Some thoughts to ponder on B.C. Family Day weekend
By John Twigg
Not that anyone complained, but there are some good reasons why my journalistic output waned a bit in recent days: unexpected health and dental issues.
Not that I was ever at risk, only inconvenienced briefly and reminded anew how fortunate we are in British Columbia to generally have ready affordable access to professional care that's as world-class as it gets.
Not that I'm always going to begin my columns with "not" - indeed it may be the first time in my now-long career as a journalistic writer, mainly in politics and business but also in sports and arts and culture and food and... life. Oh, and we can't forget spirituality, religion, theology, prophecy and some bigger words. But not today, not right here, not right now. (That's a subtle reference to the song Right Here, Right Now by the group Jesus Jones, which contains this brilliant lyric: "Watching the world wake up from history.")
No, the topic today is how I recently got a great stitch job to a bad cut on my nose that I incurred while trying to disassemble a large set of plastic shelving - a self-inflicted wound that sliced open my left nostril and caused lots of blood to flow, and then only a week or so later I had to have two broken molars extracted (unrelated to the encounter with plastic shelving).
In the first instance the doctor on duty in the Campbell River hospital emergency department was Dr. Shannon Hammersly, an emergency room specialist who happened to also be trained as a plastic surgeon, and he did such a great job that my wound was virtually invisible when I appeared on my local television show about 10 days later (Talk About on Shaw TV North Island - latest show re SD72 budget is here ).
But apart from the doctor's talent there also was Medicare, which made my access relatively fast and very affordable, i.e. free! I was told a similar surgery in the U.S. would have cost several thousands of dollars.
And then this week I was referred to Dr. Bruce Woermke, a local specialist in dental surgery, for two difficult tooth extractions, and again he did it promptly and with amazing talent, albeit not for free but still well worth it, and it reminded me that politically I would like to see universal dental care available soon too.
Those events were in a way blessings helping me to have a better appreciation for the superb quality of life most people enjoy in British Columbia, which is something we can all hopefully meditate on a bit come Monday on the new Christy Liberal - created Family Day, a statutory provincial holiday.
And that reminded me of me how we all need to be much more mindful of the importance of maintaining a healthy political economy that enables more businesses and individuals to prosper in a place where the rule of law does rule and fairness and equal opportunities generally do prevail so businesses can be profitable, employ lots of people and pay a fair level of taxes to governments plural so that they can deliver the basic services everyone needs regardless of their varying abilities to pay, not just in health and welfare but also in housing and education and all the basics of life.
Policy ramifications of paying for needed services
I am a generally left-leaning but not really radical fellow in my politics, supporting the redistribution of wealth for those very such things as social, personal and economic health, but I'm also a pragmatist who realizes how badly we need a healthier economy with more jobs and more surplus value to share around, so I get annoyed when some ecological idealists so blithely advocate leaving resources in the ground because they might emit a bit of carbon, and other such nimby attitudes in various industries, all with different sets of pros and cons (both negatives and scams).
Of course we do not promote pollution or extinction of species or contamination of aquifers, and nor should we support subsidies to big businesses because they make timely substantial donations only to the politicians of their favour, but we DO need to grow our economic pies so there will be more to share all around.
Economic growth needed to pay for social services
In the short term it includes letting mines postpone their power bills to B.C. Hydro, as B.C. Premier Christy Clark has just done, and which other B.C. regimes have done in decades past, but that's a slippery slope that has some dangers too, such as exposing B.C. to complaints that it is unfairly subsidizing exports, which could violate the FTA, NAFTA, GATT and maybe (probably) the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership deal too.
No, what we really need are better long-term strategies to bolster and grow the B.C. economy, especially to make it more self-reliant in central and essential services, and getting B.C. residential, governmental and business consumers of electricity to pay inflated prices to B.C. Hydro in order to finance the Site C boondoggle to in turn subsidize the dubious export LNG golden goose is NOT one of those better strategies. But there should be and are better ways to accomplish similar ends, and not just pie-in-the-sky mass conversions to massive solar-panelled plains or vast vistas of windmills or other supposed environmental panaceas like plug-in cars for urban use now on the verge of viability (as John Horgan recently intimated).
Those innovations can and will help if and when they become economically viable to mass markets but meanwhile we need more new things NOW to bolster and grow the B.C. economy, and probably what we'll see in the coming federal and provincial budgets will make some welcome but still essentially inadequate steps in that direction.
The challenge here is with the structure of the economy, like what is counted in the GDP, what industries are kept underground, which human services are deemed to be priceless or valueless to the economists calculating inflation and productivity, and just which types of work should be paid at which levels. And which kinds of new services should be mandated, from better care of parks to better care of people, especially for those forced to tent in them!
Creating new currency could shelter B.C.
This leads to another key debate that's a bit esoteric about the various ways to achieve the creation of money, which is an increasingly important solution to just how we can or should inject more capital into the economy; I'll try to deal with it more in a subsequent blog post but essentially it is that both the (if-revived) Bank of B.C. and the Bank of Canada have the power to create new currency without first borrowing it from oligopolists - but they're too afraid to do it!
The U.S. government is in the same predicament and eventually they'll probably have to create fiat money to pay their huge overhanging debts to pension plans with unfunded liabilities, and to the Peoples Republic of China to which the U.S. now has an unrepayable debt.
The latest gyrations in exchange rates is giving the U.S. a brief opportunity to knock down some megadebts to China but if the U.S. has been doing so it has not yet become apparent, at least to me.
In such an unstable world surely it behooves British Columbia to develop its own stable currency for internal use so that its citizens on Family Day 2017 would be able to buy groceries with made-in-B.C. bucks.
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