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.

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.

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/

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.