One Hundred Plus Reasons

BC independent journalist Laila Yuile writes for community newspapers, 24, blogs for HuffPo and on her own blogsite. She has a pretty good group of people following her work, which is why, when she asked them to come up with reminders of the Liberal record here in BC, they responded quickly, efficiently, and in volume.
The Liberal Party, first under Gordon Campbell and now under Christy Clark, have weathered some pretty strong political storms. Through it all, they've managed to maintain a majority government, even though they haven't broadened their support. Then they ran a campaign that swore they wouldn't bring in a harmonized sales tax, folding the federal and provincial taxes together. Six months later: harmonized sales tax.
Campbell thought he was running the standard playbook--bring in massive changes all at once in the first year of your mandate, and then spend the rest of it managing for re-election. It worked a treat for Ralph Klein in Alberta, and has proved successful enough that it's been used in Ontario and at the federal level as well. But the HST was different.
First, it was egregious. Negotiations on harmonization had to have been taking place for months before the election. And while harmonization was going to be good for large corporations, it was going to be brutal on smaller, local enterprises--like restaurants. And that pissed off the small business community who thought they had a champion in the Campbell government.
But the small business community found a new champion--even though he wasn't really all that new. Charismatic politician Bill Vander Zalm, former premier of the province leading a Social Credit government (precursors to the Liberals who fouled their brand so thoroughly under Vander Zalm that the party folded itself into the Liberal brand), picked up the banner. Using legislation brought in under a former NDP government (under great pressure from the Socreds), Bill announced a referendum drive to repeal the legislation harmonizing the two taxes.
With Zalm leading the charge, the HST was no longer a purely partisan issue in the legislature, but became a populist movement transcending partisan politics. The HST probably wasn't the worst Liberal idea to come out (abusing the poor and indigenous populations, a perennial favourite, was clearly worse), but the people of BC decided enough was enough, and used the referendum push to spank the ruling class.
The NDP admitted during the campaign that the referendum legislation had been crafted so that it was almost impossible to successfully complete a recall campaign. But when the people gets riled up.....
The referendum ultimately called, passed. Meaning that the government was compelled to reverse course on the HST ( still not reversed, btw), and started a slide in Liberal popularity even among their traditional supporters. Campbell, his personal brand trashed as badly as Bennett's and Zalm's before him, took a powder. The party, taking a leaf from the Socred playbook, elected a woman to replace him--figuring that the public and media would have a harder time attacking a female premier. But Christy Clark has been up to the challenge, and it looks like the province will get at least one term of NDP government starting in 2013.
But just to make sure that the boobs in power get what's coming to them, laila Yule's crew have provided a reminder to the province  about the last decade of Liberal rule: 100 reasons the Liberals have to go.

Briony Penn Takes on Oilberta

Focus Magazine used to be this sleepy little mag read by seniors and, well, pretty much no-one else. But over the last couple of years, it has transformed itself into one of the most hard-hitting, deep-digging, and well-written magazines in Canada. And pretty much nobody outside Victoria knows about it.
We also have some of the smartest and most committed environmental activists in the world here. The local environment pretty much demands it of a person. There's Alexandra Morton taking on the fish farms of the Broughton Archipelago. David Suzuki just keeps getting smarter and more focused. And let's be frank; who else has elected a Green to Parliament? And then there's Briony Penn.

photo from The Province newspaper

Yes, Briony is not unwilling to use pretty much any means to get an issue attention. She rode through Vancouver as Lady Godiva to bring attention to logging on Salt Spring Island. And, if you've seen Salt Spring
Island, youll know why she did it.

Photo from findfamilyfun.com

Briony is also an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Victoria, and continues to write--currently in Focus Magazine.  Where she has written this excellent article on the way the two sides are approaching the expansion of pipeline capacity through British Columbia.

Despite [Ian Anderson, CEO of Kinder Morgan}'s claim to be committed to more genuine consultation, it’s not clear that he or any of his colleagues in the oil patch understand British Columbians’ deep opposition to exposing their land, rivers and sea to the risks posed by oil pipelines and tankers and our even broader concerns. Many of us are sensing that we are on the verge of environmental collapse and that any one of these major projects could put us over the edge. Gerald Amos, past chief councillor of the Kitimaat Village Council, at the end of Enbridge’s proposed pipeline between the tar sands and the coast, articulates the crucial point around consultation: “The big issue for communities—one that really hasn’t been grappled with yet—is the cumulative impact of what we call progress.”
Whether it’s Jasper grappling with the cumulative impacts of man-made corridors on wildlife populations; or Kitimaat with the rising toll of logging, mining, hydro projects and the eight proposed liquefied natural gas plants; or Victoria facing another 300 oil tankers in our waters each year to service the expanded Kinder Morgan depot, the big issue for British Columbians is not just the next big project planned, but the sum total of where we are going as a nation with our energy needs, our distribution, and the rate of exploitation.

Anderson’s speech suggested that he believes it’s a waste of time trying to educate British Columbians about the importance of the pipeline to national security, that we’re simply concerned about our own backyard. In reality, though, it’s Anderson who doesn’t understand the big picture.
We get it that we are moving perilously close to the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or, more aptly, in the case of the Rockies, the mountain caribou’s back. And on the coast, the southern resident orca’s (another species at risk) back. Environmental collapse cannot be addressed with such solutions as one discussed by the Heavy Oil club: saving caribou in the tar sands by fencing them into compounds to “mitigate” their decline.
“Cumulative impact” is the scientific term for what we intuitively sense is happening to our environment. While assessing such impacts is central to environmental assessments—and true national security—in jurisdictions around the planet, Canada’s policy on such matters, unfortunately, has regressed back to the 1950s.

Read the article. Particularly if you're an Albertan--the days of blithely assuming that oil will sell, the economy will expand, and "Alberta will be the  envy of the country," well, those days are over. BC is one of the reasons Harper decided to gut environmental protections in this country. We are squarely in the cross-hairs, and we know it. Ans still two thirds of BC residents are willing to flip him the bird. Harper's worried about bodies in front of bulldozers day after day on the news. He should be.

 "¡No pasarán!"

Perils of the Progressives

Well, that might be a bit misleading.... it's not exactly clear that the Green party is progressive. But be that as it may, this whole "unite the left thing" might be running into some early problems. The CBC (and other outlets) are reporting that once Andrew Weaver got the nod as the Oak Bay-Gordon Head candidate for the Greens, Michael Byers, a member of the provincial NDP (and former federal candidate) called him up and suggested it might be for the best if Weaver did not run, but instead might think about taking an ADM position in the expected ND government next spring.
Nothing really wrong with the phone call. After all, this kind of horse-trading is pretty much what progressives have been calling for federally. The question is, was the offer a bribe (as Weaver characterized it) or more of a carrot or inducement (as Byers characterized it)? If you remember, the federal Conservatives were accused by Chuck Cadman's widow of having offered a seven figure "inducement" to get the terminally ill Mr. Cadman to cross the floor and shore up the Cons minority-status government.
The Conservative offer was never taken to court, but cash is always considered a bribe. The opportunity to serve and influence government policy, however, is considered fair play in the political jungle. And why not? Power and policy are the goal of parties and candidates, and the process can allow a party to shore up policy areas that are a little thin with out-of-party help. But a position cannot be guaranteed to an opposition candidate who then agrees to drop out or run a poor campaign.
So why has this little chat come out in the media? I suspect because it offered Weaver and the provincial Greens an opportunity to present themselves as making the NDP nervous. There's nothing better to make your party look like a contender than some twitchiness on the part of another party. Just ask the BC Conservatives, who were bleeding hard right support from the provincial Liberals--at least until they imploded.

This Is Not An Enbridge Animation

From the Dogwood Initiative website:

Last Saturday, Dave Shortt emerged from 10 days of filming in the northern B.C. bush, found a wi-fi connection at the Kitimat library and happened upon a story online about Enbridge being criticized for deleting islands in the Douglas Channel from a video animation.

“I had this eureka moment,” Shortt says. The 38-year-old filmmaker had been filming along Enbridge’s proposed pipeline route with an eye to putting together a five-minute video to help raise awareness about the areas at risk and encourage people to sign Dogwood’s petition at notankers.ca.

“The plan was to film for another week or two but then I read the story about omitting the islands and I realized that’s what the video should be about,” he said on Wednesday afternoon from his camper van parked outside the Prince Rupert Safeway store. “It’s about trying to bring some reality to what’s at risk.”

Shortt knew the media interest in the missing islands would pass quickly, so he needed to get the video posted pronto. “It was 10 in the morning, but I still needed to finish filming because I didn’t have the shots of Kitimat yet,” Shortt says.

He quickly got the shots he needed, then headed back to the Kitimat library where he spent four hours editing the video — but then he hit a road block. “I had to sit as close to the wireless internet as possible, but it wasn’t suitable for uploading or transferring data. I realized it was going to be like three hours,” Shortt says.

While he battled with the wi-fi, Shortt’s friend asked the librarian if she knew anywhere with fast Internet in town and she recommended the rec centre. And that’s how it came to be that Shortt launched his soon-to-be-viral video into the world from the lobby of the Kitimat Rec Centre — humble beginnings for 100 seconds of footage that have been viewed more than 34,000 times in four days, driven 4,500 new signatures to the No Tankers petition and drawn the attention of the Huffington Post, Toronto Star, Vancouver Province and Canada AM.

BC Power Generation Ruling

In an interesting decision yesterday, the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) ruled that current BC Hydro acquisition plans are “not in the public interest” and refused to allow them to go ahead. This includes the Campbell governments plans for privately-owned “run of river” hydro projects that were intended to change the numbers in the government's greenhouse gas emission policy.
The Campbell government is possibly Canada's greenest government, having passed into law a requirement that BC reduce greenhouse gas emissions from 2007 levels by at least 33% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. One of the methods by which they hoped to achieve these targets was to increase power production in the province, but have that power generated by smaller-scale hydro projects (the “run-of-river” projects). Then, in a very controversial move, the Campbell government decided that they would encourage these projects to be privately owned and developed.
Typically, this set off a firestorm of protest in the province (BC, after all, keeps its conservatives in check by occasionally electing the social-democrat NDP—in the last election less than 5000 strategic votes would have flipped the outcome). A broad spectrum of affected citizens, spearheaded by Rafe Mair, a former radio talk-show host and currently writing regularly in The Tyee, have been keeping the heat on both the private power companies (primarily Plutonic Power Corp, who saw their share price fall 24% yesterday), called IPPs or independent power producers, and the provincial government. The heat comes mostly from broad-based environmental concerns—we've learned over the years that even hydro power comes at a price—from the effect on communities, the forests, and on the sport and commercial fisheries.
One of the interesting rulings from BCUC is that BC Hydro will not be allowed to downgrade their Burrard Generating Station from 5000 GWh to 3000 Gwh. If the ruling stands, private power generation projects will have to be reduced by a similar amount—thus the fall in Plutonic's share price yesterday.
The ruling suggests that the government and BC Hydro have been purposely overestimating BC's power requirements in order to justify IPP entry into the market. Lori Winstanley of COPE, quoted in the 29 July '09 Globe and Mail, says quite plainly that “[w]e have a very flawed energy plan in this province...the government cannot continue to exaggerate the need for power.” The BCUC did approve a BC Hydro plan to spend $418 million on demand side management, which is a good thing as there are significant gains that can be realized by simply reducing demand in the province. But one of the reasons for increased demand on generation capacity is that a large amount of power from BC is sold south into the US, and BC Hydro isn't seeing that demand drop at any time in the future. Particularly with the growing demand for low greenhouse gas emitting power, which is only set to grow from south of the border. And US dollars are important to BC Hydro—they made billions on Enron's whipsawing of the California utility market.
And the BCUC also approved BC Hydro's spending of $41 million on continued consultation on the proposed Site C mega-project dam on the Peace River, so there's still hope for US dollars to flow long-term into BC Hydro's coffers. 'Caused it's always about the money, innit?

Corruption, Private and Public

Here in B.C., some of us have been paying attention to the Basi/Virk trial—these are the guys who got arrested in 2003 when the RCMP raided the Ledge, hauling off cartons of files and papers. B&V are charged with fraud and corruption relating to the sale of BC Rail to CN. More precisely,leaking information, rigging the deal, and taking payoffs. Their defense is based on “just following orders” to get the interest (and, by extension, price) up on the sale. They deny having accepted money in any way (other than their salaries, of course), but acknowledge that they leaked information—though on the instructions of higher ups, including from our premier. So their lawyers subpoenaed all emails relating to the sale of BC Rail, including those of the premier.

It turns out, to no one's surprise, that the email records were destroyed. Of course there are rules concerning such things; “Government records destruction must be suspended during court orders for Demand for Discovery.” Also “Records disposition must be suspended during legally mandated reviews (e.g. Litigation, document discovery, and commissions of inquiry).” “Well,” said the business charged with keeping track of government backups, “that was more than 13 months ago, and they've already been trashed.”(or words to that effect.) Except that now it comes out that some email backup records from pre-May 2004 were discovered during the election campaign earlier this spring—including some of the premiers email. And somehow, someone in a position of power decided that the tapes should be destroyed. And so they were, during a campaign in which the court case was an issue. Funny how that happens, isn't it?

And Gordon Campbell “cruised to an easy win,” returning as premier for the third time. “Cruised to a win” in an election in which 4,500 votes, in the right ridings, would have almost exactly reversed the outcome. This is the kind of crap that sent Dick Nixon down. It's sunk quite a few Canadian politicians as well.

The question of whether the sale of BC Rail was corrupt isn't in doubt; by admission of Basi/Virk, it was. But naturally this won't make a damn bit of difference to the sale. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with that. Instead, at best, it will cost a couple of flunkies their jobs and maybe some jail time. Gordon Campbell is expected to retire before the next election, and every effort is being made to see that he remains un-tarred by this particular brush (although his bio will always record that he was a convicted felon when elected for the third time (having been convicted of felony DUI in Hawaii)). He will, of course, be cared for by those for whom he's made boatloads of money over the last two terms. But anyone actually paying a price for corruption in government? Not gonna happen.

This is one of the failings in our current system of government; there is a real and serious lack of accountability. CN knew damn well that it was participating in a corrupt process, but there will be no piper for them to pay. A couple of schmucks will have their lives ruined (maybe—they too may be cared for in the end by the rich pricks ripping apart the commons for private profit).

But what would happen if the sale was nullified? The billion dollars BC took for BC Rail returned to CN, and CN not compensated for “improvements” (the line has not only not been improved, but in fact has been the scene of numerous speed-based derailments, including the one that dumped highly toxic chemicals into the river outside of Squamish a couple of years back. CN paid a few bucks for the massive destruction of salmon at the time, but apparently no changes have been made to the way they've been doing business in the region. The number of derailments since bear witness to that.), but what if CN was actually taxed to recover all the profit they've made on the line since its sale? After all, a case could be made that, by participating knowingly in a corrupt bidding process, these profits are in fact proceeds of crime, just like any pot dealer's car. Corruption flourishes because of economic benefits. If you remove the benefits, you can slow or stop corruption.