Liberal Party.

[flamingfingers]

Amazing!!

Thursday, December 06, 2012
Sometimes A Memo Is Just A Memo...

...And Sometimes It Is Worth Less Than Zero.

To wit, the Campbell-Clark government's recent missive that the line must be held on spending at all costs.

Writing in The Globe, Justine Hunter lays out the many, many ways this has been ignored, mostly for useless stuff that, for all intents and purposes, are nothing more than BC Liberal propaganda campaigns paid for by you and me.

Here are just a couple of them:

...Jobs Minister Pat Bell didn’t get the memo. His shop is spending $11-million this year telling people, again, that his government has a jobs strategy.

Ben Stewart, Minister of Citizens Services, is looking to spend $1.5-million on Family Day celebrations just a few weeks ahead of the next provincial election...

But, who cares.

Because, as an Anon-O-Mouse pointed out in the comments, our current (not) Premier is, according to that paragon of unbiased research The Fraser Institute, the 4th best fiscal manager in all of Canada:

Which begs the question...

Who's in fifth place...

Nelly Skalbania?

http://pacificgazette.blogspot.ca/

[Veovis]

How is the fact that a brand new stat being celebrated a bad thing. It's the First Family Day ever, and it's criticized for having a launch budget. That's a tad petty considering the businesses of BC are the ones that will be paying out millions in wages for that new extra day that they receive no extra money for.

If you are against the new day so much there FF will you work for free for your boss that day?

Yes spending needs to be reduced but complaining about 1.5 million for a one time thing is getting petty when billions are bleeding out in other areas and where the major losses in large sectors that anyone points at the left freaks out. (recent reports on sick time usage for example.)

[maple leaf]

How is the fact that a brand new stat being celebrated a bad thing. It's the First Family Day ever, and it's criticized for having a launch budget. That's a tad petty considering the businesses of BC are the ones that will be paying out millions in wages for that new extra day that they receive no extra money for.

If you are against the new day so much there FF will you work for free for your boss that day?

Yes spending needs to be reduced but complaining about 1.5 million for a one time thing is getting petty when billions are bleeding out in other areas and where the major losses in large sectors that anyone points at the left freaks out. (recent reports on sick time usage for example.)

I don't think it is so much that they want to spend money to celebrate that stat.It is more about how this government speaks one thing out one side of it's mouth while doing something else.They come out and say there is a spending freeze and no new hiring and how there is no money and spend millions on advertising to tell us that they are controlling the economy by cost cutting ,cut backs,( spending freeze).Then they go ahead and spend and hire new Christy Clark staff ,which is already over staffed.They hire new judges,( nothing wrong with doing that ,we need them) ,they spend on holidays,they spend on advertising.The problem is they are trying to pretend they are doing what the 15 million dollar advertising is telling us they are doing when they obviously aren't.

[Veovis]

By that reasoning you could argue any spending higher than last year on healthcare, education, infrastructure etc was also a horrible and crooked decision.

Don't get me wrong saying hiring freeze and then hiring people comes off completely hypocritical, and to say "we need to cut back," and not really cut back is a failure of what they declared. In doing so, the Liberals did fail. The last deficit is a goodly amount higher than they planned, now other factors affected this result as well that they could do nothing about but none the less it's there.

I personally haven't seen all these millions in ads saying "we've balanced the budget" that are supposedly out there so I can't really comment on those, or are they just something people assume are being made?

As for the new stat, employees will get extra time off or extra money, government will get credit for a new holiday. Businesses will pay for it all though.

[maple leaf]

By that reasoning you could argue any spending higher than last year on healthcare, education, infrastructure etc was also a horrible and crooked decision.



As for the new stat, employees will get extra time off or extra money, government will get credit for a new holiday. Businesses will pay for it all though.

[color=#0000FF]Yup and who's big idea was that one.


I'm not the one saying that there is a spending freeze,then spending the money they say they won't.They need to spend the money as needed.Spending the money is not the horrible and your words crooked part about this .It's spending 15 million telling me they have a spending freeze and they are controlling the economy by cutting back and not spending,then do the opposite.But that is what this Liberal /Campbell government has been doing since 2001 , say one thing then do the opposite,and Christy Clark is doing the same.
IF you have not seen any of these ad's maybe you need to do some research and just see how this government is wasting your tax dollars.

[flamingfingers]

How is the fact that a brand new stat being celebrated a bad thing. It's the First Family Day ever, and it's criticized for having a launch budget. That's a tad petty considering the businesses of BC are the ones that will be paying out millions in wages for that new extra day that they receive no extra money for.

If you are against the new day so much there FF will you work for free for your boss that day?

For the first part, WHERE is this money going to be spent, and by who? I would humbly suggest that it will be spent in ADVERTISING how grand the Libs are in declaring this 'holiday'. Nothing will be spent in actual community activities province wide. Like, are they gonna give Houston,BC money to hold a celebration on "Family Day?"

For the second part, no I am NOT going to 'work for free for my boss that day." I am the boss of my own company and work whenever my clients demand my valuable services. I have never worked for free.

[NAB]

Another one bites the dust...

"Two-term Vancouver Island Liberal MLA Ron Cantelon has announced he won't be running in this May's B.C. election."

http://www.theprovince.com/news/Cantelo ... story.html

[Smurf]

At least they are resigning before they destroy the province like the Liberals and resign in shame .

[maple leaf]

Real life example of Liberal misleading ,mismanagement makes the NDP fudget budget look like child's play.And they are trying to tell us once again that they will have a balanced budget before this next election.

Snip;
Big time is right. On the eve of the 2009 election, the Liberals tabled a budget with a projected deficit of $495 million. When the books were closed and audited at the end of the financial year, the actual shortfall was $1.779 billion.

Snip;
But the record from those days indicates that the Liberals had ample warning of the deteriorating financial situation before tabling their lowball deficit number, including from its own independent panel of financial experts.
Snip;
“Our budget is a solid budget,” he told reporters at mid-campaign. “The deficit will be $495 million maximum.”
Snip;
But that forecast had long since passed its best before date. A few weeks later, and two days after winning re-election, Campbell was advised that the finance ministry was now projecting a deficit well in excess of $1 billion.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/20 ... z2En00ax2P

[Jo]

One-liner off-topic comments and cartoons removed. Please remember, if you want to post off-topic stuff or one-liners that offer nothing, go to the Political Arena. Leave this area for people who prefer a serious discussion.

[flamingfingers]

And how have we done over the past decade with the ChristyLiberals when compared to the 1990s with the NDP. Here are a couple of charts done by the Progress Board set up by Gordon Campbell in 2001. He asked a group of business leaders — David Emerson was the first chair, Jimmy Pattison was on board — to set measurable goals for the province, report on progress each year and offer advice on critical issues.

The boards out six important areas — economic growth, standard of living, jobs, the environment, health outcomes and social conditions. Then it identified key indicators that could be used to measure how well the province was doing each year, things like exports per capita and birth weights and educational achievement. In 2011, shortly after the Progress Board's last report, Christy Clark killed it off. Wonder why?

[maple leaf]

You can't have the NDP show up the Liberals,that would blow all the myths of the lost decade under the NDP.And with that board around today would probably be even harder to pretend that their false misleading 15 million dollar ad's had any credit.

[flamingfingers]

Looks like "Houston, we have a PROBLEM!!"

British Columbia Outlook to Negative From Stable: Moody’s
By Greg Quinn & Cecile Gutscher - Dec 12, 2012 2:57 PM PT

British Columbia’s Aaa credit-rating outlook was reduced to negative from stable by Moody’s Investors Service, which cited the province’s rising debt burden in a weakening economy.

The revision affects C$39.8 billion ($40 billion) of outstanding debt, New York-based Moody’s said in a statement. Net debt has swelled to C$33.6 billion, or 82 percent of revenue, at the end of March, from 65 percent of revenues four year earlier, according to Moody’s.

British Columbia projected on Nov. 28 that its fiscal 2012- 2013 budget deficit will widen to C$1.47 billion, or C$328 million more than the previous forecast of C$1.14 billion, reflecting lower property-tax revenue and declining coal prices.

The outlook change reflects “the risks to the province’s ability to reverse the recent accumulation in debt with the softened economic outlook, weaker commodity prices and continued expense pressures,” Jennifer Wong, Moody’s lead analyst for the province, said in the statement.

British Columbia issued C$500 million of 3.2 percent notes maturing June 18, 2044 yielding 94.5 basis points more than federal benchmarks last month.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-1 ... ody-s.html

[maple leaf]

Now if the NDP ran the province like this below,they would have been downgraded a long time ago.


The staggering future costs of the B.C. government's contracts
BY KEITH REYNOLDS | JULY 30, 2012


As usual, there has been quite a hubbub surrounding last week's release of British Columbia's Public Accounts.
The provincial auditor says the provincial deficit is $520 million more than the government admits. And then there is the Auditor General's review of finances at the legislature that found "substantial irregularities."
But all of the above is pocket change compared to the staggering increase of the province's contractual obligations over the last six years. Normally, the government focuses on debt as a measure of its financial performance. In 2005/06, however, at the urging of the Auditor General, they began to publish numbers for their largest future contract obligations as well as debt. The Public Accounts describe it this way:
The government has entered into a number of multiple-year agreements for the delivery of service and the construction of assets. The following table presents the minimum amounts required to satisfy contractual obligations that are greater than $50 million, by sector, by year.
In 2005/06 those future contract obligations came to $34.013 billion. That year total debt for the province came to $34.356 billion. The province's future obligations totalled $68.4 billion.
This year's Public Accounts show those contractual obligations have increased by nearly 300 per cent since 2005/06. The contractual obligations reported for 2011/12 come to $96.374 billion. The provincial debt figure reported this year is $50.193 billion. The combined total is more than $146 billion. Since 2005/06, the future obligations for B.C.'s taxpayers have more than doubled.
How did we triple our contractual obligations in six years? The lion's share is to pay for private power contracts. In 2005/06 these obligations amounted to $13.4 billion. This year it has risen to $54.9 billion. That is more than half of all of our future contractual obligations. It is more than our total provincial debt. I leave it to others better informed than I to comment on whether betting all our chips on private power at this cost is a good idea (see here and here).



Looking forward on a year-by-year basis, the government says we will spend $8.4 billion to meet these contractual obligations in 2013. The figure falls to $4.8 billion in 2014 and in future years (up to 2017) averages $3.5 billion.
There is no question that a government needs to pay attention to its debt. But these contracts stretch decades into the future and we will have to pay for them. They look like debt to me.
The government now publishes details on these contractual obligations. You can find it at http://www.fin.gov.bc.ca/ocg/pa/11_12/C ... ations.pdf. I have spelled out the URL here rather than adding a link because by changing the date for the year you can look at earlier examples.
This article was first posted on Policy Note.

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/policyn ... -contracts


http://www.fin.gov.bc.ca/debtmgmt/debstat00-01.pdf

[Glacier]

Here's a good read from the Terrace Standard.

Separating myth from political reality in B.C.

Published: November 21, 2012 11:00 AM
By Martyn Brown

Myths are powerful things, especially when they feature forces of good (“free enterprise”) and evil (“socialists”), and evoke heroes (BC Liberals), villains (BC Conservatives) and monsters (NDP). Great myths derive their greatest power from their retelling, to the point where lore is accepted as “truth,” half-truths are accepted as fact, and reality approximates fiction. Such is the main myth of B.C. politics, which warrants new questioning and inspection.

As explained by the Globe & Mail’s Justine Hunter and Ian Bailey, “The right-wing forces stick together, usually, because British Columbia is by and large a province divided into only two political faiths, with the NDP or its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, on one side and some type of center-right coalition on the other. When the coalition splits, the NDP wins.” Gary Mason’s summary of Premier Clark’s convention pitch echoed that argument: “Any time there is a fracture in the so-called free enterprise coalition in B.C., the NDP wins...”

Not quite true.

In eight of the Social Credit Party’s 11 wins, Liberals were also elected. In four of those cases, so were Conservatives. Of the last 30 elections in British Columbia, 27 have resulted in “free enterprise” governments and 25 of them elected representatives from at least three parties, and/or independents. In 12 elections, four or more parties won seats, not including independents. In three instances, five or more parties elected MLAs.

Since W.A.C. Bennett’s time, the BC Liberal Party was the biggest vote-splitter of them all, typically taking about 20 per cent of the vote up until 1972, without depriving the Socreds of their consecutive majority governments. The real reason the Socreds lost so badly in 1972 was not just that there were other parties; it was that the Socreds’ support plummeted to 31 per cent, even as the BC Liberals’ support also fell to its lowest level in B.C. history, while the NDP increased its vote to record levels.

Similarly, the reason the NDP was annihilated in 2001 with only 21.5 per cent support was not just that the Green Party took 12.4 of the vote; it was that Gordon Campbell’s Liberals earned 57.6 per cent of all votes, thanks to many former NDP supporters who abandoned that party. When the Socreds lost in 1991, it was because their support fell to 24 per cent – a level that is eerily close to where the BC Liberals stand today. Were it not for Gordon Wilson’s vote-splitting Liberals, who formed a large and strong opposition, the NDP’s majority would have been even larger.

Even in the 1996 election that the NDP won with less of the popular vote than the BC Liberals, free enterprise vote-splitting is, at best, a partial answer. If the BC Liberals had earned another 3,340 combined votes in 1996 in Burnaby North, Burnaby-Willingdon, Cariboo South, Kootenay, Saanich South and Vancouver-Fraserview, they would have won the election with six more seats than the NDP If Campbell’s party had only won two of those six seats, with an extra 704 total votes there would have been a minority BC Liberal government. Organization matters.

The reason the NDP now enjoys some 46-49 per cent support is not just because the BC Conservatives are “siphoning off” votes from the BC Liberals, or that the Green Party is attracting its own share of support. It is that more voters than ever are prepared to vote for the NDP, including more than a handful “free enterprisers.” It is because the old “free enterprise versus socialist” dichotomy is itself an aging myth that is not wearing well with younger voters or in the modern Canadian liberal context. That entire ideological ethos is largely a false distinction that died with the Cold War and that is increasingly less relevant in driving voter choice.

The fact is, if the Green Party does not run a full slate of candidates in 2013, which seems likely, the NDP’s voting universe will suddenly reach well beyond the 50 per cent mark that “free enterprisers” claim to own as their birthright. A majority beats a minority every time. The BC Liberals’ main challenge is to win back votes from the NDP as well as from the other parties, including the Conservatives and Greens. The only reason the Clark government’s fortunes look so dire at present is because it has driven voters away to other parties across the political spectrum that has cut its support coalition in half. What history mainly shows is that no governing party can win re-election with only 21 or 24 or 31 per cent support – especially if any competitor enjoys the support of close to an absolute majority of decided voters.

The main reason why even more voters are not now “parked” with the BC Conservatives is not because of fear of the NDP. It is because Mr. Cummins’ party has revealed itself as a marginal force that is still not ready for primetime. It has alienated more voters than it has attracted with weak leadership, extremist tendencies and internal factionalism. Many of those traditionally conservative-leaning voters will “hold their nose” and vote for the NDP unless they are given new positive reason to return to the BC Liberal fold.

Myths are made to be reinvented. The real evil we do is to vilify agents of political choice and to vote in fear of ideological “monsters” largely of our own making; it is in not demanding better of our political leaders and in allowing our actions to be dictated by negative options more than by positive visions and platforms in which we can honestly believe and trust.

Martyn Brown is the author of the new eBook, Towards A New Government In British Columbia, available on Amazon. He was former B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff, top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of Tourism, Trade & Investment in British Columbia.