The Daily Twigg April 29, 2013
So much more could and should be done
to make B.C. the truly best place in the world

By John Twigg (Copyright)

It's a bit rich to suddenly see all the fooferaw around Premier Christy Clark's foolish red-light incident in which leading pundits, the mainstream media and even some of her own B.C. Liberal Party members are now questioning her character.
Yes she was stupid to stop and then go through a red light at a deserted intersection at 5 a.m. with her son on the way to his hockey practise and even moreso with a Vancouver Sun reporter in the back seat preparing a pre-election profile, and she was even more stupid when she mis-spoke about what she claimed she and her son to have said about it before and then gradually changed her story about her story...

Clark's character has long been questionable
We've heard Clark do that many times before about so many issues, from misrepresenting her dubious role as a leaky cabinet minister in the scandal-plagued sale of BCRail to her latest fabrications about the state of B.C.'s finances and economy and what the bond-rating agencies say about it, and what the New Democrats espouse and on and on.
Hey folks where have you been these last three years or so? The same folks now questioning Clark's character sat more or less mute while she pulled off numerous similar peccadilloes on her way to winning - some say stealing - the leadership of the B.C. Liberal Party about two years ago, including the notorious noxious use of bulk sales of new voting membership in the Indo-Canadian communities and then apparently the bulk voting by those memberships too, which numerous party insiders are aware of but so far only the notorious "political blogger" Alex G. Tsakumis has reported in any detail (especially the involvement of a convicted thug).
Whether or not Christy Clark's leadership win was marginally legal or not, it now appears that a cabal of powerful backroomers including lobbyist Patrick Kinsella and senior government lawyer Doug Eastwood among others inserted her into the Premier's Office so she could keep a lid on that and numerous other potential scandals in the wake of former premier Gordon Campbell's unexpected ouster in the wake of the Basi-Virk and Harmonized Sales Tax fiascos. Campbell is now in de facto witness protection serving as Canada's Agent General London while Kinsella reportedly is retiring and moving to a gated community in Palm Springs and Eastwood has been transferred to the B.C. Justice Institute training academy.

Dix shies away from personal attacks
The list of issues Clark has mishandled is too long for this column and sadly you won't find that list on the B.C. New Democratic Party's website either due to an anomaly in this campaign, namely that NDP leader Adrian Dix has decided to only offer positive alternatives, though the NDP did recently (Apr. 28) publish a cutely-worded list of why a dozen of the B.C. Liberal Party candidates could be called upon to step aside (which came soon after pundit Rafe Mair had criticized Dix for being too milquetoast [my word, his concept] against Clark).
NDP MLAs and officers have criticized numerous policy failings by Clark and the Liberals, especially re misrepresenting the size of the deficits and debt, but none have gone so far as to say she is personally flawed even though Christy has run up the debt even more than Campbell did, she has botched numerous projects such as the BC Place naming and the Prince George wooden office tower, and she has alienated many of her party's stalwarts, notably Kevin Falcon and George Abbott who lost the leadership and already have new jobs outside government.
Christy also has continued the chronic underfunding of numerous critical social services, she has allowed very few sittings of the legislature, she has churned through staff like a revolving door for a shoe sale, she has alienated other Premiers and scrambled to field a full slate of candidates, and abused the election process with massive spending on taxpayer-paid advertisements, and on and on like that.
But now the MSM pundits and a few diehard Liberals are now questioning her character because she drove through an empty intersection at 5 a.m.? and then misrepresented it?? It's ludicrous, but if that's what it takes then so be it. It's obviously time overdue for her and her colleagues to go for many many reasons, and perhaps this will be her last straw. We'll see how it plays or if it is even raised in the televised debate tonight at 6:30.

Dix faces new questions after policy flip-flop
However Clark is sheltered somewhat by a strange irony that is curiously typical of B.C.'s often tumultuous topsy-turvy politics and that is that B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix also is being subjected to renewed questions about his character (which probably is also partly why he eschewed negative campaigning).
Dix of course became notorious for back-dating a memo to file in order to try to protect his then boss Premier Glen Clark from a scandal (a constituent seeking a gaming licence), then Dix getting caught and being forced to resign. Dix managed to admit his mistake and go on to win the B.C. NDP leadership also about two years ago and also won narrowly after some questions arose about his supporters recruiting bulk votes from the Indo-Canadian community, but he seemed well on his way to recovery until he was found to be on SkyTrain without a ticket, which he also managed to live down.
Though Liberal campaign strategists and external supporters launched massive advertising campaigns focussed on Dix's peccadilloes, claiming he thus was unfit to be a Premier, the polls showed repeatedly that voters had forgiven him, with 45% supporting the NDP versus only about 31% for the Clark Liberals and the remainder going to B.C.'s Green and Conservative parties (and about 20% undecided). As well, Dix topped Clark in the "best Premier" question.
So almost everyone was saying and assuming that it was Dix's election to win or lose and all he had to do was avoid mistakes.
As noted by pundit Norman Spector, the B.C. NDP campaign managed by former federal leadership candidate Brian Topp was one of the most astute he had ever seen by the B.C. NDP, and I agree with that as do many others though I would have preferred a more balanced approach including the positives but also lots of negatives about Clark and the Liberals, lots of reasons why people should get out to vote against the incumbents too.
But as perhaps many readers already know by now Dix may have blown it by suddenly flip-flopping on an important policy question: whether Kinder Morgan should be allowed to double the capacity of the former Trans-Mountain Pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby to enable new exports of bitumen through Vancouver's inner harbour.
Initially Dix was studiously keeping an open mind on that proposal, withholding comment until KM submitted its official proposal, but then suddenly on Earth Day when he released the party's official platform he came out against adding any new oil tanker shipments through Vancouver harbour.
That reversal sparked a storm of controversy that is still raging and probably will be a central issue in tonight's televised leaders debate and unfortunately for Dix it renewed questions about his character from pundits including Spector this morning on CKNW's Bill Good Show.
So why did Dix flip-flop? So far he hasn't given a solid explanation so we are left to speculate that Topp's in-house polling had discovered a tidal wave of support flowing to the Green Party and so to forestall it he persuaded Dix to try to out-green the Greens, which he did at the expense of Kinder Morgan, refinery workers and B.C. government revenues.
As a person who grew up in West Vancouver I well sympathize with people, especially First Nations with rights to forage for food, who see increased oil tanker traffic as a threat, and I share NDP energy critic John Horgan's view that the terminus of Kinder Morgan's second line could be moved to a place such as Sumas or even go directly to Anacortes in Washington State, but either way the pipeline proposal is not for me a make-or-break vote-determining issue because the environment has co-existed reasonably well with Chevron's refinery in Burnaby for many decades and could continue to do so even if it added one tanker ship per day as now proposed. But it would be good to have a genuine review of the options and their cost-benefits - as Dix originally was promising to do. But now? Who knows. It has become a political football.

Campaign lacks creative ideas to grow jobs
What we have not seen yet from any party is creative ideas on how to grow the economy and to create jobs (they're connected but not the same thing), especially to add lots of low-skilled entry-level jobs which can give marginalized people enough work experience to get and take training to qualify for better jobs and to provide the skilled labour that many major industries in B.C. are now clamoring for - in other words moving towards full employment!
In my opinion the Number One Issue in the present B.C. election is the economy in general (which is what the polls also say) and direct job creation in particular, which the polls do not say and which the pols (politicians) won't even mention maybe for fear of being accused of being profligate wastrels.
In Dix's case we see a leader letting himself be steered by the party factions that elected him leader and the party pros who want to make him Premier, so his 74-page platform is super-cautious, with virtually no new spending nor even any major new directions but lots of positive small steps such as linking B.C. food to B.C. hospitals, and providing good fodder for his one-a-day policy pronouncements.
A prime example is B.C. Ferries, which in Dix's platform will get $40 million and a two-year rate freeze while the new government studies its options, which could be worse but also better.
For example, I have been pushing a radical idea to add a third-crossing from the area near Vancouver International Airport and the Iona sewage outfall over to Gabriola Island and then a short new bridge to the big island. It would be a very short crossing that could easily cater to truck traffic and foot passengers, especially with a link to SkyTrain in Richmond, and here's the kicker: the new ferry could be fuelled by gases extracted from Metro Vancouver's sewage which is soon going to need new treatment plants costing billions of dollars anyway!
B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins meanwhile is proposing an innovative tax credit for ferry users which was well-received, and the B.C. Green Party probably has a ferries plank in its massive on-line policy manual but if so they are not yet campaigning on it. And the Clark Liberals? Who knows - don't ask don't tell?

Green Party leader Sterk raising profile
So what we see so far is Clark and the Liberals promising pie in the sky to eliminate debt in decades hence when or really if the liquefied natural gas concept comes to fruition while Cummins and the Conservatives pander to small-c curmudgeons and the Greens offer such a plethora of ideas that so far no one thing stands out.
B.C. Green Party leader Jane Sterk won the radio debate on Friday (according to me and Vaughn Palmer and others) because she raised her profile and credibility, especially when she quickly connected with a caller complaining about the pittance disabled people must live on, but it remains to be seen if the Greens can win more than a few seats.
One problem the Greens have is that too many of their activists are well-meaning zealots who lack common sense about economics, business and government finances, and who accept on blind faith the scare tactics and twisted statistics from groups such as the International Panel on Climate Change who have vested policy interests as conflicted as any business or industry (viz Al Gore).
Thus when they see the level of carbon in the atmosphere approaching 400 parts per million they willingly claim it is some kind of tipping point towards disaster when really it's only one more artificial dot on a long continuum of what is really a relatively tiny component - in other words a bit of nonsense akin to the Y2K panic.
Yes the Green zealots are well-meaning, and yes rising sea level is a problem that some people will need to address (such as by Richmond adding berms akin to Holland), but the causes of the warming (which many claim has already ended) are mainly natural (changes in solar phases) and meanwhile there are many many other issues that are far more urgent and far more important, such as job creation, health funding and skills training, to name three.

Many moves available to improve B.C.
What we are not seeing in this campaign are major new reforms to the structures of our province in ways that will benefit the people living here now and furthermore become a model that other nation-states would do well to emulate.
In particular, B.C. should move quickly to revive the Bank of B.C. and enable it to issue a made-in-B.C. currency which would be instrumental in preserving the province's stability and the people's security if or when the U.S. Federal Reserve and/or other central banks fail or collapse under their mountains of debt. No doubt some readers will immediately become naysayers believing it couldn't possibly work, that it would cause inflation or some other such flaw, but really it's simple: in order for B.C. to survive the tribulations ahead it would help a lot to have recourse to its own money supply operating in parallel with other currencies as now with the U.S. and Canadian dollars. And to keep the B.C. dollar viable the Province would declare it acceptable for the payment of taxes.
The Province also could mandate or legislate or directly create a wide variety of new industries, especially by legalizing marijuana but also encouraging industrial hemp, which is a sort of miracle plant providing food, fibres, energy, oils and medicines all from one renewable and easy-to-grow plant.
It also could enable bulk exports of surplus water, which the province has in abundance and could do through a single-window export agency like Saskatchewan does with potash fertilizer or an auction approach to get around NAFTA, or in other ways even including the NAWAPA proposal which would see the high-altitude Site C dam collecting rain and snow melt and delivering it through canals and lift stations all the way to Arizona. Though many well-meaning people have painted water exports as a devilish trap, in fact it would be a renewable bonanza for B.C. and a boon to people and farmers in many locations including California farms that now send very large volumes of water-laden vegetables into Canada.
Similarly the Province could do better jobs exporting energy, forest and mineral products, it could move towards self-sufficiency in food and other essential products including micro-hydro and other forms of renewable energy, and it could improve its delivery of home care, reform courts and jails, add coastal ferries - it could electrify railways, repurpose ICBC, save the Agricultural Land Reserve and do almost everything in the platforms of all four major parties.
It also could build more rental housing, encourage energy retrofits (good sources of new jobs too), enable more woodlots and tree farms and catch up on reforestation.
It could expand preventive health care to reduce hospital and drug costs, it could invest in social programs and service-providers to reduce crime and limit court and police costs.
There also could be lots of financial reforms, such as finding a better funding formula for municipalities and reopening negotiations with Ottawa to this next time do a better job of designing, selling and then implementing a better harmonized sales tax system (the previous HST had an illegitimate process and too many design flaws). We might also bring back the B.C. Savings Bonds that were killed by Gordon Campbell.
And finally (at least for this list) it could engage in some systemic political, electoral and legislative reforms including more electronic direct democracy (assuming it survives a proper public process beforehand) and removing the system of partisan bullying exposed by journalist Sean Holman in his new film documentary called Whipped.
Indeed all that is still only a short survey of the many good things that could and should be done to make British Columbia into truly the best place in the world and a beacon of light to other nation-states.
We can begin by watching tonight's leaders' debate and then voting accordingly on May 14 (or sooner by advance ballot).