No Shocker here. Adrian Dix has stepped down as leader of the BCNDP and will hang on until a successor is chosen.
This is the right thing to do on two fronts.
Stepping down allows the party a shot at renewal and hanging on until a successor is chosen prevents a quack from taking over as interim leader and making things worse.
This is a classy move by Dix and he is to be congratulated.
We wonder if Moe Sihota gets the message and will get out-of-the-way?
What would you do if you were Moe?
I get that thousands of people are protesting on the streets in Quebec over the secular charter, they should. They should also be screaming about the mess the Parti Quebecois made of their economy!
They are not.
Likewise here in BC.
The newly elected BC Liberal government has not learned a thing.
This week they are floating trial balloons of 26.4 % increases in Hydro costs . They also want to jam you $35 per month for opting out of the smart meter program.
They want you to think they are heroes when those increases come through at 19 or what ever incestuous number they all arrive at.
Meanwhile over at the BC Ferries the board gets fat increases and bonuses.
Privately people complain, but when are they going to do something about it?
We know you can; the HST movement proved that.
When will the people say enough is enough?
It seems Justin Trudeau and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson have been discussing a potential switch to federal politics.
It made me wonder why most journalists refer to the provincial arm of the NDP as the training ground for their federal cousins.
It seems like provincial NDP parties are more like a training ground for the federal liberal party.
Just ask Ujjal Dosanjh, Roy Romanow or BOB Rae.
Those three were all NDP premiers who went on to become federal liberal MPs. ( note to provincial NDP organizers: you may want to consider your new theme song to go something along the lines: mama don’t let you sons grow up to be federal Liberal MPs)
Does that speak to the chances of so called NDP stars winning a cabinet post with the federal NDP or does it speak to how far left the Federal Liberals are?
If Mayor Moonbeam ( if you are reading this outside of BC,that’s what he is called) jumps to the liberal ship after the 2014 municipal election you can bet Trudeau will try to bait him with something significant.
If Vancouver’s experience is any indicator, and Trudeau and team win the 2015 election, you can look for bike lanes on the Trans Canada highway.
They day they open, Robertson will likely peddle a bike with a sidecar upon which Trudeau will sit. They will be passing a reefer back and forth.
Nice country we live in eh!
Can a leopard change it’s spots?
In BC the leopard is the species known as the BC Liberal Party.
As you may know the Christy Clark Today’s BC Liberal’s ( the name pf the party depends upon the polling of Clark’s leadership rating) recruited all-star candidate from Langley Amrik Virk to run on their behalf in the recent provincial election.
It seems that Virk is now carrying on the BC Liberal tradition of scandalistic behavior as word now comes that he was more than likely aware of some harassment going on at Kwantlen College that had one of the employees so stressed out that she kept a barf bucket handy for use after interactions with the President.
I can only imagine the work-out that employee’s barf bucket got when Virk was named Advanced Education Minister in the so called New Christy Clark Cabinet.
Clark, as is par for her course, is no where to be found during this episode and has issued no statement about the affair.
That in itself probably speaks volumes about whether Virk was complicit in this.
Should it turn out that Virk knew about this and did nothing, this would not only be a black mark against the new minister but also against the RCMP who used to employ him as a police officer in a force whose image has already been tarnished by other purported cases of harassment and associated cover ups therein.
Given that Virk, Clark and Company still have over four years left on their new mandate, we should all join that employee and purchase barf buckets.
With the scandal potential of this government and its leader, I am sure they will get lots of use!
In the last month we have had at least four terrible accidents involving either rail or trucks that transport oil in this country.
We have has rail oil spills in Saskatchewan and in Quebec.
We have had a jet fuel spill in the Slocan Valley and most recently a life ending collision in Lloydminster Saskatchewan that resulted in a number of deaths.
You would expect that by now the environmentalists and the anti-pipeline gang would be either chaining themselves to railroad tracks or lying across roads in an effort to stop this .
But no, they are lining up against Enbridge trying to kill the pipeline.
Seems to me their priorities are a little out of whack, don’t you think?
Back in the day (2009) Gordon Campbell misrepresented ( goofed,screwed up,lied your choice) about the deficit during the 2009 election.
That was the election that brought us the HST and cost Carol James her job as NDP leader.
Eventually that error, lie or goof-up cost Campbell his job as well.
Move ahead now 4 years to today when the New (lol) Christy Clark government presented a financial update and reported they missed their target by more than $175 million.
It could have been worse they said but for the new spending controls introduced halfway through the year.
This speaks volumes for the likelihood that their budget that they sailed on during the election will actually balance.
In the business world the executive and CEO who reported that would have been sent on their merry way but in the government world this crew was rewarded with a new 4 year term. ( likely 4.5 year term in the election is moved to the fall to allow for budget debate.
The most hilarious statement out of all of this comes from NDPer Mike Farnworth who went on the record and said he was concerned about rising debt.
Where were you during the election Mike? Why didn’t you and Adrian bring that little tidbit up then?
Once again this gaffe will cause an NDP leader to lose his job simply because it illustrates that glaring hole in their election campaign, namely they didn’t hammer the Christy Clark Today’s BC Liberals over their record.
Only in B.C can one party lie,err, mislead, or goof up ( your choice) and the leader of the other party get fired over it.
With 35% of the polls reporting and Christy Clark getting 61% of the vote, I think we can safely say that the by-election is over and now the province can get down to the business of watching Clark govern.
She’s got some fancy dancing to do given the hefty increases that are purported to be in the works on the BC Hydro file.
It should not be a tough task for her and Minister Bennet.
As has been reported over and over ad nauseum during the waste of taxpayers money known as the by-election: It only takes Clark 5 minutes to get familiar with a file.
She’ll need every second of that 5 minutes because that’s the file that will cause the government and by extension the taxpayers the big headaches over the next few years,
Get ready because the increases are coming courtesy of the just voted in Clark and the BC Liberal-Bc Hydro deferral accounts.
Stay tuned!
Rich Coleman’s water boy Peter Fassbender put a hold on the bargaining process with teachers today in hopes of imposing I mean negotiating Christy Clark’s nauseating 10 year deal with the teachers.
The proposed deal is nauseating because a) it will probably never happen b) if it ever did it would be broken or torn up long before the 10 years would be up.
In fact if they somehow imposed ( reached) a deal before the next election,it would no doubt become an election issue to cover up the eventual failure of Clark’s LNG pipe dream.
By the time all the hysteria over the 10 year deal dies down, Susan Lambert will no doubt wish she was still dealing with George Abbott rather than Premier Coleman ( should Clark somehow blow the by election) and flunky Fassbender.
Stay tuned I think this issue will get a whole lot more interesting between now and September when the kids are scheduled to return to school.
As crazy as it sounds,today,at the weekend conference of blame the BCNDP is holding to determine what went wrong during the May election,Adrian Dix blamed a large part of the loss on those folks who are blue collar workers and NDP supporters who lost their jobs and moved on .
This is a totally illogical statement coming from the man who, without warning, changed his position on the Kinder Morgan project which surely cost them the election. In fact it still has not occurred to Adrian that by opposing this project it would result in the loss of more of those blue collar jobs he has accused the BC Liberals of scaring off.
In fact if the BCNDP wants some hindsight into why they lost they should simply read Gary Mason’s excellent column in the Globe. It details for the most part why the Liberals won and how they came back from the dead.
From my work in the field during the election,Mason only left out one part of the NDP defeat and it was it important and it was this : After the Kinder Morgan fiasco which led to Dix’s lousy performance at the debate, my field operatives started reporting to me that Dix’s people has told them that Dix was such a wimpster they were staying home and were not prepared to vote for him.
The NDP,instead of putting the election on cruise control,should have been hammering the Liberals on their record and their litany of scandals.
As for the debate, BC Conservative leader John Cummin’s first line had a prophetic vision attached to it, just not in the way we thought. If you recall he said: You are tuned in tonight because you know Christy Clark and the BC Liberals are going to lose the election and you want to see what kind of premier Adrian Dix will make.
The people saw alright and what resulted was a BC Liberal majority!
In a continuation of the theme from yesterday’s blog post ( and every newspaper I have seen) people are very upset at the pay hikes given out by the Christy Clark government before they were even sworn in.
Phone lines were jammed on the talk shows this morning with people calling in to show their disgust. Kind of reminded me of those same calls that came in over the HST. You recall that episode was not to pretty for the BC Liberals.
People said after the election that Clark was a good campaigner but a lousy governor and she would revert to the later quickly. I don’t think anybody realized how quickly it would start.
You would have thought that in the name of screwing the people over they would have at least waited until after that election was done.
Except that Clark and her team are extremely smug and arrogant and could care less about what the people think.
Patronage and payback are at the top of her list. ( More on that in a later post)
This event in itself shows that she really doesn’t get it.
The voters in Westside-Kelowna ought to do her and her government a favor a teach her a harsh lesson now.
They should show their angst for both losing the MLA they voted for a few weeks back and for this terrible act of managing the taxpayers money.
They should take advantage of this golden opportunity and vote against her.
A loss here will no doubt cause the party to give her the boot and just maybe they will get their act together and get a good leader that believes in honesty and transparency.
But then this is BC and these are the BC Liberals so who knows what they would do.