British Columbians go to the polls in mid-May. It’s now almost mid-February. The incumbent premier, B.C. Liberal Christy Clark, continues to trail badly in the polls and she polls particularly badly among female voters. Here’s a new ad that, it seems to me, is aimed at female voters. Think it’ll help?
Continue reading B.C.'s Clark pitches for women: Will it work?
Angus Reid says voters in BC think Premier Christy Clark is “out-of-touch”, “arrogant” and “secretive “. [Here’s the poll – PDF] On my show Battleground last night, Alise Mills thinks Clark is wearing the rep for years of Liberal rule in BC.
The B.C. NDP have responded (above) to some negative ads put up by a right-leaning group known as the Concerned Citizens for B.C. as well as other ads put out in the last week by the B.C. Liberals. From the B.C. NDP press release: Continue reading Hi, I'm Adrian Dix and I'm not the scary guy my opponents would have you believe
Earlier this week, a group calling itself the Concerned Citizens for BC launched attack ads aimed at Adrian Dix and the BC NDP. Dix’ NDP has a 15 point lead on incumbent B.C. Liberal Premier Christy Clark with less than 16 weeks until e-day. Today, at separate press conferences, both Dix and Clark said they’d avoid negative ads.
Well, so far, Clark, at least, is true to her word and her party is first out of the gate with a political ad, i.e. paid for by the party. (You may have heard some controversy about the $15 million in taxpayer funds being spent on ad campaign that New Democrats say is a thinly-disgused pro-Clark campaign). Here’s the Premier:
Every party now and again feels the need to trump the wishes of their local riding association and appoint a candidate to run in a general election. But, with the British Columbia general election just a few months away, the Liberal Party of British Columbia (which should definitely not be confused with the Liberal Party of Canada) seems to be making it more of a normal practice of trumping its local riding association. Continue reading BC Liberals continue to push around local riding associations
Earlier today, John Slater, the MLA for Boundary-Simalkameen tweeted this:
Eff. Today, I will be stepping down as a member of the BC Liberal Caucus and will sit as an Independent for the rest of the session #bcpoli
— John Slater (@JohnSlaterMLA) January 14, 2013
The BC Liberal Party issued a press release shortly after in which party president Sharon White said: Continue reading BC Liberals won't endorse incumbent's nomination papers; paper suggests it's cuz he likes beer
Colin Hansen had the good fortune/misfortune to be the finance minister of British Columbia when his boss, then Premier Gordon Campbell, told him to merge the GST and BC’s PST to create BC’s HST. Any number of economists (and a certain federal finance minister named Jim Flaherty) will tell you that an HST is more efficient, better for the economy, etc., etc.,
But British Columbians hated it at least because Hansen announced the plan to move to an HST within weeks after the last BC provincial election, an election in which Campbell’s Liberals made no mention of the HST.
The backlash was ferocious, so much so that Campbell eventually called it a day (and was sent, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to London where he is Canada’s High Commissioner to the UK) and was replaced as leader and premier by Christy Clark. Clark subsequently sent Hansen to the backbench in the Victoria legislature. Then she held an HST referendum and after campaigning half-heartedly in its favour lost that ballot and resolved to go back to a PST and an HST. Hansen, meanwhile, had been relegated by Clark to the backbenches in the legislature and so, after 17 years in that institution, got the message and, last September, announced his retirement as MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena (a riding which is the eastern neighbour, incidentally, of Clark’s Vancouver-Point Grey riding).
But Hansen is still a force in the party, taking on the duties of deputy campaign manager for the upcoming election. His task will be to to convince voters that Clark is Campbell’s heir to the free enterprise coalition that has been governing BC for an awful long time now. Here, on Battleground, we ask him about the election and the role the HST will play and what he’ll be doing to help Christy Clark overcome Adrian Dix’s Socialist Hordes. ™
#bcpoli NDP insider calls me up and asks me to step down as Green candidate in OBGH. Talks about party being worried about Green support.
— Andrew Weaver (@AJWVictoriaBC) December 13, 2012
#bcpoli Talks about other ways I could be effective in an NDP government. Dangles the idea of my being Deputy Minister of the Environment
— Andrew Weaver (@AJWVictoriaBC) December 13, 2012
Those two tweets, from University of Victoria professor and the nominated BC Green Party candidate in Oak Bay-Gordon Head have created quite a little kerfuffle. The “NDP insider” that Weaver is referring to in those tweets is Michael Byers, a UBC political scientist who ran for the federal NDP in the last general election. Continue reading In his own words: BC Green Party candidate Andrew Weaver on allegations of political interference
The headline news from Statistics Canada Friday morning was not good for the government of Premier Christy Clark. In it’s monthly jobs report, Statscan reported an unexpected and surprising jobs boom in Ontario and Quebec but the worst performing province in November compared to October was B.C. Statscan reported 4,700 jobs were lost in B.C. in the month and the unemployment rate rose to 6.8% from 6.7%. Continue reading No other way to say it: The BC Government is fudging its job creation record
Brian Hutchinson has a piece in today’s National Post that ought to get a little more attention in B.C. for what it says about how the provincial government is managing the public purse while trying to deal with the problem of homelessness [My emphasis]:
A total of 900 hotel rooms [at the Marble Arch Hotel] — most of them around 350-square-feet — will be improved by 2017. That’s a staggering $128,888 per room.
Taxpayers will have spent approximately $32,000,000 just fixing the Marble Arch, once the latest batch of “major” repairs is finished. The tally doesn’t include $3.9-million that has already been spent on building operations and support services since 2007. Nor does it include future “maintenance costs” to be borne by the province.
Worse, the Marble Arch will still be an inefficient, unsightly dump after all the work is done, sometime in 2014. There’s not much to improve on its looks and character, but the latest restoration effort will still have to adhere to Vancouver’s rigid heritage conservation restrictions; these typically forbid upgrades such as new windows. Single-pane glass in old wooden frames will just have to do.
Heritage conservation isn’t cheap, either. Three years ago, another publicly funded, century-old SRO in the Downtown Eastside was restored for $14,365,000, or $608-per-square foot of living space. Brand new homes in affluent neighbourhoods can be built — let alone purchased — for less.