Today was a good day for the BC Conservative Party up-to and including the incident where John Van Dongen left the party.
The party elected Voice of Reason Al Seibring as president, Christine Clark as Vice President,Linda Bellamy as Secretary and re-elected Treasurer Lambert Leung .
Also elected were a whole host of new directors including Dan Denis,Dennis Beliveau,Daniel Brooks and Douglas Machan.
All the instigators of the last week were not elected and lots of new blood was elected to the board.
John Van Dongen left the party ( I told you that might happen in my post yesterday) and so the party has a chance to get some work done and elect some MLAs next May.
Van Dongen worked hard on the BC Rail file but he also worked hard at disrupting board meetings with his monthly ” I am getting elected with or without your help threats”.
During his goodbye speech John Van Dongen mentioned that the BC Conservatives did not work as a team. This is a concept that Van Dongen himself doesn’t understand as his demands on the board above illustrate.
Could we have done more to pacify him? Probably but he could have done more during the by-elections to help us too.
Sure losing an MLA is a blow but in this case the party is better for it!
Everybody has been saying all summer that once September rolls around ,politics in BC will get real interesting.
Well what do you know September is here and just look at the past two days.
Yesterday,BCNDP leader Adrian Dix came out of the closet and actually said something. Horror of horrors he said what we all knew all along. He is going to raise taxes!
He was talking about corporate taxes of course.
He says he is going to raise those taxes up to 2008 rates.
You could make the argument they are already there with the tax increases the BC Liberals have levied on business.
You remember the new holiday and the increase in minimum wage tax.
This spelled the death of the video game industry in British Columbia.
Note to Christy: When those people who are not real step behind a voting booth they are just as real as anybody else. I would think anybody that was thinking of voting for you would now be changing their minds.
I would also think those people in other parts of BC, most notably the ones in your riding who sent you to Victoria in the first place, will now be having second thoughts, now that they know how much you hate it.
Meanwhile,over at the BC Conservative Party,John Cummins and Crew were too busy warding of a small group of agitators ( More on this in a future post later this week) to have much time to comment on any of this.
Today the giveaways continued with the $1.50 discount day sale over at the Port Mann. It will now only cost you $3 per day to cross instead of $6.
I wonder how the voters that travel the Golden Ears Feel,A might ripped off I would imagine.
Remember to we are privatizing over at the liquor distribution branch to clear up the budget short fall.
How will they buy your votes next?
Lots of ways probably, given that today’s poll showed them picking up 3 points to the NDP. They are still getting hammered ( Down by 20%) so be prepared for more election style give a ways.
Clark and the BC have lots to be concerned about in this poll mind you. With all the recent turmoil the 4 dissidents have caused the BC Conservatives you would have thought they would have attracted Conservative support back. They didn’t.
This just proves that ( over and above the 4 dissidents in the BC Conservative Party), people are smarter than Clark gives them credit for.
The Liberals also picked up their 3 % with Clark out of the picture ( in Asia making deals she will never be around to see consummated) and away from the camera where she usually gets herself in trouble.
Smart Liberals ( if there are any) will be pulling out calculators trying to figure what kind of bounce they would get in the polls if Clark was gone for good!
Will the vote-buying continue or will Clark get the boot?
Clark on Her New Cabinet: I won’t bother you with the names because this time next year none of these people will be here anyways!
After waxing poetic earlier in the week about all the talent in the BC Liberal back bench,Premier Christy Clark slapped all but two of them in the face when she played the shell game with 13 recycled and former cabinet ministers.She only added 2 MLAs who were not previously in cabinet.
To add further insult to injury Clark attempted once again to ‘bait’ voters with their own money by hinting about tax breaks for families around election time.
Premier Clark seems to repeatedly confuse leadership with bullshit.
We already know the only family she cares about is the BC Liberal family.
When will it stop?
How many more MLA’s will either resign,cross the floor or just plain head for the hills of the heartland?
Clark has done nothing to create jobs nor has she helped with the cost of housing.
The specter of an NDP government with its alarming tax and spend policies ( You will hear more after the election.Don’t expect Dix to say or do anything with such a large lead in the polls), is also contributing to the exodus as young people head to conservative Alberta and Saskatchewan in search of better paying jobs and housing they can afford to live in.
What would you expect them to do? With No job prospects today and even less after next years election most young folks are leaving now to beat the rush next May and June.
Don’t forget about those pesky Liberal gas, carbon taxes,smart meters, higher insurance and hydro.People can escape that by bolting for the confines of neighboring welcoming provinces.
Who would be happy about this?
The moving companies that’s who. I can imagine they are planning for steady growth over the next 11 or 12 months.
Maybe that was Clark’s idea of creating jobs?
Better hurry folks, Dix will find away to tax you on the way out of town.
Believe me,Nobody BS’s and Lies like Premier Clark!
It seems every Friday we end with a blog post detailing the Shenanigans, Gaffes and Bulls*t Premier Christy Clark and her Government are responsible for..
Every week we get hand delivered a new set of lies . It’s almost as if you can go to the BC Liberal web site,enter your email or subscribe and get straight to your inbox this weeks nonsense.
It’s simple just set up a Google Alert and every night like a horror movie your Blackberry or iPhone goes ping and you can see first hand what Christy Clark screwed up that day.
Sometimes I even get my own, although this week I entitled my Blog Piece about the fumbling of the Clark Government: Stephanie Cadieux should resign! I don’t have an Alert set up for her because, well, she is irrelevant.( I heard her on the radio a day or so later and she sounded even more incompetent on that medium)
This brings us to a piece by Justine Hunter discussing the BC Liberals trying to work out their differences with the BC Conservatives.
No matter what Fantasy land Phil Hochstein or John Reynolds live in, this will never happen.
The Clark Government don’t know how to tell the truth and certainly will never earn my trust.( or the voting public’s for that matter)
A child could be drowning in the Fraser River and Clark and her entire cabinet could form a chain and pull the kid to safety. The public’s reaction: So what; they were probably looking for a photo-op and tossed the kid there in the first place!
Nothing can save these people because they have passed the point of no return. Certainly no BC Conservative I have ever met would want to join up with them.
Why would we. These people are arrogant and corrupt as we shall see if we ever get lucky enough to have a full inquiry into BC Rail.
They need to be flushed away in the next election.
For a lot of us with Christy Clark in Google Alerts it can’t come soon enough!
How many times do I have to answer that Question ? How about until you answer it you blockhead!
I never started this blog as a open window to the world on what an idiot we have as a Premier but Christy Clark makes this too easy.
Case in point: Today, in this the week of Clark rolling out old announcements trying to make them look new, she couldn’t answer a simple question about how much money she was committing to the so-called St.Paul’s redevelopment project.
She told reporters a number of times she had already answered the question but of course she hadn’t. She was finally able to come up with an answer but what was galling was that she actually thought she answered it.
Even worse when repeatedly asked to go on record with an answer she got lippy with reporters.
She is such a dolt that she can’t remember from one word to the next what she says.
This kind of off the cuff stuff from Clark gives credence to the story that she makes this crap up as she goes along.
About the only bright side is that if the BC Liberals leave Clark in as leader we will have another 11 months of this unintended slapstick provided by the hapless Premier.
Does the fact that the Premier is a dope make you laugh or cry?
Today comes word that the Adrian Dix led BCNDP will bring in Brian Topp to manage their 2013 election campaign.
What will this mean to BC Voters and a greater extent to the Mainstream Media?
Back in the 1990’s Brian Topp worked Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow as his Deputy Chief of Staff.
What is remarkable about this and why it is a great move for the BCNDP is this : There are three amazing parallels to the Romanow win and our own upcoming BC Election.
1) Grant Devine and his Conservatives found themselves as far behind and as reviled as The Christy Clark BC Liberals are now.
2) There were 3 main parties who had candidates in that election, The NDP,Conservatives and the Liberals
3) The NDP ran a great campaign and won easily.
What the NDP did in Saskatchewan I suspect the BCNDP will do here. They ran a campaign dubbed in the media as the Roy in the Bubble Campaign.
This meant that Roy Romanow was so far ahead when the election started, he kept his mouth shut,held on to his big lead and won.
I suspect Brian Topp will bring some of that knowledge to this campaign and encourage Adrian Dix and the BCNDP team to do the same.
Whether you like it or not,the people are trying to tell you something!
I used to work for a small polling company back in 2000-2005.
When I was there this is how polling worked.
The company would get hired to poll customers or voters relevant to a specific question,product service or idea.
A script would be written,approved by stakeholders and loaded into a computer so that those trained in a call center environment would phone and ask a question.
They did not browbeat people into answering but rather were instructed to be overly nice as the competition for the consumers time was unbelievable.( It’s worse now even with do not call lists)
The caller would enter the data into the computer and from there a report was generated and sent out for statistical analysis.
The person doing the analysis was an experienced statistician who had analyzed data for a number of years for a number of different polls.
From there reports were present to clients and released to the news.
Lately we have seen polling done on the BC political climate with the pollsters telling us what people think today. The most obvious question they would have asked would have been” If an election were held today,who would you vote for?”
The most recent result on a poll done by Angus Reid showed us that 50% of the people would vote BCNDP if an election were held now.
The current BC Liberal government polled at 23%.
This means that as of today, Christy Clark and the BC Liberal Government are not connecting with 77% of the electorate.
You may recall he said Canadian Jobs were flowing south like the Niagara River. When it was pointed out to him that the river actually flowed north,he lashed out and said he would get the person who wrote the speech with the wrong facts.
As you know by now he went on to lose the election because of this and other gaffes. Had he taken leadership of that,the result might have been different.
My point is that through lashing out, politicians like Day and most likely Clark lose because they don’t know how to lead.
In Clark’s case she has 12 month’s to learn.
Do you think she will? ( A clue might be that Stockwell Day is one of her mentors)
So there we sit, our GDP low enough to keep us out of trouble but close enough ( 90% or higher) would get us going down a lane we don’t want to go.
This gives cause for thought in that we ( The country) are facing 3 major provincial elections in the next year and a bit.They would occur in British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario.
I have lumped Ontario in the group because although they have just come through a provincial election, it resulted in a minority of tenuous proportions.
With pollsters releasing numbers here at home in BC and 48% of people saying they would vote NDP, the chart above gives me cause to wonder why anybody would even answer that question at this point in time.
With all the problems in the world’s economic situation, why would anybody say they would vote one way or another without reviewing a parties economic platform and seeing how it would affect them?
Why would almost half of the polled people say they would vote BCNDP when history speaks of all the economic mismanagement and mayhem they caused as recently as the 1990’s?
( I know you are thinking the BC Liberals have made such a mess of things we need to give them the boot! We do, but there are other options than the BCNDP) )
In these coming elections, voters need to be better educated than ever. They should review the policies and platforms each of the 3 main parties lists on their web sites.
