Written by Grant G
I remember when British Columbia owned a profitable rail line, thousands of miles track, we owned right-aways, rolling stock, we owned a profitable freight and cargo rail company.....BC Rail
In 1996, in our 1996 B.C. Provincial Election BC Liberal Leader Gordon Campbell went up against upstart businessman and NDP leader Glen Clark....NDP versus Liberal...Gordon Campbell versus Glen Clark.
Gordon Campbell's 1996 campaign manager was a man named David G A Mclean...
Gordon Campbell in the 1996 election, a key election BC Liberal plank was....Campbell campaigned on privatising BC Rail, meaning sell it off...Gordon Campbell told voters he was going to sell the profitable BC Rail..
Gordon Campbell and his BC Liberal team lost that election....
before I get into the nuts and bolts of the article....here is a little more detail on who David Mclean was/is..
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Born in Calgary, Alberta, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 and a Bachelor of Law degree in 1962 from the University of Alberta.
In 1972, he founded his own real estate investment firm, The McLean Group and is the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. The McLean Group owns Vancouver Film Studios, one of Vancouver's largest film industry companies.
In 1994, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of Canadian National Railway Company (he was also a member of the Board from 1979 to 1986) and became Chairman in December 1994.
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So...Gordon Campbell and his Liberal(Social Credit) Party lost in 1996..the voters spoke...Gordon Campbell didn't go away, he stayed on as an effective opposition leader and led his team into our 2001 Provincial election...
Campbell and the Liberals promised B.C. voters in that 2001 election two very specific things..
"We won't sell BC Rail"....."We won't tear up negotiated contracts"
Gordon Campbell won...BC NDP were reduced to three seats, ...BC Liberals denied the NDP Party status....
Then Gordon Campbell and his BC Liberal Party tore up those signed negotiated contracts, the same contracts he promised during the election not to tear up...Then Gordon Campbell sold BC Rail for a song.....a long 8 year BC Rail corruption trial ensued, ...a trial where the guilty got off scot free, a trial where everyone's memory failed, a trial that cost the taxpayers millions....(details linked below)
Gordon Campbell's 2001 campaign manager was ....David Mclean..who just happened to be the Chairman of Canadian National Railway....Chairman of the company that ended up owning BC Rail..."I won't sell BC Rail"
We no longer have a provincial railway, and we never will, it would be next to impossible to find land, a route, lay track, cut through mountains, skirt rivers, rolling stock, to replace BC rail if we had to would cost 10's of billions, in other words, impossible..we now have nothing.
Proportional representation electoral system would have stopped Gordon Campbell and his BC Liberal Party from betraying voters..would have stopped the BC Liberals from tearing up contracts and worker's rights, ..that betrayal too went to court, the Supreme Court of Canada..where the BC Liberals lost, it cost BC literally hundreds of $million to settle that contract shredding case ...
The HST betrayal...in our 2009 B.C. Provincial election....Gordon Campbell was still there as BC Liberal leader, the BC Rail trial was still going on, so was the contract shredding case..all still going on...Gordon Campbell, and finance Minister Colin Hansen in the 2009 election campaign told BC voters that "the HST tax was not on our radar" and ...Gordon Campbell and Colin Hansen said that the budget deficit for 2009 was going to be "$495 million maximum"....
Well, after the election it was revealed that the budget deficit going into election 2009 was not $495 million maximum..it was this...
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British Columbia will have a record deficit of $2.8 billion, according to a budget update Finance Minister Colin Hansen presented today. That's five times greater than the $495 million projected in February and insisted upon by Premier Gordon Campbell during the election campaign
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Then, immediately after the 2009 provincial election Stephen Harper's federal government offered Gordon Campbell and the BC Liberal government $1.4 billion dollars to ram the HST tax down our throat, a tax that would shift over $2 billion dollars from corporations onto average BCers each year...
Then we learned that Colin Hansen was in talks about adopting the HST with the Stephen Harper federal Government before the election... BCers raged....The first ever successful recall campaign ensued...every riding in BC had to sign up a massive amount anti HST signatures....The people won..a referendum was called, and despite no money for the repeal campaign we won....
However, we in British Columbia had to endure the betrayal tax and pay for 2 years until the referendum was held and HST repealed...a slam dunk....BC Liberals spent $millions campaigning for the tax,,,,Wasted tax money...The people didn't speak, they roared...
Proportional Representation electoral system and we BCers would never had to pay the BC Liberal betrayal tax for two years, in fact the HST would have never been foisted on the people at all with a PR electoral system....in other words, PR protects the public from lying betraying politicians...no group of 40% can ram a corporate screw through our thumbs..
Gordon Campbell was forced to resign after his latest betrayal....That brought us Christy Clark, the new BC Liberal Leader..
Christy Clark in 2013 campaigned on "families First" and "a $trillion dollar LNG bonanza, create a 100,000 LNG jobs and not only debt free but no sales tax and a $100 billion dollar prosperity fund"
I'll let you readers decide on the "families First" part....I can tell all about the LNG fantasy..
We have no shovels in the ground, no FIDs, the market is glutted, saturated with LNG until 2030....the price has tanked and Greenfield LNG projects are not getting built, only brownfield projects, in other words...BC LNG fantasy is dead and buried..
Site C dam project....Christy Clark and the BC Liberals rammed through the Site C dam project with no business case, dozens of expert economists have told BC Hydro that the project is not economically viable....BC Liberals refuse to send the project to the British Columbia Utilities Commission..an independent body created to protect the ratepayers of British Columbia..
A $10 billion dollar project, if it's on budget, with no market for the power, with BC's electrical demand flat over the last decade, over the last 10 years, despite a big increase in population BC's electricity demand is flat....This vanity project is a political project, BC liberals spending $10 billion dollars, backstopped by BC hydro customers for the sole purpose of luring in LNG companies with the promise of free power....there is o free power, this is a $50 billion dollar project after finance charges, to lure LNG companies..they are not coming here...and even if they did...Site C power would only produce enough power for 1 LNG project....Petronas for example...and LNG carbon bomb proposed to built on the Skeena River Estuary...Canada's most prolific wild salmon river, thousands of miles of coastline and the BC Liberals permit Petronas ....On the Skeena River estuary...Thank goodness Petronas walked away from British Columbia...
Proportional Representation would have stopped Christy Clark and the BC Liberals from ramming through that very expensive Site C Dam project...PR electoral system....The legislature under PR would have sent the project proposal to the BCUC ..and a non-partisan committee would have been created to investigate the dubious power need claims...PR would have forced BC Hydro and the BC Liberals to make the economic case.....Christy Clark and Bill Bennett absolutely refuse to send it to the BCUC...because they know they can't make the business case!
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Norman Farrell has everything you need to know on BC Hydro, Site C and run of river IPPs....
Laila Yuile on Site C too...https://lailayuile.com/
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In other words if we had a Proportional Representation Electoral System Christy Clark and the BC Liberals could not ram Site C Dam boondoggle down our throats...A clear concise business case for expending that much taxpayer money would have to be made, and proven in our legislature...PR Electoral system protects the public from vanity projects, photo-op projects....
BCers wouldn't have wasted 2 years doing nothing on transit except waiting for a referendum on Translink...PR would have forced the BC Government to figure out how to pay for transit...
Right now ...The Patullo bridge is at the end of its life....A report came out this year that a severe windstorm could blow the bridge down...The bridge is old, narrow and dangerous...and falling apart..
All the Metro Mayors are in favor of replacing the Patullo bridge now....but no, Christy Clark and BC Liberal Tyranny....Christy Clark and only one mayor(Lois Jackson) want the Massey bridge built..at a cost of $3.5 billion and another $8 billion in finance charges....when a Massey tunnel twinning could save the Province $12 billion and relieve rush hour gridlock in the tunnel...twin the tunnel with $billions leftover to replace the old dilapidated Patullo bridge....A win win..
And more...the reason why BC Liberals want a Massey super high bridge instead of a tunnel is so LNG supertankers can go up the Fraser River...again, monies wasted chasing an LNG industry that isn't coming to BC...
All of these headaches and the $billions of dollars being squandered by a corporate BC Liberal government...money wasted chasing white elephants...These boondoggles and boondoggles to be can be prevented if we had a proportional representation electoral system..
Our BC debt was $28 billion in 2001...in 2017 our BC debt is $70 billion(not counting Massey bridge), ..with another 110 billion in contractual debt, BC Hydro debt(before Site C) is another $18 billion..
With Proportional Representation all those BC Liberal betrayals and boondoggles would have been stopped...can be stopped...We would not have had to endure two years of paying HST..3 years fighting the HST through recall and referendum...a Transit funding referendum...
With Proportional Representation we the voters are protected from tyranny no matter who is in power..Bills and Legislation will have to be passed on merit, on debate, on research, on the facts not just rammed through by an ideological corporate government....or rammed through by a small minority..
It's for that reason why I believe it's time B.C. adopted the PR electoral system...or as I like to call it...
An anti Tyranny Electoral System
The Straight Goods
Cheers Eyes Wide Open
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