 19 headlined "Wildrose win wouldn't be as scary as some say" and Simpson on April 20 headlined "Nothing's rosy for climate if Wildrose wins".
Also notable in retrospect was the Globe's edition of Saturday April 14 which featured a nasty profile of Smith topped by an unflattering photo and accompanied by brief profiles of some candidates including one of journalist Link Byfield that unfairly smeared him as anti-Semitic.
So now we can more clearly see that what happened in the Alberta election was this: an upstart conservative movement developed an overly-simplistic platform that appealed to lots of people but once the mainstream media exposed the flaws in it a large proportion of voters went to the more moderate incumbent in order to stop them.
In the end the Progressive Conservatives won 61 seats with 44% of the votes, Wildrose won only 17 seats with 34%, the Liberals 5 seats with about 10% and the New Democrats 4 seats (up two to regain official party status) with 10%.
That was a big turnaround from early in the campaign when several pollsters had Wildrose at about 45% and the PCs at only 31%, though that apparently ignored a reality that there was a very large undecided and that campaign tactics could still swing many voters.
The turnout was up sharply to 57% too, the highest since 1993, which further suggests that many Alberta voters were stampeded into stopping Wildrose, which is especially reflected in the realtive weakness of the Liberal and NDP results.
It should also be noted that PC leader Alison Redford is a very red Tory, a politically-correct lawyer who won the party leadership with the assistance of flocks of teachers who joined simply to support her bid. Though she was criticized for being too liberal, that proved to be her greatest strength.
So while some headlines referred to Redford extending a 41-year dynasty, really it was a regime change inside the province's natural governing party, or Alberta's version of a free-enterprise coalition. And though Redford denied her win was due to strategic voting, that is exactly what happened: hordes of moderate people voted for a moderate regime called Progressive Conservative in order to thwart a radical conservative party.
Implications for B.C. politics
The implications of that result for B.C. politics could be huge, especially warning that the B.C. Conservative Party led by John Cummins will not have any success unless and until it too turns "red Tory" and eschews the Bible-thumping fundamentalism of some of its progenitors. It certainly is valid for its supporters to personally hold theologically-based principles but trying to use politics to impose them on society as a whole is simply a no-go non-starter, which also was somewhat reflected in the recent byelections.
But there's also a big lesson for B.C. Premier Christy Clark and her B.C. Liberal Party, namely that trying to masquerade as more conservative than the Conservatives is futile and really her and their best chance lies in the middle, building a big tent that will appeal to moderates of both left and right. That is what Redford did and look what it produced!
So Clark needs to do more like her first act in office: raise the minimum wage after a ridiculous, crazy and unconscionable 10-year freeze by her predecessor, and less pandering to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his big-oil politics.
As for B.C.'s New Democrats, there should be lessons too, including that campaign tactics are still critical, and that having a moderate platform attractive to a broad range of voters is essential to avoiding a stop-them stampede by voters. And that they should be prepared to quickly counter smears from the mainstream media, especially out-of-province ones.
"We were focused on delivering a positive constructive plan that made sense to the people of Alberta to build our future,” Redford said on election night, and that's something all parties should emulate.
And let there be lessons for the pollsters too, some of whom seemed to get caught up in a game of being first to accurately predict an outlandish result, and some of whom went too far in predicting what the numbers would produce. Remember the surveys measure "if an election was held today" not in the election still several weeks away.
It is all too easy and tempting to make rash predictions, such as I did with a hope that the Canucks would win round one in five games, but when pollsters are dealing with the public interest they should be more cautious and circumspect, and not forget to report the undecided numbers too.
Finally, let's not overlook the impact of new media such as Twitter and Facebook, which are making the dissemination of information ever more rapid and wider. Even though many voters are still not involved in social media, those who are tend to be opinion leaders and they need to be cultivated like a special crop.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/04/27/redfords-debt-to-albertas-left
http://ezralevant.com/2012/04/the-undertaker-alberta-premier.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/gary_mason/bcs-christy-clark-the-political-chameleon/article2416691/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/so-happy-yet-so-restless-in-alberta/article2406959/?utm_medium=Feeds:%20RSS/Atom&utm_source=Opinions&utm_content=2406959
http://www.angus-reid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2012.04.27_Election_AB.pdf
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/04/25/Reading-Albertas-Election/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=250412
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/taking-a-lesson-from-alberta-clark-edges-back-to-the-centre/article2413225/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/19/wildrose-leader-booed-during-alberta-leaders-debate-for-doubting-climate-change-science/
http://politicsrespun.org/2012/04/deconstructing-the-wildrose-effect/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/wildrose-party-set-for-sweeping-majority-latest-poll-shows/article2410297/
B.C. Politics Trendwatch
Alberta's confounding election result
holds big lessons for B.C.'s parties too
By John Twigg
With the benefit of hindsight and the analyses of others I think I can say now what really happened in that weird Alberta provincial election in which Premier Alison Redford and the Progressive Conservatives confounded the pundits and pollsters by winning another large majority while the upstart Wildrose Alliance Party snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
It may be a bit late to be doing such analysis (the election was on April 23) but it's still important because some key aspects could well be repeated and/or avoided by several parties and players in British Columbia's general election scheduled for May 14, 2013 - and anyway lots of other media and pundits are still discussing the matter too.
In short, WRAP leader Danielle Smith blew it because in her inexperience she let herself become infected by the arrogance of Premier Stephen Harper and his majority Conservative government, many of whose members were openly backing WRAP candidates following Harper's unusual move to remove his ban on federal Tories engaging in provincial politics, which he did partly because so many of his Alberta colleagues wanted to support WRAP's hard-c conservative platform and partly because in the B.C. byelections on April 19 Harper and his colleagues realized or decided that the best or only way to stop a future New Democratic Party government was to support the coalition called B.C. Liberal Party and not support the upstart hard-c conservative party called B.C. Conservative Party.
Got all that? The party names may change from province to province but the ideological songs remain the same: paramount!
Many analysts with vested interests have been quick to conclude that the Alberta election turned on a dime due mainly to their own issues, so the environmental activists claim the key issue was Smith's arrogant complete denial of global warming and other related issues including her party leaflets sneering at "environmental extremists".
Similarly, gay activists claimed the key issue was the late-in-campaign revelations that a WRAP candidate who was also a pastor had claimed in a posted sermon that homosexuals would be punished by eternal torment in the lake of fire, which Smith vainly tried to defend as his right to say as a pastor even though politically it is stupid and scripturally it is wrong. (The punishment stated in the Bible in Rev. 21:8 is not eternal torment but is a so-called second death in a lake of fire and that is the same merciful quick death that billions of other non-homosexual sinners including false preachers will get, as opposed to qualifying for eternal life. There is some eternal torment mentioned in Revelation 14 but it will apply only to those humans who choose to worship a yet-to-be-seen beast power who will rise up in rebellion against God.)
But even those two hot-button issues were not the only main factors in WRAP's defeat, and Smith herself also cited poorly-explained plans for a provincial police force, a provincial pension plan, conscience rights and approaches to oil industry pollution. Plus there were other issues too such as fiddling with Medicare and planning to scrap the Human Rights Commission that contributed to an apparent turnaround by voters in the last few days of the campaign.
So how did Wildrose build up such a large lead in early opinion polls and then apparently squander it all in the latter days? Well after 11 consecutive majority governments for the Progressive Conservatives and their choice of a very moderate new leader (who happened to be a woman) there was understandably some desire for regime change, especially because there were questions about some mismanaged issues - and then out of the south there came a new reform movement (all puns intended!) espousing a form of populist conservatism that felt and sounded a lot like the Harper Conservatives' mantras and though the party had only a handful of candidates with elected experience they had several skilled backroom advisers and a photogenic leader who looked and sounded more than a bit like American Sarah Palin (though as journalist Andrew Nikiforuk pointed out Smith was only a pale imitation and showed none of Palin's willingness to challenge authorities such as Palin did in sometimes fighting the oil industry in Alaska).
The media soon got a hold of the story and suddenly a juggernaut was born: out of nowhere an upstart party was going to win a large majority - if the polls were to be believed, and why not when dozens of different polls all found more or less the same thing. But apparently almost everyone overlooked the fact found afterwards by Angus Reid pollsters that an amazing 39% of voters decided their choices in the last three days.
Though Wildrose started strongly, once the campaign reached the stage of all-candidates and leaders debates the wheels began getting wobbly under WRAP's cart and by voting day they had simply fallen off; their momentum was gone.
Reports suggest the beginning of the decline was Smith's failure to more firmly deal with the clearly anti-homosexual candidate; to her credit (in the eyes of some pundits such as Andrew Coyne and Michael Den Tandt) she did defend the right of free speech for theologians but to her debit she failed to convince Albertans that under her leadership there would be zero tolerance of discrimination or abuse of human rights. Then that controversy was quickly followed by one in which a WRAP candidate claimed he had an advantage because he was a white guy running against visible minorities, which she also mishandled by treating too lightly, mainly dismissing it as a mis-speak by a rookie politician.
The turning point though appeared to be the main leaders debate on the evening of Thursday April 19 before a live audience in the CBC's Edmonton studios - which is about as left-leaning as one can get in Alberta and sure enough featured a mob booing and almost wanting to lynch Smith because she dared to doubt the supposed science of global warming though she did advocate measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which NDP leader Brian Mason ridiculed with outrage while the urban audience cheered.
It didn't help that in the final days of the campaign Smith seemed to tour aimlessly by bus in a bubble through Conservative strongholds while the national media, especially the Toronto Globe and Mail, threw numerous smears at her, such as on April 21 with columnists Margaret Wente citing "a party full of bigots and climate-change deniers" and Jeffrey Simpson warning of plans "to build 'firewalls' around the province" - i.e. threats to cut off equalization payments.
Other notable media slams included a Den Tandt column on April 19 headlined "Wildrose win wouldn't be as scary as some say" and Simpson on April 20 headlined "Nothing's rosy for climate if Wildrose wins".
Also notable in retrospect was the Globe's edition of Saturday April 14 which featured a nasty profile of Smith topped by an unflattering photo and accompanied by brief profiles of some candidates including one of journalist Link Byfield that unfairly smeared him as anti-Semitic.
So now we can more clearly see that what happened in the Alberta election was this: an upstart conservative movement developed an overly-simplistic platform that appealed to lots of people but once the mainstream media exposed the flaws in it a large proportion of voters went to the more moderate incumbent in order to stop them.
In the end the Progressive Conservatives won 61 seats with 44% of the votes, Wildrose won only 17 seats with 34%, the Liberals 5 seats with about 10% and the New Democrats 4 seats (up two to regain official party status) with 10%.
That was a big turnaround from early in the campaign when several pollsters had Wildrose at about 45% and the PCs at only 31%, though that apparently ignored a reality that there was a very large undecided and that campaign tactics could still swing many voters.
The turnout was up sharply to 57% too, the highest since 1993, which further suggests that many Alberta voters were stampeded into stopping Wildrose, which is especially reflected in the realtive weakness of the Liberal and NDP results.
It should also be noted that PC leader Alison Redford is a very red Tory, a politically-correct lawyer who won the party leadership with the assistance of flocks of teachers who joined simply to support her bid. Though she was criticized for being too liberal, that proved to be her greatest strength.
So while some headlines referred to Redford extending a 41-year dynasty, really it was a regime change inside the province's natural governing party, or Alberta's version of a free-enterprise coalition. And though Redford denied her win was due to strategic voting, that is exactly what happened: hordes of moderate people voted for a moderate regime called Progressive Conservative in order to thwart a radical conservative party.
Implications for B.C. politics
The implications of that result for B.C. politics could be huge, especially warning that the B.C. Conservative Party led by John Cummins will not have any success unless and until it too turns "red Tory" and eschews the Bible-thumping fundamentalism of some of its progenitors. It certainly is valid for its supporters to personally hold theologically-based principles but trying to use politics to impose them on society as a whole is simply a no-go non-starter, which also was somewhat reflected in the recent byelections.
But there's also a big lesson for B.C. Premier Christy Clark and her B.C. Liberal Party, namely that trying to masquerade as more conservative than the Conservatives is futile and really her and their best chance lies in the middle, building a big tent that will appeal to moderates of both left and right. That is what Redford did and look what it produced!
So Clark needs to do more like her first act in office: raise the minimum wage after a ridiculous, crazy and unconscionable 10-year freeze by her predecessor, and less pandering to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his big-oil politics.
As for B.C.'s New Democrats, there should be lessons too, including that campaign tactics are still critical, and that having a moderate platform attractive to a broad range of voters is essential to avoiding a stop-them stampede by voters. And that they should be prepared to quickly counter smears from the mainstream media, especially out-of-province ones.
"We were focused on delivering a positive constructive plan that made sense to the people of Alberta to build our future,” Redford said on election night, and that's something all parties should emulate.
And let there be lessons for the pollsters too, some of whom seemed to get caught up in a game of being first to accurately predict an outlandish result, and some of whom went too far in predicting what the numbers would produce. Remember the surveys measure "if an election was held today" not in the election still several weeks away.
It is all too easy and tempting to make rash predictions, such as I did with a hope that the Canucks would win round one in five games, but when pollsters are dealing with the public interest they should be more cautious and circumspect, and not forget to report the undecided numbers too.
Finally, let's not overlook the impact of new media such as Twitter and Facebook, which are making the dissemination of information ever more rapid and wider. Even though many voters are still not involved in social media, those who are tend to be opinion leaders and they need to be cultivated like a special crop.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/04/27/redfords-debt-to-albertas-left
http://ezralevant.com/2012/04/the-undertaker-alberta-premier.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/gary_mason/bcs-christy-clark-the-political-chameleon/article2416691/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/so-happy-yet-so-restless-in-alberta/article2406959/?utm_medium=Feeds:%20RSS/Atom&utm_source=Opinions&utm_content=2406959
http://www.angus-reid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2012.04.27_Election_AB.pdf
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/04/25/Reading-Albertas-Election/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=250412
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/taking-a-lesson-from-alberta-clark-edges-back-to-the-centre/article2413225/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/19/wildrose-leader-booed-during-alberta-leaders-debate-for-doubting-climate-change-science/
http://politicsrespun.org/2012/04/deconstructing-the-wildrose-effect/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/wildrose-party-set-for-sweeping-majority-latest-poll-shows/article2410297/
Saturday, April 21, 2012
B.C. climate plan a corrupt boondoggle
The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 41 April 21, 2012
Campbell's political climate initiative decaying
as media scrutiny reveals a corrupt boondoggle
By John Twigg
The large block of text below is a complete copy of an article I wrote in early March for the Commonsense Canadian website on the then-new provincial budget's treatment of B.C.'s gas tax, the now-controversial Pacific Carbon Trust and the overall Western Climate Initiative.
The article is still on the Commonsense website but it is difficult to find, possibly due in part to one reader who took it to be an unwarranted attack on the sacrosanct carbon tax and therefore a de facto denial of global warming, when really it was an early and realistic look at how a flawed tax and flawed cap-and-trade system was imposed on the province and its consumers and polluters by a politician (former Premier Gordon Campbell) who was desperately pandering for votes in the run-up to the 2009 provincial general election.
It is being republished here and now in response to an excellent in-depth analysis of the flaws in the Pacific Carbon Trust by Gordon Hoekstra in today's Vancouver Sun, which can be viewed here: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/todays-paper/Carbon+credibility/6497264/story.html .
It is interesting to note that Hoekstra's article includes a passage in which Simon Fraser University economist Mark Jaccard says part of the PCT system is bogus, which is the same word that Independent MLA Bob Simpson used in my earlier article below - but Jaccard's initial reaction to my article was virulently negative, apparently because my article supposedly wrongly denies that global warming is an urgent crisis and Jaccard is a member of the renowned (or others say infamous) International Panel on Climate Change which believes the Earth is rapidly passing a tipping point to disaster and only drastic action will save the world from a climatic climactic cataclysm.
Well for the record I believe that reasonable actions should be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce societal and economic dependencies on non-renewable and polluting carbon-based fuels but I do not believe those actions need to be done in a panic and at great cost, merely in a practical manner commensurate with other threats to society (like reducing salt use in fast-food restaurants, reducing germs in hospitals etc.).
I also believe in climate variability more than in global warming, because there also is mounting evidence that global warming is slowing down (the polar bears are thriving, not dying) and it still could prove to be merely a cyclical blip, and even if warming does persist it could still be addressed in the next 50 to 100 years (e.g. by building dykes in the Fraser Delta), not to mention that many aspects of global warming would be positive too (e.g. boosting food production and lowering heating costs in northern regions).
Another problem is that the human contribution to the causes of global warming has been greatly over-exaggerated by some players with vested interests, and they have tended to try to bully rival scientists and contrarian opinionists into silence.
For example, do you know what percentage of the atmosphere is now composed of CO2? Few people do: it's about 0.0387% or 387 parts per million, which is up about 2 ppm in the last decade and up about 100 ppm since the industrial revolution but is still miniscule. And how much of that is due to natural contributions of carbon into the atmosphere (e.g. volcanoes and swamps)? About 97%, leaving only 3% of that 0.038% as human-caused or "anthropogenic global warming" - according to the latest summary on Wikipedia (which ratio is in approximate accord with other sources but is still being studied and so could be subject to change).
Yes many scientists will argue that any extra is too much and that the proportions in the atmosphere are fragile, and maybe so, but common sense argues that miniscule changes should not be considered a crisis especially when there also are benefits, so that is why some deniers call proponents "alarmists". Not to mention that economic and social dysfunctions leading to a Bible-prophesied nuclear war is a much larger and more urgent threat to the survival of mankind than the climate variability is, or at least should be considered so.
Indeed if one studies Bible prophecies diligently one will discern that unfulfilled prophecies are coming true so rapidly now that that is the issue that really should be at the top of the agenda for the United Nations [e.g. the entry of Germany directly into Syrian civil unrest is a harbinger of a war between the King of the South (Iran) and the King of the North (Europe led by Germany) described in Daniel 11:40] but instead of trying to deal with that what the world has been duped into fixating on is a false crisis about the climate for which little can be done anyway.
And please don't get me wrong: I support carbon-replacement and pollution-reduction strategies, provided they're sensible and doable and are cost-effective (e.g. scrubbing carbon out of coal-fired generating plant emissions and out of natural gas processing plant emissions), but such remediations need to be seen in a broader and more realistic perspective.
Sun article skewers B.C.'s waning climate program
To bring the matter closer to home, the Hoekstra article is a superb and well-deserved skewering of Campbell's politically-driven climate initiative which now reportedly has stalled due to economic concerns and the "waning political will on the part of new B.C. Premier Christy Clark." Not to mention that most other provinces and states have since withdrawn from the Western Climate Initiative.
To put it in a nutshell, Campbell unilaterally bullied into place a cap-and-trade system that was not sufficiently accountable or transparent, that provided millions of dollars to large corporations that tended to also be large donors to the B.C. Liberal Party and for projects that should not have been eligible for subsidies because they were being planned before the Pacific Carbon Trust was announced, which Simpson told Hoekstra was "a shell game" and which Simpson told me was benefiting mainly partisan donors, and which I say were also benefiting his political friends and insiders.
But it was and still is even worse than that because at the same time Campbell's system was actually taxing hospitals and school districts for their carbon emissions, which means he was deliberately underfunding school classrooms and denying (or reducing by rationing) health care for people in order to generate money that could be given to his corporate backers. Another example of how he has blood on his hands.
And worst of all was how he cooked up all of that as part of a strategy to fraudulently win the provincial election in 2009, which also featured him illegitimately and probably knowingly misrepresenting the condition of the province's finances before and during the election campaign (e.g. see Auditor General's criticism of deferral accounts hidden inside B.C. Hydro).
Hoekstra apparently has a series of articles coming and it will be fascinating to see what else he reveals. Perhaps he will address the many flaws in the carbon tax that B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins says would be the first thing removed if he became Premier (the whole tax, not only the flaws).
Yes there could and arguably should be some taxes on carbon-based fuels in order to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to better fuels, but the plan Campbell forced upon the province was mainly penalties on people and businesses who had no viable alternatives and thus was a crude tax grab masquerading as a leading-edge social good.
When looked at that way it was a really disgusting initiative and that is one more good reason why 70% of voters in the two recent byelections voted against the Campbell-Clark regime.
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British Columbia's controversial and widely misunderstood carbon tax will soon be subjected to a comprehensive review with the results likely to be revealed in next year's budget, just in time for the tax to become another pre-election political football to be kicked around by voters and political parties in the run-up to the May 14, 2013 voting day.
B.C. Finance Minister Kevin Falcon announced the move in his 2012-13 budget speech, and a few more details were provided in budget documents, but there are still no details on who will do the review and only a few bits are known about how and when, namely that citizens will have the opportunity to make written submissions to the Minister of Finance and that "changes will be considered as part of the 2013 Budget process" (which usually begins in earnest in the Fall and leads to formal announcements in the February budget). Further details of the review were to be posted on the Ministry's website: http://www.gov.bc.ca/ca/fin/.
Though that move is thus open to many partisan political manipulations, such as the B.C. Liberal Party potentially trying to use it to portray the B.C. New Democrats as anti-job if they oppose any changes, Falcon made it clear that there also are numerous practical considerations about the carbon tax that need to be reviewed, notably providing some early relief to the export-oriented agriculture and greenhouse industries but possibly including other areas related to air emissions and climate change such as the Pacific Carbon Trust, a Crown corporation seen by many as dysfunctional because it taxes hospitals and schools among other flaws.
The carbon tax is now applied to fossil fuels and other combustibles based on their equivalent carbon dioxide emissions and generates roughly $1 billion a year which is applied to a variety of tax expenditures to make it ostensibly revenue neutral to government. It began on July 1, 2008 at $10 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) - i.e. less than a year before the 2009 provincial election that also featured the HST fiasco - and grew by $5 annual increments but will now be capped when it reaches $30 per tonne on July 1, 2012 or about 6.7 cents per litre of gasoline.
"The review will cover all aspects of the carbon tax, including revenue neutrality," said a discussion paper in the budget documents, which is a reference to the revenues being dedicated to pay for a 5% cut in personal income taxes ($218 million in 2011-12), the low-income climate action tax credit ($188 million), a corporate income tax cut ($381 million), a small business tax cut ($220 million) and several other boutique-type tax cuts and credits needing to be pulled in as the revenues rise (e.g. this year the new childrens' arts and sports tax credits and the Seniors' Home Renovation Tax Credit were added).
Curiously the carbon tax expenditures of $1.15 billion in 2011/12 exceeded the revenues of $960 million by $192 million but in years ahead the revenues are expected to grow and exceed the expenditures so new subsidies from the carbon tax are being targeted to science and film incentives to maintain an increasingly-farcical revenue-neutral balance, as Independent MLA Bob Simpson (Cariboo North) pointed out in an interview.
Falcon gave assurances that the government will still "continue moving forward with other components of our Climate Action Plan" such as the LiveSmart home retrofits program, tax incentives for buyers of "clean" or electric cars, and subsidies to help convert heavy-duty vehicle fleets to natural gas, all of which appear to be healthy on-going programs.
However that list of surviving initiatives strangely omitted mention of the government's also-controversial Pacific Carbon Trust corporation which separately runs a carbon offsets program that public-sector entities are required to participate in and which is seen by Simpson and many other observers as a costly misuse and waste of taxpayer dollars (e.g. taxing school districts and hospitals that are already in financial distress).
"We remain committed to addressing climate change. However, four years in, the revenue-neutral B.C. Carbon Tax remains the only one of its kind in North America," Falcon said in the Budget speech, noting that the rate increase on July 1 is the last one scheduled which makes now "a good time to pause and examine how the carbon tax is affecting our economic competitiveness." The budget tax measures legislation includes an amendment to clarify that the carbon tax will continue beyond June 30, 2013 but will be capped at $30 per tonne.
In the budget lockup and subsequent media appearances Falcon reiterated his pride in the government's leadership on the carbon tax and noted that putting a price on carbon is necessary if you want to address climate change but since no other provinces have followed and the Obama administration has backed off it has become necessary to review B.C.'s plans and probably make some changes, possibly including to the Pacific Carbon Trust.
"Keeping parts of the Pacific Carbon Trust would reinforce our role as leaders on the environment front and I don't want to give that up," Falcon said on Vaughn Palmer's Voice of B.C. show on Shaw TV (viewable online), suggesting changes could be rolled out "in coming months" - but also hinting that Falcon looks upon the whole policy area as a battleground in partisan politics too.
That also hints that a structural change could emerge too in which the carbon tax revenues would be redirected towards Pacific Carbon Trust activities, perhaps replacing the monies now paid in by school districts, health authorities and local governments - even becoming a subsidy for urban transit as Metro Vancouver officials have been recently seeking.
Falcon seemed to avoid such ideas and instead repeatedly focused on the carbon tax impacts on agriculture in general and on greenhouses in particular, noting they will be hit hard when the Harmonized Sales Tax is removed and replaced by the Provincial Sales Tax on April 1 next year so removing the carbon tax would help them survive and remain competitive in export markets, a promise welcomed by Independent MLA Vicki Huntington of Delta South in recent remarks in the Legislature.
Meanwhile Agriculture Minister Don McRae said the government has been working closely with greenhouse operators to create an environment that supports growth and in the weeks ahead will work to that end to provide carbon tax relief.
That precedent of reforming what some have seen as an untouchable sacred cow could help start a number of other carbon and climate policy reforms, many of which will be welcomed by critics such as MLA Simpson and B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins and some of which will be regretted by environmental activists, with the B.C. New Democrats so far remaining more or less silent, probably because they suffered in the 2009 election from having a confused policy on the carbon tax.
Cummins stands out by stating that the carbon tax will be the first tax eliminated by a B.C. Conservative government, when he spoke to a post-budget lunch meeting of the Surrey Board of Trade, apparently believing that such a tax cut would create jobs, but his only suggestion so far for replacing the tax revenue has been spending cuts by government, which is nonsensical if one looks at the size of government as a proportion of GDP as was done recently on the Tyee website by pundit Will McMartin, revealing that the Campbell regime has already cut government to the bone.
Nonetheless there is a widespread view especially among fiscal and political conservatives that the carbon tax and its related programs such as the Pacific Carbon Trust have become a confusing mish-mash of contradictory and perverse concepts that kill commerce and services and fail to achieve their supposed goal of combatting global warming or climate change.
When you go online to research the B.C. government's climate program you find a blinding montage of pretty photos and padded rosters and not many details or numbers until maybe the end of a document if at all. And as Simpson in particular complains, the Pacific Carbon Trust is not open to legislature or public purview even though it is a Crown corporation, the Legislature is exempt and some entities are taxed twice, such as health authorities paying both carbon tax and emissions charges.
That suggests part of the reasons for Falcon's somewhat unexpected foray into carbon tax and climate policy is to do some political damage control, to make some changes that will mollify such criticisms before they become a political albatross for the Liberals in the 2013 election campaign.
In fact there are still quite a few good things happening in this policy area too, such as energy retrofits of public-sector buildings and private homes, and projects such as the Carbon Offset Aggregation Co-operative of Prince George which on Feb. 24 received $2 million from Environment Minister Terry Lake to help heavy equipment operators and trucking companies retrofit their vehicles' engines to lower their carbon emissions (though social program advocates could argue that that money would have been better spent on something like addressing child poverty or on home care to help keep seniors out of more costly institutions).
But what you also find, as Simpson pointed out in an interview, is that beneficiaries of such energy-efficiency handouts have an amazingly high rate of also being donors to the B.C. Liberal Party, which ratio he estimated at 95%, and that some of the projects being subsidized might have been done anyway and so should not be considered as incremental for climate purposes.
Simpson interestingly has become such an expert in the whole area that he was singled out for praise by Falcon on the Shaw cable show but that didn't stop Simpson from calling the Liberals' various climate programs "bizarre" and "goofy" and "confusing" and "unfair" and even "totally bogus".
That latter epithet was regarding the government's initial decision and continuing policy to apply the carbon tax to consumers and public-sector entities but to exempt carbon-intensive industries such as cement plants and natural gas scrubbers, the latter venting methane into the atmosphere comprising about 20% of the province's total emissions but none of which are subject to a climate tax, and about half of that is now coming from fracked shale gas. Another large source of emissions not being taxed is landfills (i.e. garbage dumps).
B.C. Green Party leader Jane Sterk also drew a connection between climate policy and party politics, surmising that if the government does choose to appoint an outside committee to review the carbon tax (as it has done in other policy areas such as tax reform) then most of the members will be donors to the B.C. Liberals and oriented towards business and industry.
Sterk also shares some skepticism about what the government wants out of the process and what will be done versus what should be done, whether it is to redesign a better carbon tax (which could be done without a review) or merely tweak the system to make it better understood and more acceptable.
"I expect the review will recommend scrapping the tax because other jurisdictions have not followed suit and to rely instead on joining the group of jurisdictions committed to cap and trade," she said, or it could reduce the tax by half to reflect the reality of it being uncompetitive but still demonstrate some commitment to climate change.
She also predicted the carbon tax will be a key issue in the next election campaign, with the Liberals possibly promising to eliminate the tax if re-elected but also trying to trap the New Democrats similar to what happened in 2009 when the NDP wanted to "axe the tax" but have since swung around to supporting it. However the New Democrats have been silent on the issue of late and did not respond to requests for a comment for this article.
Sterk believes the carbon tax was poorly designed and has become regressive for low-income people and she says the Pacific Carbon Trust needs to be improved but she still wants to retain the carbon tax, hike it to $50 a tonne and keep raising it, and apply it to large emitters while directing some proceeds to transit, rail, biking and pedestrians.
"Our policy on the carbon tax needs to be seen in terms of our overall policy which is to move to regionally self-sufficient and resilient economies," she said, linking climate change to food security, job creation, health and social and community well-being.
Sierra Club BC executive director George Heyman said the government’s announcement of the carbon tax review sends the wrong signal at a critical time when scientists say we need immediate action to slow global warming.
“Real climate leadership requires long-term commitment, not a one-time gesture,” said Heyman, surmising that the government is definitely looking for a way to get out of the carbon tax either fully or partially.
“This is a government that, at one point, showed leadership on pricing carbon. What they’re saying now is: `We expected everyone to follow us and they didn’t so we’re going to back out of it.’”
Heyman said there should be a systematic expansion of carbon tax coverage to all B.C. sources of carbon emissions but B.C.'s natural gas strategy alone will make it all but impossible to meet the province's legislated carbon reduction targets, and that the Liberals are not prepared to be honest about the need to develop a low-carbon economy that can assure sustainable, jobs-intensive employment for future generations.
Simpson also believes the government should put a tax on industrial process emissions and with no cap-and-trade on the horizon that the proceeds should go first to Pacific Carbon Trust and then to general revenues, with changes made to PCT, which now gets most of its revenues from the public sector even though it produces less than one per cent of total emissions.
He said the government's clawback of money given to public agencies such as school and hospital boards is a complete distortion of tax policy and a wrong thing to do when those agencies do not have taxing powers, and that is further distorted because those entities have to pay $25 a tonne for offsets when their market value is only about $4 a tonne.
He noted there are numerous unfair aspects in the system, such as the school districts getting rebates when others don't, and the health authorities being double-taxed with the carbon tax on the fuels they use and a $25 per tonne charge on emissions.
"To me the issue is we have a finance minister who has never been enamored of the carbon tax ... and now is saying enough is enough," said Simpson, explaining that the Liberal caucus was caught unawares when former premier Gordon Campbell suddenly "got religion" on the need for a carbon tax to address climate change and though the original intent in 2008 was to change behaviours there has been little evidence of that and meanwhile many people in rural areas complain they are being taxed on things they have no choice about.
Simpson said the Liberal government now seems to be after three things, an end to the revenue-neutral nonsense and an easier way to find valid projects to invest in, an end to further increments in the tax, and some relief for sectors being damaged such as agriculture and possibly log truckers.
A roster of the public agencies and what they're emitting and paying to invest in offsets shows a total of about 800,000 tonnes and offsets worth $18.2 million. It can be viewed in the appendix at:
After citing international examples of how carbon taxes have stimulated green industries and prosperous economies, they conclude that B.C. also could have a win-win solution for the environment and the economy.
"Communities could see new investment and jobs, a balanced transportation system, reduced traffic congestion, cleaner air, more green spaces, energy savings, and, best of all, a better quality of life. But only if we demand it," they wrote, urging people to participate in the review proces
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The following two items are unedited news releases from the stated sources:
PRINCE GEORGE - Environment Minister Terry Lake announced $2 million in funding for the Prince George-based Carbon Offset Aggregation Cooperative (COAC).
This first-of-a-kind program helps heavy equipment operators and trucking companies to lower their carbon emissions.
COAC is a marketing cooperative that provides a framework for owners of heavy equipment and trucks to reduce operating costs and create, aggregate and sell carbon offsets that are produced through a reduction in diesel consumption.
The funding is essential seed money that will help COAC provide more members with low-interest loans to retrofit their heavy duty diesel trucks and equipment to increase fuel efficiency, save money and reduce carbon emissions. Currently, 33 units (trucks and equipment) have been retrofitted. Installation has been completed on the first truck fleet of six units and COAC expects to install another 24 in the near future.
This funding is expected to provide financing to retrofit 100 units per month, resulting in emission reductions of approximately 13,400 tonnes over the first three years. With every 1,000 litres of diesel saved, approximately three tonnes of carbon dioxide will be diverted from the atmosphere. One truck operating for 250 days a year can use up to 300 litres per day and will emit approximately 200 tonnes of carbon annually.
The cooperative provides financing to member businesses for modifications of existing vehicles and machinery that use fossil fuels (diesel). Operators will also receive driver-awareness training that will lead to even more energy efficiencies and GHG reductions that will save them money.
To learn about the first company to participate in the COAC program, visit: http://www.bcjobsplan.ca/ourprogress/b-c-heavy-equipment-company-goes-green/
These reductions in fuel consumption and GHGs emitted will produce carbon offsets, which are then aggregated and sold, transferred or traded by COAC. The proceeds of the sales are returned to the member as a dividend. The offsets are sold as made-in-B.C. greenhouse gas offsets.
This is part of a suite of B.C. Clean Transportation programs and follows on the heels of the Clean Energy Vehicle Program and BC SCRAP-IT funding, which the Province announced in November 2011.
Quotes:
Terry Lake, Minister of Environment:
This co-op demonstrates that being environmentally responsible can save companies money. It also shows how our Climate Action Plan benefits rural communities by helping business owners save money, reduce emissions and participate in a program that benefits B.C. families and helps create jobs.
Shirley Bond, MLA Prince George-Valemount:
This made-in-the-North program will reduce emissions and help heavy-duty vehicle operators increase their fuel efficiency. Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to create this unique program.
Pat Bell, MLA Prince George-Mackenzie:
COAC is showing some real innovation with this program, and it shows how British Columbia is a leader in developing innovative solutions to lower GHG emissions.
Mary Anne Arcand, COAC chair:
This kind of support from government sends a clear signal that it is serious about addressing climate change, and supportive of industry's initiative to be innovative and engaged at the ground level.
COAC member representative Doug Pugh:
Having the funding to help smaller operators like me get on the program makes it possible for everybody to do their part in reducing fuel consumption and emissions.
Quick Facts:
BC Newsroom - Ministry of Environment: http://www.newsroom.gov.bc.ca/ministries/environment-1/
Carbon Offset Aggregation Cooperative (COAC): www.carbonoffsetcooperative.org
Contact:
Suntanu Dalal
Communications Officer
Ministry of Environment
250 387-9745
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Heyman sees budget as threat to water:
Eliminating regulations for B.C.’s expanding mining projects will jeopardize water and wildlife and lead to increased community concern and conflict, Sierra Club BC Executive Director George Heyman warned today following the B.C. budget.
“British Columbians are increasingly concerned about secure access to clean water, but this budget fast-tracks mining projects while cutting regulatory provisions that clearly exist to protect the public interest,” said Heyman. “There is no vision here for a sustainable economy that protects our environmental assets; instead we have more raw resource extraction with reduced public interest protection.”
Government’s public affairs bureau budget – at $26 million – is now three times as big as the budget for B.C.’s environmental assessment office, which has been frozen at $8.75 million despite a significant leap in proposed mining and energy projects.
“There appears to be plenty of money for the government to spin its message, but no increased funding for environmental assessment. New mine proposals around the province, and the environmentally questionable practice of natural gas fracking, cry out for strong measures that guarantee public and community health,” said Heyman.
“The government will spend $24 million in reducing the turnaround time for mineral exploration permits, but not a penny more to ensure robust environmental assessment capacity,” Heyman said. “With the Fish Lake debacle, we saw B.C.’s environmental assessment process green-light a mine that was later scathingly rejected by the federal environment minister. And now the B.C. government wants to make it even easier for mining companies to engage in controversial road-building and drilling that will only lead to community conflict and economic uncertainty around the province.”
Campbell's political climate initiative decaying
as media scrutiny reveals a corrupt boondoggle
By John Twigg
The large block of text below is a complete copy of an article I wrote in early March for the Commonsense Canadian website on the then-new provincial budget's treatment of B.C.'s gas tax, the now-controversial Pacific Carbon Trust and the overall Western Climate Initiative.
The article is still on the Commonsense website but it is difficult to find, possibly due in part to one reader who took it to be an unwarranted attack on the sacrosanct carbon tax and therefore a de facto denial of global warming, when really it was an early and realistic look at how a flawed tax and flawed cap-and-trade system was imposed on the province and its consumers and polluters by a politician (former Premier Gordon Campbell) who was desperately pandering for votes in the run-up to the 2009 provincial general election.
It is being republished here and now in response to an excellent in-depth analysis of the flaws in the Pacific Carbon Trust by Gordon Hoekstra in today's Vancouver Sun, which can be viewed here: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/todays-paper/Carbon+credibility/6497264/story.html .
It is interesting to note that Hoekstra's article includes a passage in which Simon Fraser University economist Mark Jaccard says part of the PCT system is bogus, which is the same word that Independent MLA Bob Simpson used in my earlier article below - but Jaccard's initial reaction to my article was virulently negative, apparently because my article supposedly wrongly denies that global warming is an urgent crisis and Jaccard is a member of the renowned (or others say infamous) International Panel on Climate Change which believes the Earth is rapidly passing a tipping point to disaster and only drastic action will save the world from a climatic climactic cataclysm.
Well for the record I believe that reasonable actions should be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce societal and economic dependencies on non-renewable and polluting carbon-based fuels but I do not believe those actions need to be done in a panic and at great cost, merely in a practical manner commensurate with other threats to society (like reducing salt use in fast-food restaurants, reducing germs in hospitals etc.).
I also believe in climate variability more than in global warming, because there also is mounting evidence that global warming is slowing down (the polar bears are thriving, not dying) and it still could prove to be merely a cyclical blip, and even if warming does persist it could still be addressed in the next 50 to 100 years (e.g. by building dykes in the Fraser Delta), not to mention that many aspects of global warming would be positive too (e.g. boosting food production and lowering heating costs in northern regions).
Another problem is that the human contribution to the causes of global warming has been greatly over-exaggerated by some players with vested interests, and they have tended to try to bully rival scientists and contrarian opinionists into silence.
For example, do you know what percentage of the atmosphere is now composed of CO2? Few people do: it's about 0.0387% or 387 parts per million, which is up about 2 ppm in the last decade and up about 100 ppm since the industrial revolution but is still miniscule. And how much of that is due to natural contributions of carbon into the atmosphere (e.g. volcanoes and swamps)? About 97%, leaving only 3% of that 0.038% as human-caused or "anthropogenic global warming" - according to the latest summary on Wikipedia (which ratio is in approximate accord with other sources but is still being studied and so could be subject to change).
Yes many scientists will argue that any extra is too much and that the proportions in the atmosphere are fragile, and maybe so, but common sense argues that miniscule changes should not be considered a crisis especially when there also are benefits, so that is why some deniers call proponents "alarmists". Not to mention that economic and social dysfunctions leading to a Bible-prophesied nuclear war is a much larger and more urgent threat to the survival of mankind than the climate variability is, or at least should be considered so.
Indeed if one studies Bible prophecies diligently one will discern that unfulfilled prophecies are coming true so rapidly now that that is the issue that really should be at the top of the agenda for the United Nations [e.g. the entry of Germany directly into Syrian civil unrest is a harbinger of a war between the King of the South (Iran) and the King of the North (Europe led by Germany) described in Daniel 11:40] but instead of trying to deal with that what the world has been duped into fixating on is a false crisis about the climate for which little can be done anyway.
And please don't get me wrong: I support carbon-replacement and pollution-reduction strategies, provided they're sensible and doable and are cost-effective (e.g. scrubbing carbon out of coal-fired generating plant emissions and out of natural gas processing plant emissions), but such remediations need to be seen in a broader and more realistic perspective.
Sun article skewers B.C.'s waning climate program
To bring the matter closer to home, the Hoekstra article is a superb and well-deserved skewering of Campbell's politically-driven climate initiative which now reportedly has stalled due to economic concerns and the "waning political will on the part of new B.C. Premier Christy Clark." Not to mention that most other provinces and states have since withdrawn from the Western Climate Initiative.
To put it in a nutshell, Campbell unilaterally bullied into place a cap-and-trade system that was not sufficiently accountable or transparent, that provided millions of dollars to large corporations that tended to also be large donors to the B.C. Liberal Party and for projects that should not have been eligible for subsidies because they were being planned before the Pacific Carbon Trust was announced, which Simpson told Hoekstra was "a shell game" and which Simpson told me was benefiting mainly partisan donors, and which I say were also benefiting his political friends and insiders.
But it was and still is even worse than that because at the same time Campbell's system was actually taxing hospitals and school districts for their carbon emissions, which means he was deliberately underfunding school classrooms and denying (or reducing by rationing) health care for people in order to generate money that could be given to his corporate backers. Another example of how he has blood on his hands.
And worst of all was how he cooked up all of that as part of a strategy to fraudulently win the provincial election in 2009, which also featured him illegitimately and probably knowingly misrepresenting the condition of the province's finances before and during the election campaign (e.g. see Auditor General's criticism of deferral accounts hidden inside B.C. Hydro).
Hoekstra apparently has a series of articles coming and it will be fascinating to see what else he reveals. Perhaps he will address the many flaws in the carbon tax that B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins says would be the first thing removed if he became Premier (the whole tax, not only the flaws).
Yes there could and arguably should be some taxes on carbon-based fuels in order to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to better fuels, but the plan Campbell forced upon the province was mainly penalties on people and businesses who had no viable alternatives and thus was a crude tax grab masquerading as a leading-edge social good.
When looked at that way it was a really disgusting initiative and that is one more good reason why 70% of voters in the two recent byelections voted against the Campbell-Clark regime.
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Review of B.C.'s Dysfunctional Carbon Tax Aims for Repairs in 2013 Pre-election Budget
From the Commonsense Canadian Written by John Twigg Friday, 02 March 2012 10:30British Columbia's controversial and widely misunderstood carbon tax will soon be subjected to a comprehensive review with the results likely to be revealed in next year's budget, just in time for the tax to become another pre-election political football to be kicked around by voters and political parties in the run-up to the May 14, 2013 voting day.
B.C. Finance Minister Kevin Falcon announced the move in his 2012-13 budget speech, and a few more details were provided in budget documents, but there are still no details on who will do the review and only a few bits are known about how and when, namely that citizens will have the opportunity to make written submissions to the Minister of Finance and that "changes will be considered as part of the 2013 Budget process" (which usually begins in earnest in the Fall and leads to formal announcements in the February budget). Further details of the review were to be posted on the Ministry's website: http://www.gov.bc.ca/ca/fin/.
Though that move is thus open to many partisan political manipulations, such as the B.C. Liberal Party potentially trying to use it to portray the B.C. New Democrats as anti-job if they oppose any changes, Falcon made it clear that there also are numerous practical considerations about the carbon tax that need to be reviewed, notably providing some early relief to the export-oriented agriculture and greenhouse industries but possibly including other areas related to air emissions and climate change such as the Pacific Carbon Trust, a Crown corporation seen by many as dysfunctional because it taxes hospitals and schools among other flaws.
The carbon tax is now applied to fossil fuels and other combustibles based on their equivalent carbon dioxide emissions and generates roughly $1 billion a year which is applied to a variety of tax expenditures to make it ostensibly revenue neutral to government. It began on July 1, 2008 at $10 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) - i.e. less than a year before the 2009 provincial election that also featured the HST fiasco - and grew by $5 annual increments but will now be capped when it reaches $30 per tonne on July 1, 2012 or about 6.7 cents per litre of gasoline.
"The review will cover all aspects of the carbon tax, including revenue neutrality," said a discussion paper in the budget documents, which is a reference to the revenues being dedicated to pay for a 5% cut in personal income taxes ($218 million in 2011-12), the low-income climate action tax credit ($188 million), a corporate income tax cut ($381 million), a small business tax cut ($220 million) and several other boutique-type tax cuts and credits needing to be pulled in as the revenues rise (e.g. this year the new childrens' arts and sports tax credits and the Seniors' Home Renovation Tax Credit were added).
Curiously the carbon tax expenditures of $1.15 billion in 2011/12 exceeded the revenues of $960 million by $192 million but in years ahead the revenues are expected to grow and exceed the expenditures so new subsidies from the carbon tax are being targeted to science and film incentives to maintain an increasingly-farcical revenue-neutral balance, as Independent MLA Bob Simpson (Cariboo North) pointed out in an interview.
Falcon gave assurances that the government will still "continue moving forward with other components of our Climate Action Plan" such as the LiveSmart home retrofits program, tax incentives for buyers of "clean" or electric cars, and subsidies to help convert heavy-duty vehicle fleets to natural gas, all of which appear to be healthy on-going programs.
However that list of surviving initiatives strangely omitted mention of the government's also-controversial Pacific Carbon Trust corporation which separately runs a carbon offsets program that public-sector entities are required to participate in and which is seen by Simpson and many other observers as a costly misuse and waste of taxpayer dollars (e.g. taxing school districts and hospitals that are already in financial distress).
"We remain committed to addressing climate change. However, four years in, the revenue-neutral B.C. Carbon Tax remains the only one of its kind in North America," Falcon said in the Budget speech, noting that the rate increase on July 1 is the last one scheduled which makes now "a good time to pause and examine how the carbon tax is affecting our economic competitiveness." The budget tax measures legislation includes an amendment to clarify that the carbon tax will continue beyond June 30, 2013 but will be capped at $30 per tonne.
In the budget lockup and subsequent media appearances Falcon reiterated his pride in the government's leadership on the carbon tax and noted that putting a price on carbon is necessary if you want to address climate change but since no other provinces have followed and the Obama administration has backed off it has become necessary to review B.C.'s plans and probably make some changes, possibly including to the Pacific Carbon Trust.
"Keeping parts of the Pacific Carbon Trust would reinforce our role as leaders on the environment front and I don't want to give that up," Falcon said on Vaughn Palmer's Voice of B.C. show on Shaw TV (viewable online), suggesting changes could be rolled out "in coming months" - but also hinting that Falcon looks upon the whole policy area as a battleground in partisan politics too.
That also hints that a structural change could emerge too in which the carbon tax revenues would be redirected towards Pacific Carbon Trust activities, perhaps replacing the monies now paid in by school districts, health authorities and local governments - even becoming a subsidy for urban transit as Metro Vancouver officials have been recently seeking.
Falcon seemed to avoid such ideas and instead repeatedly focused on the carbon tax impacts on agriculture in general and on greenhouses in particular, noting they will be hit hard when the Harmonized Sales Tax is removed and replaced by the Provincial Sales Tax on April 1 next year so removing the carbon tax would help them survive and remain competitive in export markets, a promise welcomed by Independent MLA Vicki Huntington of Delta South in recent remarks in the Legislature.
Meanwhile Agriculture Minister Don McRae said the government has been working closely with greenhouse operators to create an environment that supports growth and in the weeks ahead will work to that end to provide carbon tax relief.
That precedent of reforming what some have seen as an untouchable sacred cow could help start a number of other carbon and climate policy reforms, many of which will be welcomed by critics such as MLA Simpson and B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins and some of which will be regretted by environmental activists, with the B.C. New Democrats so far remaining more or less silent, probably because they suffered in the 2009 election from having a confused policy on the carbon tax.
Cummins stands out by stating that the carbon tax will be the first tax eliminated by a B.C. Conservative government, when he spoke to a post-budget lunch meeting of the Surrey Board of Trade, apparently believing that such a tax cut would create jobs, but his only suggestion so far for replacing the tax revenue has been spending cuts by government, which is nonsensical if one looks at the size of government as a proportion of GDP as was done recently on the Tyee website by pundit Will McMartin, revealing that the Campbell regime has already cut government to the bone.
Nonetheless there is a widespread view especially among fiscal and political conservatives that the carbon tax and its related programs such as the Pacific Carbon Trust have become a confusing mish-mash of contradictory and perverse concepts that kill commerce and services and fail to achieve their supposed goal of combatting global warming or climate change.
When you go online to research the B.C. government's climate program you find a blinding montage of pretty photos and padded rosters and not many details or numbers until maybe the end of a document if at all. And as Simpson in particular complains, the Pacific Carbon Trust is not open to legislature or public purview even though it is a Crown corporation, the Legislature is exempt and some entities are taxed twice, such as health authorities paying both carbon tax and emissions charges.
That suggests part of the reasons for Falcon's somewhat unexpected foray into carbon tax and climate policy is to do some political damage control, to make some changes that will mollify such criticisms before they become a political albatross for the Liberals in the 2013 election campaign.
In fact there are still quite a few good things happening in this policy area too, such as energy retrofits of public-sector buildings and private homes, and projects such as the Carbon Offset Aggregation Co-operative of Prince George which on Feb. 24 received $2 million from Environment Minister Terry Lake to help heavy equipment operators and trucking companies retrofit their vehicles' engines to lower their carbon emissions (though social program advocates could argue that that money would have been better spent on something like addressing child poverty or on home care to help keep seniors out of more costly institutions).
But what you also find, as Simpson pointed out in an interview, is that beneficiaries of such energy-efficiency handouts have an amazingly high rate of also being donors to the B.C. Liberal Party, which ratio he estimated at 95%, and that some of the projects being subsidized might have been done anyway and so should not be considered as incremental for climate purposes.
Simpson interestingly has become such an expert in the whole area that he was singled out for praise by Falcon on the Shaw cable show but that didn't stop Simpson from calling the Liberals' various climate programs "bizarre" and "goofy" and "confusing" and "unfair" and even "totally bogus".
That latter epithet was regarding the government's initial decision and continuing policy to apply the carbon tax to consumers and public-sector entities but to exempt carbon-intensive industries such as cement plants and natural gas scrubbers, the latter venting methane into the atmosphere comprising about 20% of the province's total emissions but none of which are subject to a climate tax, and about half of that is now coming from fracked shale gas. Another large source of emissions not being taxed is landfills (i.e. garbage dumps).
B.C. Green Party leader Jane Sterk also drew a connection between climate policy and party politics, surmising that if the government does choose to appoint an outside committee to review the carbon tax (as it has done in other policy areas such as tax reform) then most of the members will be donors to the B.C. Liberals and oriented towards business and industry.
Sterk also shares some skepticism about what the government wants out of the process and what will be done versus what should be done, whether it is to redesign a better carbon tax (which could be done without a review) or merely tweak the system to make it better understood and more acceptable.
"I expect the review will recommend scrapping the tax because other jurisdictions have not followed suit and to rely instead on joining the group of jurisdictions committed to cap and trade," she said, or it could reduce the tax by half to reflect the reality of it being uncompetitive but still demonstrate some commitment to climate change.
She also predicted the carbon tax will be a key issue in the next election campaign, with the Liberals possibly promising to eliminate the tax if re-elected but also trying to trap the New Democrats similar to what happened in 2009 when the NDP wanted to "axe the tax" but have since swung around to supporting it. However the New Democrats have been silent on the issue of late and did not respond to requests for a comment for this article.
Sterk believes the carbon tax was poorly designed and has become regressive for low-income people and she says the Pacific Carbon Trust needs to be improved but she still wants to retain the carbon tax, hike it to $50 a tonne and keep raising it, and apply it to large emitters while directing some proceeds to transit, rail, biking and pedestrians.
"Our policy on the carbon tax needs to be seen in terms of our overall policy which is to move to regionally self-sufficient and resilient economies," she said, linking climate change to food security, job creation, health and social and community well-being.
Sierra Club BC executive director George Heyman said the government’s announcement of the carbon tax review sends the wrong signal at a critical time when scientists say we need immediate action to slow global warming.
“Real climate leadership requires long-term commitment, not a one-time gesture,” said Heyman, surmising that the government is definitely looking for a way to get out of the carbon tax either fully or partially.
“This is a government that, at one point, showed leadership on pricing carbon. What they’re saying now is: `We expected everyone to follow us and they didn’t so we’re going to back out of it.’”
Heyman said there should be a systematic expansion of carbon tax coverage to all B.C. sources of carbon emissions but B.C.'s natural gas strategy alone will make it all but impossible to meet the province's legislated carbon reduction targets, and that the Liberals are not prepared to be honest about the need to develop a low-carbon economy that can assure sustainable, jobs-intensive employment for future generations.
Simpson also believes the government should put a tax on industrial process emissions and with no cap-and-trade on the horizon that the proceeds should go first to Pacific Carbon Trust and then to general revenues, with changes made to PCT, which now gets most of its revenues from the public sector even though it produces less than one per cent of total emissions.
He said the government's clawback of money given to public agencies such as school and hospital boards is a complete distortion of tax policy and a wrong thing to do when those agencies do not have taxing powers, and that is further distorted because those entities have to pay $25 a tonne for offsets when their market value is only about $4 a tonne.
He noted there are numerous unfair aspects in the system, such as the school districts getting rebates when others don't, and the health authorities being double-taxed with the carbon tax on the fuels they use and a $25 per tonne charge on emissions.
"To me the issue is we have a finance minister who has never been enamored of the carbon tax ... and now is saying enough is enough," said Simpson, explaining that the Liberal caucus was caught unawares when former premier Gordon Campbell suddenly "got religion" on the need for a carbon tax to address climate change and though the original intent in 2008 was to change behaviours there has been little evidence of that and meanwhile many people in rural areas complain they are being taxed on things they have no choice about.
Simpson said the Liberal government now seems to be after three things, an end to the revenue-neutral nonsense and an easier way to find valid projects to invest in, an end to further increments in the tax, and some relief for sectors being damaged such as agriculture and possibly log truckers.
A roster of the public agencies and what they're emitting and paying to invest in offsets shows a total of about 800,000 tonnes and offsets worth $18.2 million. It can be viewed in the appendix at:
- http://www.livesmartbc.ca/government/carbon_neutral/index.html
- http://www.livesmartbc.ca/attachments/carbon_neutral_action_reports/CarbonNeutralBC-transformingBCpublicsector.pdf
After citing international examples of how carbon taxes have stimulated green industries and prosperous economies, they conclude that B.C. also could have a win-win solution for the environment and the economy.
"Communities could see new investment and jobs, a balanced transportation system, reduced traffic congestion, cleaner air, more green spaces, energy savings, and, best of all, a better quality of life. But only if we demand it," they wrote, urging people to participate in the review proces
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The following two items are unedited news releases from the stated sources:
PRINCE GEORGE - Environment Minister Terry Lake announced $2 million in funding for the Prince George-based Carbon Offset Aggregation Cooperative (COAC).
This first-of-a-kind program helps heavy equipment operators and trucking companies to lower their carbon emissions.
COAC is a marketing cooperative that provides a framework for owners of heavy equipment and trucks to reduce operating costs and create, aggregate and sell carbon offsets that are produced through a reduction in diesel consumption.
The funding is essential seed money that will help COAC provide more members with low-interest loans to retrofit their heavy duty diesel trucks and equipment to increase fuel efficiency, save money and reduce carbon emissions. Currently, 33 units (trucks and equipment) have been retrofitted. Installation has been completed on the first truck fleet of six units and COAC expects to install another 24 in the near future.
This funding is expected to provide financing to retrofit 100 units per month, resulting in emission reductions of approximately 13,400 tonnes over the first three years. With every 1,000 litres of diesel saved, approximately three tonnes of carbon dioxide will be diverted from the atmosphere. One truck operating for 250 days a year can use up to 300 litres per day and will emit approximately 200 tonnes of carbon annually.
The cooperative provides financing to member businesses for modifications of existing vehicles and machinery that use fossil fuels (diesel). Operators will also receive driver-awareness training that will lead to even more energy efficiencies and GHG reductions that will save them money.
To learn about the first company to participate in the COAC program, visit: http://www.bcjobsplan.ca/ourprogress/b-c-heavy-equipment-company-goes-green/
These reductions in fuel consumption and GHGs emitted will produce carbon offsets, which are then aggregated and sold, transferred or traded by COAC. The proceeds of the sales are returned to the member as a dividend. The offsets are sold as made-in-B.C. greenhouse gas offsets.
This is part of a suite of B.C. Clean Transportation programs and follows on the heels of the Clean Energy Vehicle Program and BC SCRAP-IT funding, which the Province announced in November 2011.
Quotes:
Terry Lake, Minister of Environment:
This co-op demonstrates that being environmentally responsible can save companies money. It also shows how our Climate Action Plan benefits rural communities by helping business owners save money, reduce emissions and participate in a program that benefits B.C. families and helps create jobs.
Shirley Bond, MLA Prince George-Valemount:
This made-in-the-North program will reduce emissions and help heavy-duty vehicle operators increase their fuel efficiency. Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to create this unique program.
Pat Bell, MLA Prince George-Mackenzie:
COAC is showing some real innovation with this program, and it shows how British Columbia is a leader in developing innovative solutions to lower GHG emissions.
Mary Anne Arcand, COAC chair:
This kind of support from government sends a clear signal that it is serious about addressing climate change, and supportive of industry's initiative to be innovative and engaged at the ground level.
COAC member representative Doug Pugh:
Having the funding to help smaller operators like me get on the program makes it possible for everybody to do their part in reducing fuel consumption and emissions.
Quick Facts:
- COAC currently represents 25 member companies provincewide.
- Collectively, the companies consume more than 58-million litres of diesel annually.
- The program helps business owners overcome the technological and financial barriers to making carbon-reduction changes to their operations.
- The purpose is to provide a fuel-efficiency and carbon-reduction program for owners of heavy equipment and long- and short-haul trucks to reduce operating costs, aggregate and transfer, trade or sell carbon offsets.
- COAC expects the average savings from these measures to range from 10 to 15 per cent annually.
BC Newsroom - Ministry of Environment: http://www.newsroom.gov.bc.ca/ministries/environment-1/
Carbon Offset Aggregation Cooperative (COAC): www.carbonoffsetcooperative.org
Contact:
Suntanu Dalal
Communications Officer
Ministry of Environment
250 387-9745
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Heyman sees budget as threat to water:
Eliminating regulations for B.C.’s expanding mining projects will jeopardize water and wildlife and lead to increased community concern and conflict, Sierra Club BC Executive Director George Heyman warned today following the B.C. budget.
“British Columbians are increasingly concerned about secure access to clean water, but this budget fast-tracks mining projects while cutting regulatory provisions that clearly exist to protect the public interest,” said Heyman. “There is no vision here for a sustainable economy that protects our environmental assets; instead we have more raw resource extraction with reduced public interest protection.”
Government’s public affairs bureau budget – at $26 million – is now three times as big as the budget for B.C.’s environmental assessment office, which has been frozen at $8.75 million despite a significant leap in proposed mining and energy projects.
“There appears to be plenty of money for the government to spin its message, but no increased funding for environmental assessment. New mine proposals around the province, and the environmentally questionable practice of natural gas fracking, cry out for strong measures that guarantee public and community health,” said Heyman.
“The government will spend $24 million in reducing the turnaround time for mineral exploration permits, but not a penny more to ensure robust environmental assessment capacity,” Heyman said. “With the Fish Lake debacle, we saw B.C.’s environmental assessment process green-light a mine that was later scathingly rejected by the federal environment minister. And now the B.C. government wants to make it even easier for mining companies to engage in controversial road-building and drilling that will only lead to community conflict and economic uncertainty around the province.”
Friday, April 20, 2012
Ramifications of NDP byelection wins
The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 40 April 20, 2012
B.C. Politics Trendwatch
NDP's strong campaign wins both byelections,
Liberals relieved to be ahead of Conservatives
By John Twigg
The results of the two B.C. byelections are now widely known but the debate about what they mean will go on for months and possibly all the way to the next provincial election in May next year.
The B.C. New Democrats' wins in both Port Moody and Chilliwack were breakthroughs notable in their own right but perhaps more significant to the long-term political trends in the province was the contest between the B.C. Liberal Party and B.C. Conservative Party, which some have tried to portray as merely a "split" of the so-called free-enterprise vote but which really is something a lot more complex than that.
To get right to it, the Liberals finished a clear second in both constituencies, with about 30 per cent of the votes in a mere 40% turnout of voters, which is a bit better than what they had been getting in recent opinion polls, and quite a bit better than the 15% the Conservatives got in Port Moody and the 25% they got in Chilliwack.
Calls to oust Clark may ease
That should be enough to quieten some calls for the immediate ouster of Liberal Premier Christy Clark but to keep her job until the new year she probably will have to engineer a party name change in the fall and implement a major policy reform package in the February budget aimed at assuaging the thousands of Liberal supporters who for various reasons have defected to the New Democrats and Conservatives.
B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins claimed to be "quite pleased" with the results, about 25% in Chilliwack and 15% in Port Moody, given that the party's campaign team was starting from scratch, got outspent five-to-one and didn't have enough volunteers to get its vote out, and he pledged to be more competitive and ready in the provincial election. He also noted that the votes confirmed poll findings that his party is a serious contender.
Clark and other Liberal apologists were quick to cite the Conservatives' vote-splitting but Cummins was having none of it and the vote results tend to support him: NDP candidate Joe Trasolini in Port Moody-Coquitlam pulled in a surprising 54% per cent, which means the popular ex-mayor would have won in a two-way race too, while in Chilliwack the NDP's hard-working Gwen O'Mahony won with a solid 41% while Conservative John Martin scored a solid 25%, many of which were anti-Liberal protest votes, so if Mahony had been in a two-way race against a Liberal she probably would have still won.
Dix says positive campaign helped NDP
As NDP leader Adrian Dix noted in post-election comments, some 70% of voters sent a message against the Liberals in the byelections and he's looking forward to seeing that repeated in the next provincial election.
"We had the best candidate(s) and we ran a positive campaign and I think people responded to that," said Dix, perhaps downplaying the impact of his party sending many outside volunteers into the two campaigns and overlooking the reality that the main trend at work was the decaying of the Liberal support, some of which declined to vote, some of which went to the NDP and some of which went Conservative.
A good example of that was Conservative candidate Christine Clarke in Port Moody, who in the 2009 election was a volunteer worker for successful Liberal candidate Iain Black, who last year resigned as MLA to take a job with the Vancouver Board of Trade.
The New Democrats by contrast not only held onto to all of their support (roughly 35% in 2009) they also pulled all of it out to vote plus they pulled a few defectors from the Liberals plus they probably drew some former B.C. Green Party support too because that party chose to not run candidates, while the Cummins Conservatives have been taking in droves of Liberals fed up with Liberal shenanigans, notably Abbotsford South MLA John van Dongen who crossed the floor of the Legislature early in the campaign, which helped boost the Conservatives' profile and credibility.
Liberal support decays due to HST
So why is the Liberal vote decaying? Interestingly interviews with exiting voters by CKNW's Shane Woodford revealed that the hated Harmonized Sales Tax was still sparking a backlash, but more generally the protest votes seemed to be against the Liberals' perceived arrogance and corruption and mismanagement of too many major issues, such as the corrupted giveaway of B.C. Rail, deconstruction of the Agricultural Land Reserve and several questionable moves involving B.C. Hydro and other Crown agencies (not to mention that the Auditor General found that former premier Gordon Campbell had illegitimately cooked the province's financial books prior to the 2009 election campaign).
Though Clark as Premier has had more than a year to turn around such problems, the opinion polls and now the byelection results prove that she has so far failed to do so, and if her party had finished third in both byelections she probably would have been ousted by August, but now it seems she will be given a few more months to try to restore the so-called free-enterprise coalition that has governed B.C. for about 50 of the last 65 years. A major test will be a major fundraising dinner in June which is critical to the party's pre-election fundraising.
Clark statement cites vote-splitting
Clark watched the results from her Vancouver office then issued the following statement: "Voters know that by-elections are not about changing government. It’s never been clearer that only a unified free enterprise coalition can defeat the NDP. That’s why we are focused on strengthening our coalition so that in the next general election voters will have a clear choice between the free enterprise coalition and the NDP. A choice between higher income taxes, reckless government spending and runaway debt or our free enterprise coalition that is keeping taxes low, restraining government spending and keeping our economy growing with jobs for B.C. families."
Cummins however was having none of that: "The Liberals have their heads in the sand - people are walking away from them in droves. The Liberals say we are vote-splitting but we offer the best hope for the so-called free-enterprise vote," he said.
"We're on the way up and they're on the way down and I think that will continue . . . we expect to do well when more people understand what we're all about," he continued, dismissing any thought of a merger with "a discredited organization like the Liberals."
"The B.C. Conservative Party are a sort of brand without any policy - they are NOT the federal Conservative Party," said former Liberal communications official Mike Morton in an interview on CKNW, which further focused on the byelections' message that it showed the B.C. Conservatives also have a lot of work to do before they will be able to offer voters a viable alternative to the NDP, which under Dix is trying to appear as moderate and non-threatening as possible despite its sometimes radical policies and activists in its ranks (e.g, gender quotas for candidates, opposition to resource projects, etc.).
Fall sitting of Leg to be dropped?
One other notable impact of the byelections could be the cancellation of possible plans for a fall sitting of the legislature, because the defection of only four more MLAs would deprive the Clark Liberals of their majority.
The two byelection wins give the NDP 36 seats while there are 3 Independents (one being van Dongen) and now 46 Liberals, one of whom is Speaker. Thus if three Liberals defected the Speaker could have to vote to break a tie, and if four defected it wouldn't matter what the Speaker did, except maybe to advise the Lieutenant Governor to stay near a phone in case he was needed to trigger an election or - gasp! - give Dix a chance to govern instead!!
That probably won't happen but there is talk of several other Liberal MLAs considering defecting depending on the byelections and other matters and the way to thwart that is to simply not let the Legislature sit in the fall.
While a fall sitting is not a necessity nor even a tradition, it often has been used when governments want to introduce policy shifts for consideration by the public and special interest groups, which appears to fit Clark's plans for introducing a new policy direction prior to the next election.
So I was intrigued when Liberal MLA Ralph Sultan (West Vancouver - Capilano) tweeted after the Sun Run that he was looking forward to a six-week run of the Legislature (with one week off) and then "prorogation" - meaning the formal ending of the Session. I sent him an email wondering whether he meant to say adjournment but he did not reply.
There is a bit of an anomaly insofar as the current sitting was not a new session but merely was a continuation of a session begun last fall as a sort of new policy direction by Clark, which is why there was no Throne Speech this year, and which could be why the sitting and the session will de facto end at the end of May (though technically the formal prorogation usually doesn't happen until the morning before a new one starts).
Another wild card in the deck is the possibility that the Legislature might have to be called back in August in order to force striking teachers back to work, and/or possibly to deal with other pending public-sector labour disputes.
Anyway, the byelection results gave the Dix New Democrats a boost, they gave Clark and the Liberals a warning and a bit of time to make repairs and reparations and they give the Cummins Conservatives a clear message that they need to work both harder and smarter if they're going to become a serious option in the next election.
So really there's no big deal, B.C.'s turbulent politics is merely unfolding as it should.
B.C. Politics Trendwatch
NDP's strong campaign wins both byelections,
Liberals relieved to be ahead of Conservatives
By John Twigg
The results of the two B.C. byelections are now widely known but the debate about what they mean will go on for months and possibly all the way to the next provincial election in May next year.
The B.C. New Democrats' wins in both Port Moody and Chilliwack were breakthroughs notable in their own right but perhaps more significant to the long-term political trends in the province was the contest between the B.C. Liberal Party and B.C. Conservative Party, which some have tried to portray as merely a "split" of the so-called free-enterprise vote but which really is something a lot more complex than that.
To get right to it, the Liberals finished a clear second in both constituencies, with about 30 per cent of the votes in a mere 40% turnout of voters, which is a bit better than what they had been getting in recent opinion polls, and quite a bit better than the 15% the Conservatives got in Port Moody and the 25% they got in Chilliwack.
Calls to oust Clark may ease
That should be enough to quieten some calls for the immediate ouster of Liberal Premier Christy Clark but to keep her job until the new year she probably will have to engineer a party name change in the fall and implement a major policy reform package in the February budget aimed at assuaging the thousands of Liberal supporters who for various reasons have defected to the New Democrats and Conservatives.
B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins claimed to be "quite pleased" with the results, about 25% in Chilliwack and 15% in Port Moody, given that the party's campaign team was starting from scratch, got outspent five-to-one and didn't have enough volunteers to get its vote out, and he pledged to be more competitive and ready in the provincial election. He also noted that the votes confirmed poll findings that his party is a serious contender.
Clark and other Liberal apologists were quick to cite the Conservatives' vote-splitting but Cummins was having none of it and the vote results tend to support him: NDP candidate Joe Trasolini in Port Moody-Coquitlam pulled in a surprising 54% per cent, which means the popular ex-mayor would have won in a two-way race too, while in Chilliwack the NDP's hard-working Gwen O'Mahony won with a solid 41% while Conservative John Martin scored a solid 25%, many of which were anti-Liberal protest votes, so if Mahony had been in a two-way race against a Liberal she probably would have still won.
Dix says positive campaign helped NDP
As NDP leader Adrian Dix noted in post-election comments, some 70% of voters sent a message against the Liberals in the byelections and he's looking forward to seeing that repeated in the next provincial election.
"We had the best candidate(s) and we ran a positive campaign and I think people responded to that," said Dix, perhaps downplaying the impact of his party sending many outside volunteers into the two campaigns and overlooking the reality that the main trend at work was the decaying of the Liberal support, some of which declined to vote, some of which went to the NDP and some of which went Conservative.
A good example of that was Conservative candidate Christine Clarke in Port Moody, who in the 2009 election was a volunteer worker for successful Liberal candidate Iain Black, who last year resigned as MLA to take a job with the Vancouver Board of Trade.
The New Democrats by contrast not only held onto to all of their support (roughly 35% in 2009) they also pulled all of it out to vote plus they pulled a few defectors from the Liberals plus they probably drew some former B.C. Green Party support too because that party chose to not run candidates, while the Cummins Conservatives have been taking in droves of Liberals fed up with Liberal shenanigans, notably Abbotsford South MLA John van Dongen who crossed the floor of the Legislature early in the campaign, which helped boost the Conservatives' profile and credibility.
Liberal support decays due to HST
So why is the Liberal vote decaying? Interestingly interviews with exiting voters by CKNW's Shane Woodford revealed that the hated Harmonized Sales Tax was still sparking a backlash, but more generally the protest votes seemed to be against the Liberals' perceived arrogance and corruption and mismanagement of too many major issues, such as the corrupted giveaway of B.C. Rail, deconstruction of the Agricultural Land Reserve and several questionable moves involving B.C. Hydro and other Crown agencies (not to mention that the Auditor General found that former premier Gordon Campbell had illegitimately cooked the province's financial books prior to the 2009 election campaign).
Though Clark as Premier has had more than a year to turn around such problems, the opinion polls and now the byelection results prove that she has so far failed to do so, and if her party had finished third in both byelections she probably would have been ousted by August, but now it seems she will be given a few more months to try to restore the so-called free-enterprise coalition that has governed B.C. for about 50 of the last 65 years. A major test will be a major fundraising dinner in June which is critical to the party's pre-election fundraising.
Clark statement cites vote-splitting
Clark watched the results from her Vancouver office then issued the following statement: "Voters know that by-elections are not about changing government. It’s never been clearer that only a unified free enterprise coalition can defeat the NDP. That’s why we are focused on strengthening our coalition so that in the next general election voters will have a clear choice between the free enterprise coalition and the NDP. A choice between higher income taxes, reckless government spending and runaway debt or our free enterprise coalition that is keeping taxes low, restraining government spending and keeping our economy growing with jobs for B.C. families."
Cummins however was having none of that: "The Liberals have their heads in the sand - people are walking away from them in droves. The Liberals say we are vote-splitting but we offer the best hope for the so-called free-enterprise vote," he said.
"We're on the way up and they're on the way down and I think that will continue . . . we expect to do well when more people understand what we're all about," he continued, dismissing any thought of a merger with "a discredited organization like the Liberals."
"The B.C. Conservative Party are a sort of brand without any policy - they are NOT the federal Conservative Party," said former Liberal communications official Mike Morton in an interview on CKNW, which further focused on the byelections' message that it showed the B.C. Conservatives also have a lot of work to do before they will be able to offer voters a viable alternative to the NDP, which under Dix is trying to appear as moderate and non-threatening as possible despite its sometimes radical policies and activists in its ranks (e.g, gender quotas for candidates, opposition to resource projects, etc.).
Fall sitting of Leg to be dropped?
One other notable impact of the byelections could be the cancellation of possible plans for a fall sitting of the legislature, because the defection of only four more MLAs would deprive the Clark Liberals of their majority.
The two byelection wins give the NDP 36 seats while there are 3 Independents (one being van Dongen) and now 46 Liberals, one of whom is Speaker. Thus if three Liberals defected the Speaker could have to vote to break a tie, and if four defected it wouldn't matter what the Speaker did, except maybe to advise the Lieutenant Governor to stay near a phone in case he was needed to trigger an election or - gasp! - give Dix a chance to govern instead!!
That probably won't happen but there is talk of several other Liberal MLAs considering defecting depending on the byelections and other matters and the way to thwart that is to simply not let the Legislature sit in the fall.
While a fall sitting is not a necessity nor even a tradition, it often has been used when governments want to introduce policy shifts for consideration by the public and special interest groups, which appears to fit Clark's plans for introducing a new policy direction prior to the next election.
So I was intrigued when Liberal MLA Ralph Sultan (West Vancouver - Capilano) tweeted after the Sun Run that he was looking forward to a six-week run of the Legislature (with one week off) and then "prorogation" - meaning the formal ending of the Session. I sent him an email wondering whether he meant to say adjournment but he did not reply.
There is a bit of an anomaly insofar as the current sitting was not a new session but merely was a continuation of a session begun last fall as a sort of new policy direction by Clark, which is why there was no Throne Speech this year, and which could be why the sitting and the session will de facto end at the end of May (though technically the formal prorogation usually doesn't happen until the morning before a new one starts).
Another wild card in the deck is the possibility that the Legislature might have to be called back in August in order to force striking teachers back to work, and/or possibly to deal with other pending public-sector labour disputes.
Anyway, the byelection results gave the Dix New Democrats a boost, they gave Clark and the Liberals a warning and a bit of time to make repairs and reparations and they give the Cummins Conservatives a clear message that they need to work both harder and smarter if they're going to become a serious option in the next election.
So really there's no big deal, B.C.'s turbulent politics is merely unfolding as it should.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Bloy's smear of Dix was deliberate
The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 39 April 17, 2012 (updated Apr 18)
Bloy's blunder was a deliberate start
of a long-running campaign of smears
By John Twigg
I'm still officially on hiatus pending a restructuring of my newsletters, blogs and website, but I'd feel remiss for not putting out there my two-bits worth on the Harry Bloy story, because it is even worse than the mainstream media have implied.
Though the mainstream media portrayed Liberal MLA Harry Bloy's shocking smears of NDP leader Adrian Dix in the Legislature Monday as merely a personal blunder, there is lots of evidence to suggest it was the opening salvo in what will become an incessant bombardment of character assassinations against Dix in particular and possibly others too as the passing months approach next year's provincial election (on May 14, 2013).
Nonetheless Dix announced in the Legislature Tuesday (April 17) that he had received a personal apology from Bloy in a phone call and that he (Dix) had accepted it as genuine, apparently as part of his desire to raise the level of politics in the province and to stay away from personal attacks, which drew a fair amount of quick praise for Dix plus a few suggestions his real hope is to avoid future questions about his own past personal problems.
That's probably a naive hope on Dix's part because the systematic use of attack ads is now de rigeur in North American politics and his backdated-memo incident is still common fodder for pundits and bloggers, but it also was a lost opportunity for Dix and/or his NDP colleagues to expose some of the shenanigans behind such attacks because Bloy's outburst would have been an easy target for questions.
In fact the unusual timing of Bloy's remarks - in the midst of a debate on smart meters early Monday morning - suggests it was deliberately chosen as a test for opinion pollsters prior to the intensely-watched byelections Thursday in Port Moody - Coquitlam and Chilliwack - Hope.
Who scripted Bloy's smear?
So the question is, who put Harry Bloy, the hapless MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed, up to such a drive-by smear?
We know pollsters for all three competing parties already have a very good idea of what voting intentions are now in both ridings, where the high interest is reflected in the record turnouts for advance polls, but now after Bloy's outburst the Liberal strategists will be able to see and hear and even quantify what effects Bloy's outburst had on voting behaviour, if any (e.g. causing some people to simply stay home, which may be one of the goals).
That means the lessons learned by Liberal strategists from the by-election campaigns in general and Bloy's impact in particular can and will be applied in the run-up to the provincial election, and judging from the federal Conservative Party's successful rebranding and smearing of successive leaders of the opposing federal Liberal Party we can expect similar things here in B.C. too.
That's especially so since we've seen in the two byelections how the B.C. Liberal Party has become merely a puppet of the Harper Conservatives, especially with former Conservative MP Chuck Strahl serving as campaign chair for Liberal candidate Laurie Throness in Chilliwack; that's partly because Throness was Strahl's ministerial aide for many years but also because the Harper Cons are openly supporting a strategic alliance with the B.C. Liberals in order to try to stop the godless and dangerous socialists from gaining power even though the rising B.C. Conservative Party is ideologically closer to them.
Such political cynicism is odious to a lot of people, including some few ethical liberals, but the people behind it don't care because for them it's only about preserving their own power and money interests, and keeping their spots at the head of the trough.
What evidence is there, you ask? Well if you watched the Hansard video of Bloy's shocking remarks you might notice him glancing down from time to time, which led me and at least one other journalist to wonder on Twitter whether he was reading from notes.
Video shows Bloy using notes
And when I reviewed the video it was evident that Bloy was reading from the left-hand page on his lectern when he was talking about smart meters and from the right-hand page when he was slagging Dix - which clearly suggests he had notes and thus was not merely going too far in the heat of debate.
You can watch and read a transcript of the incident on B.C. Legislature Hansard or for a video click here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/04/16/bc-harry-bloy-apology.html
Though NDP House Leader John Horgan on Bill Good's show Tuesday morning said it seemed as if the MLAs sitting around Bloy were shocked by his performance he (Horgan) still insisted it was a deliberate and with-intent smear, noting that Bloy knows parliamentary procedure better than most members because he was for many years a chair of committees.
"The only reason that Mr. Bloy stood in the legislature today was to smear Adrian Dix," Horgan told reporters, without having to remind them that statements made in the legislature are exempt from libel laws, and that news media enjoy a "qualified privilege" in being able to repeat them.
The scripting of Bloy seemed to continue in the hallway when he told reporters he had spoken in heated debate and withdrawn the remarks and that's all he was going to say, which was nonsense except that it was enough for him to avoid a lawsuit for libel.
“In the heat of debate, many things are said,” Bloy told reporters. “I stood up in the House and withdrew the remarks.” - which also sounded like a memorized line.
It should be noted too that Bloy is a long-serving MLA who was the only caucus member to support Christy Clark for Premier and once he did make it into her cabinet he soon proved so incompetent that he had to be removed from a senior ministry (Children and Families) to a junior one (Multiculturalism) and then from that one too, after which she announced that he would not be seeking re-election.
So Bloy was an ideal sort of sacrifice: his pensions are secure, he's not running again and his reputation for being dumb is so entrenched that most mainstream media could report his remarks without worrying whether they were deliberate and scripted by others.
Horgan deplores attacks on personalities
Horgan of course deplored the attack on personality instead of debating policy that the Liberals and some key supports do, notably Philip Hochstein and his Independent Contractors and Businesses Association, but Horgan predicted it will continue and soon could be extended to B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins too, especially if his party was to win one of the byelections.
Other evidence of some kind of pre-planned and ongoing strategy include some tweets posted by the B.C. Liberal caucus research, notably one that quoted a 1999 opinion piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail that was critical of the then-NDP government's finances, which I tweeted was rather old and out of context - until I saw the Bloy flameout!
And I'm not the only one who sees a conspiracy here because Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith just opined much the same thing too, especially regarding how the federal Conservatives had successfully "framed" their opponents federally in the last two elections, and that Clark as Premier recently hired former aides to Prime Minister Stephen Harper "who has turned gutter politics and character assassination into a political art form."
Note too that while Bloy soon withdrew his remarks and later apologized for them too, that only gave the mainstream media new excuses to repeat the libels, the worst of which insinuated that Dix may have stolen the engagement ring he gave to his wife much like former NDP MP Svend Robinson had done for his gay partner - as well as accusations that Dix had lied and stolen public money.
Though Clark as Premier said she did not agree with Bloy's comments, she also did not (so far) suggest he be further disciplined, such as by evicting him from the Liberal caucus as Horgan suggested would be appropriate.
“It’s a pattern of behaviour that the Premier is leading. As disappointing and tepid as Mr. Bloy’s apology was, I would hope the Premier would have something to say about this when she returns to the capital,” said Horgan.
That was probably a reference to Clark's behaviour when Bloy resigned from cabinet in March after leaking a document to a constituent, in which she said Bloy did the right thing but it was not as bad as what Dix had done when he was an aide in an NDP government: "He did not forge a memo in an effort to try and derail an RCMP criminal investigation,” said Clark.
More recently the B.C. Liberals have been using Dix's problem with a missing transit ticket in their by-election campaign leaflets: “NDP leader Adrian Dix tried to hide his fare evasion but the police caught him red-handed. If he can’t be trusted to pay for transit, how can you trust him with your vote?”
That also echoes the tenor of Clark's campaign in the Vancouver–Point Grey by-election last year, which was extremely negative against her NDP opponent, David Eby, and against the NDP in general, probably reflecting the influence of her senior campaign adviser Patrick Kinsella, who has been a fixture behind anti-NDP campaigns in B.C. all the way back to 1975.
It also may be related to the unusually extensive damage to campaign signs in Chilliwack, in which mainly Conservative signs were destroyed, reflecting Liberal anger at the Conservatives for daring to split the free-enterprise vote.
Anyway, you can now safely bet that a lot more negative attack adds will be running in B.C. in the lead-up to the provincial election.
A key point to watch for is whether the B.C. Liberals also will get access to the federal Conservatives' vaunted database on voters, which appears to have been used in the voter-suppression or robo-calling scandal that has emerged from the last federal election. That is a very powerful too which has proven to be vulnerable to abuses.
It's now common knowledge that Harper, Strahl, Throness and Preston Manning are all members of the Alliance church (see Andrew Nikiforuk on the Tyee website for details), and Christy Clark also has flaunted her High Anglican religiosity from time to time, so that raises this question: why are such pious-sounding politicians so prone to using political dirty tricks?
---
New warnings re smart meters
While I'm here I want to draw readers' attention to what some of the above fuss was about, namely the growing list of problems associated with the B.C. Liberal government's $1-billion program in which B.C. Hydro is forcing virtually all of its customers to accept so-called smart meters.
It's bad enough that that was done without prior approval of the B.C. Utilities Commission, and it's worse that various problems have emerged with such meters, including emissions, invasion of privacy and some inaccuracies, but now worst of all is emerging concerns that smart meters can be hacked and that raises the prospect of the entire electricity grid being sabotaged.
That may seem far-fetched to people quick to ridicule the tin-helmet crowd, but if you note that even the U.S. FBI is concerned about it perhaps you will realize it is a real threat here and now too. Here's a link:
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/fbi-finds-smart-meter-hacking-surprisingly-easy/
Bloy's blunder was a deliberate start
of a long-running campaign of smears
By John Twigg
I'm still officially on hiatus pending a restructuring of my newsletters, blogs and website, but I'd feel remiss for not putting out there my two-bits worth on the Harry Bloy story, because it is even worse than the mainstream media have implied.
Though the mainstream media portrayed Liberal MLA Harry Bloy's shocking smears of NDP leader Adrian Dix in the Legislature Monday as merely a personal blunder, there is lots of evidence to suggest it was the opening salvo in what will become an incessant bombardment of character assassinations against Dix in particular and possibly others too as the passing months approach next year's provincial election (on May 14, 2013).
Nonetheless Dix announced in the Legislature Tuesday (April 17) that he had received a personal apology from Bloy in a phone call and that he (Dix) had accepted it as genuine, apparently as part of his desire to raise the level of politics in the province and to stay away from personal attacks, which drew a fair amount of quick praise for Dix plus a few suggestions his real hope is to avoid future questions about his own past personal problems.
That's probably a naive hope on Dix's part because the systematic use of attack ads is now de rigeur in North American politics and his backdated-memo incident is still common fodder for pundits and bloggers, but it also was a lost opportunity for Dix and/or his NDP colleagues to expose some of the shenanigans behind such attacks because Bloy's outburst would have been an easy target for questions.
In fact the unusual timing of Bloy's remarks - in the midst of a debate on smart meters early Monday morning - suggests it was deliberately chosen as a test for opinion pollsters prior to the intensely-watched byelections Thursday in Port Moody - Coquitlam and Chilliwack - Hope.
Who scripted Bloy's smear?
So the question is, who put Harry Bloy, the hapless MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed, up to such a drive-by smear?
We know pollsters for all three competing parties already have a very good idea of what voting intentions are now in both ridings, where the high interest is reflected in the record turnouts for advance polls, but now after Bloy's outburst the Liberal strategists will be able to see and hear and even quantify what effects Bloy's outburst had on voting behaviour, if any (e.g. causing some people to simply stay home, which may be one of the goals).
That means the lessons learned by Liberal strategists from the by-election campaigns in general and Bloy's impact in particular can and will be applied in the run-up to the provincial election, and judging from the federal Conservative Party's successful rebranding and smearing of successive leaders of the opposing federal Liberal Party we can expect similar things here in B.C. too.
That's especially so since we've seen in the two byelections how the B.C. Liberal Party has become merely a puppet of the Harper Conservatives, especially with former Conservative MP Chuck Strahl serving as campaign chair for Liberal candidate Laurie Throness in Chilliwack; that's partly because Throness was Strahl's ministerial aide for many years but also because the Harper Cons are openly supporting a strategic alliance with the B.C. Liberals in order to try to stop the godless and dangerous socialists from gaining power even though the rising B.C. Conservative Party is ideologically closer to them.
Such political cynicism is odious to a lot of people, including some few ethical liberals, but the people behind it don't care because for them it's only about preserving their own power and money interests, and keeping their spots at the head of the trough.
What evidence is there, you ask? Well if you watched the Hansard video of Bloy's shocking remarks you might notice him glancing down from time to time, which led me and at least one other journalist to wonder on Twitter whether he was reading from notes.
Video shows Bloy using notes
And when I reviewed the video it was evident that Bloy was reading from the left-hand page on his lectern when he was talking about smart meters and from the right-hand page when he was slagging Dix - which clearly suggests he had notes and thus was not merely going too far in the heat of debate.
You can watch and read a transcript of the incident on B.C. Legislature Hansard or for a video click here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/04/16/bc-harry-bloy-apology.html
Though NDP House Leader John Horgan on Bill Good's show Tuesday morning said it seemed as if the MLAs sitting around Bloy were shocked by his performance he (Horgan) still insisted it was a deliberate and with-intent smear, noting that Bloy knows parliamentary procedure better than most members because he was for many years a chair of committees.
"The only reason that Mr. Bloy stood in the legislature today was to smear Adrian Dix," Horgan told reporters, without having to remind them that statements made in the legislature are exempt from libel laws, and that news media enjoy a "qualified privilege" in being able to repeat them.
The scripting of Bloy seemed to continue in the hallway when he told reporters he had spoken in heated debate and withdrawn the remarks and that's all he was going to say, which was nonsense except that it was enough for him to avoid a lawsuit for libel.
“In the heat of debate, many things are said,” Bloy told reporters. “I stood up in the House and withdrew the remarks.” - which also sounded like a memorized line.
It should be noted too that Bloy is a long-serving MLA who was the only caucus member to support Christy Clark for Premier and once he did make it into her cabinet he soon proved so incompetent that he had to be removed from a senior ministry (Children and Families) to a junior one (Multiculturalism) and then from that one too, after which she announced that he would not be seeking re-election.
So Bloy was an ideal sort of sacrifice: his pensions are secure, he's not running again and his reputation for being dumb is so entrenched that most mainstream media could report his remarks without worrying whether they were deliberate and scripted by others.
Horgan deplores attacks on personalities
Horgan of course deplored the attack on personality instead of debating policy that the Liberals and some key supports do, notably Philip Hochstein and his Independent Contractors and Businesses Association, but Horgan predicted it will continue and soon could be extended to B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins too, especially if his party was to win one of the byelections.
Other evidence of some kind of pre-planned and ongoing strategy include some tweets posted by the B.C. Liberal caucus research, notably one that quoted a 1999 opinion piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail that was critical of the then-NDP government's finances, which I tweeted was rather old and out of context - until I saw the Bloy flameout!
And I'm not the only one who sees a conspiracy here because Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith just opined much the same thing too, especially regarding how the federal Conservatives had successfully "framed" their opponents federally in the last two elections, and that Clark as Premier recently hired former aides to Prime Minister Stephen Harper "who has turned gutter politics and character assassination into a political art form."
Note too that while Bloy soon withdrew his remarks and later apologized for them too, that only gave the mainstream media new excuses to repeat the libels, the worst of which insinuated that Dix may have stolen the engagement ring he gave to his wife much like former NDP MP Svend Robinson had done for his gay partner - as well as accusations that Dix had lied and stolen public money.
Though Clark as Premier said she did not agree with Bloy's comments, she also did not (so far) suggest he be further disciplined, such as by evicting him from the Liberal caucus as Horgan suggested would be appropriate.
“It’s a pattern of behaviour that the Premier is leading. As disappointing and tepid as Mr. Bloy’s apology was, I would hope the Premier would have something to say about this when she returns to the capital,” said Horgan.
That was probably a reference to Clark's behaviour when Bloy resigned from cabinet in March after leaking a document to a constituent, in which she said Bloy did the right thing but it was not as bad as what Dix had done when he was an aide in an NDP government: "He did not forge a memo in an effort to try and derail an RCMP criminal investigation,” said Clark.
More recently the B.C. Liberals have been using Dix's problem with a missing transit ticket in their by-election campaign leaflets: “NDP leader Adrian Dix tried to hide his fare evasion but the police caught him red-handed. If he can’t be trusted to pay for transit, how can you trust him with your vote?”
That also echoes the tenor of Clark's campaign in the Vancouver–Point Grey by-election last year, which was extremely negative against her NDP opponent, David Eby, and against the NDP in general, probably reflecting the influence of her senior campaign adviser Patrick Kinsella, who has been a fixture behind anti-NDP campaigns in B.C. all the way back to 1975.
It also may be related to the unusually extensive damage to campaign signs in Chilliwack, in which mainly Conservative signs were destroyed, reflecting Liberal anger at the Conservatives for daring to split the free-enterprise vote.
Anyway, you can now safely bet that a lot more negative attack adds will be running in B.C. in the lead-up to the provincial election.
A key point to watch for is whether the B.C. Liberals also will get access to the federal Conservatives' vaunted database on voters, which appears to have been used in the voter-suppression or robo-calling scandal that has emerged from the last federal election. That is a very powerful too which has proven to be vulnerable to abuses.
It's now common knowledge that Harper, Strahl, Throness and Preston Manning are all members of the Alliance church (see Andrew Nikiforuk on the Tyee website for details), and Christy Clark also has flaunted her High Anglican religiosity from time to time, so that raises this question: why are such pious-sounding politicians so prone to using political dirty tricks?
---
New warnings re smart meters
While I'm here I want to draw readers' attention to what some of the above fuss was about, namely the growing list of problems associated with the B.C. Liberal government's $1-billion program in which B.C. Hydro is forcing virtually all of its customers to accept so-called smart meters.
It's bad enough that that was done without prior approval of the B.C. Utilities Commission, and it's worse that various problems have emerged with such meters, including emissions, invasion of privacy and some inaccuracies, but now worst of all is emerging concerns that smart meters can be hacked and that raises the prospect of the entire electricity grid being sabotaged.
That may seem far-fetched to people quick to ridicule the tin-helmet crowd, but if you note that even the U.S. FBI is concerned about it perhaps you will realize it is a real threat here and now too. Here's a link:
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/fbi-finds-smart-meter-hacking-surprisingly-easy/
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