So the latest poll shows farebeater and NDP leader Adrian Dix picking up a few points in the best overall potential premier category dropping soon to be deposed BC Liberal Leader and current Premier Christy Clark into second place.
If Dix wins what will he stand for?
Today we begin an 11 month long series into what BC Might look like under Adrian Dix,
We will begin with..Discrimination.
At the recent BC NDP Annual convention Dix went on the record when he said “as of the 2013 provincial election, elected female NDP MLAs who retire will only be able to be replaced with another woman. Male MLAs who retire will have to be replaced with either a woman or a member of an equity-seeking group, such as a member of a First Nation.”
In other words if you are not a woman nor a part of an equity-seeking group you need not apply.
Dix passes the off as controversial and says it will affect only a small number of seats because the BCNDP is so sure they are going to win nobody will quit.
It is a lot more than controversial, it is basic discrimination aka racism.
But to Dix and his party a little bit of discrimination is okay as long as it is contained.
If you were a regular company posting this as part of a job ad you would be drawn and quartered by both the labor board and a human rights council.
So in a BC under Adrian Dix and the BC NDP discrimination is acceptable.
Ding Dong the wicked witch is starting to look like a tired old hag!
I didn’t think of that headline myself. It was spoken by Kyle Braid of Ipsos Reid who revealed today’s poll results ( not to be confused with yesterday’s lousy results reported in my blog and the Globe)
Braid reveals a new tidbit with this piece of news because now not only does the public have any use for Clark but officially neither does her party!
Expect phone huddling and meetings over the weekend looking for the quickest way to make her disappear.
Clark did not help herself with her recent mauling of Mario Canseco of Angus Reid. These guys will and did get you Christy.
Over the next days and weeks there will be countless discussions on the Liberal brand both federally and with the British Colombian election eleven months away provincially.
Lots will be said about who will want to run for the Federal Liberals when the question should probably be what will the eventual winner actually be leading.
Here in BC the discussion will be centered around the BC Liberals changing their name, Christy Clark’s leadership and the horror of a Dix led NDP win.
Prompted by Michael Smyth’s eight handy hints for Clark, I thought I would kick off discussion today with a look at the hints and reasons why Clark and the Liberals are doomed to lose.
Smyth’s article presupposes that people ( like MLA van Dongen and volunteer campaign workers like me) are malcontents because we left the party.
Nothing could be further than the truth.
I left because I had enough. I heard a Campbell speech in 1999 that started with I want to be Premier because I want BC to be a place my kids can grow up in,work here and live here.
In 2009 Campbell made a speech at his nomination that said I want to be Premier to build a province that my Grandchildren can live here and work here.
Same Speech 10 years later meant to me they had done nothing in the first 10 years of their mandate.
What life the BC Liberal party had for me died that night.
That combined with HST,Basi Virk etc. was and is a party that I no longer wanted to be associated with.
For John,the BC liberal Brand died later,but died it did.
When he left( that took courage), as you have heard van Dongen says countless times, it was because he wanted open honest accountable government. He has added that he wants to work in a government that both he and the electorate can trust.
This is not happening now and will not happen under the BC Liberals, Clark and the smoke and mirrors of a name change now.
People like John and I want to build a better BC that all of us can be proud of and that includes the people we elect to government.
We can’t do it under the Liberals and we cant do it with the same people under a different name.
People do not trust her government and they won’t no matter what she does between now and next May.
Scaling back her holidays to 4 weeks as Bob Plecas suggests probably throws most British Columbians for a loop as well. Lets face it,when most people start a new job they only get 2 weeks after year one.
Add to that, the more times she is snapped smiling at summer barbeques the more her poll results will drop. With the house out, people will just assume she is on one long summer vacation.
I believe that most people live by the old adage that he or she who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones.
For the Clark government to throw stones at Dix will endanger what little bit of a glass house the Liberal team has left.
Clark has not shown leadership since she was chosen to be Premier by the Liberal Party. An example of which is her stance on the pipeline.
Whatever she decides to do with this now will look like an act of a desperate politician . ( She is)
Finally, the handy hints and most discussion regarding re-branding and the fate of the Liberal party in BC leaves out is this: Dix’s poll results could be rising because the left leaning liberals have left the Clark tent.
Every time she pretends to be a Conservative more lefties leave the Liberal party, driving her poll numbers down even further.
What’s ahead? Certain electoral defeat for Clark and her team.
Scared of the Western Premiers Meeting Christy Clark hides out with Richard Branson!
The big smoke screen, better known as L’affaire Branson gave the Chicken Premier Christy Clark something to hide behind as she evaded discussing energy with the Western Premiers.
As you may know by now, Clark sent in her place, her favorite whipping boy Minister Pat Bell.
You may recall Bell as the guy that took the heat for Telus Gate ( the scrapping of the Telus/BC Place stadium name deal) after Clark was not invited to a major jobs announcement.
To date now that the Premiers summit has been completed , I have not found one quote from him outlining what he brought to the table on behalf of leaderless BC.
So much for BC Having a voice on this vitally important issue!
Clark as you will recall has failed to take a position on the pipeline issue. Both BC Conservative Leader John Cummins ( for) and BC NDP leader Adrian Dix (against) have shown leadership on this issue.
Specifically politicians not listening and taxing without representation.
That was the cause of riots like the Boston Tea Party through to rioting in Canada today.
Anything else? Yes Through high taxes the theme that middle class and lower class are being phased out leaving them nowhere to go and nothing to belong to, except maybe a riot or two !
Ask yourself this: What does a person or class of people think when a government decides to invest their money in flowers for a road meridian or bike lanes?
This might be a partial explanation for the hockey riots and is certainly an explanation for why over half of eligible voters don’t vote.
Has there ever been a riot or revolt without all this violence in any country including Canada?
I think yes and it would be our recent revolt against the HST. In fact there is no telling how that particular issue could have gotten out of hand if it wasn’t so well-organized.
Have our politicians got the message?
No they haven’t. An example of this would be in British Columbia right now and the big hurry to rush a whole lot of bills through the house without debate. ( Just wait for liquor prices to rise after the fast pedaling of the liquor distribution bill)
But it’s not just governments that don’t get it.
The recent labor mayhem with the teachers is a good example too! If extra curricular activities are taken away from students and from adults who enjoy putting them on. it will be one less place for those people to belong.
This is the fault of both, government and the union because neither are listening.
So am I condoning violent riots to strike out at the government?
Heavens no, the people who incite the violence need to be dealt with quickly and harshly.
What I am saying , the politicians who don’t listen also need to be dealt with quickly and severely in the same fashion as the HST.
They need to be voted out of office and replaced with a government who listens to all of their constituents.
British Columbians are lucky. They will get the chance to rise up and revolt and send the current BC Liberal Government packing in 2013.
In 2013 vote carefully, vote for the party that will represent your concerns ( links to parties websites can be found at the bottom of the highlighted blog post)
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.
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.
This should be a bigger deal than the MSM is making it out to be. The man who wants to be Premier,who wants to lead our Province was caught on a Sky Train without a ticket.
Adrian Dix says it’s one of those things and he feels bad.
I wonder if he feels bad because he made a mistake or if he feels bad because we was caught?
As the signs flew out the door and Premier Christy Clark said the BC Conservatives were here to play the spoiler role, I couldn’t help but laugh!
In 2009 when I was on the campaign team of Mary Polak in the role of Fundraising chair, I had occasion to go to the nomination meeting of Gordon Campbell.
Mr.Campbell came out on the stage and in the beginning of his speech waxed eloquent about wanting to be Premier because he owed it to British Columbia to get the province economically sound enough so that his grandchildren could live here, graduate here and get a good job here.
The problem with that speech was that he gave nearly the same one in the late ’90s in Vernon British Columbia. The only difference in the two speeches was that night in Vernon he said he wanted to be Premier so that his Children could live here, graduate here and get a good job here.
As you can see,the only thing that changed in the whole time that Campbell was Premier was that his kids grew up , had kids and the place still wasn’t good enough for them.
Ship ahead to 2011 and say Hello to Christy Clark and her families first agenda. Still the same old,I want to do good for families speech without anything ever happening.
Premier Clark has undertaken to review almost everything, a roll and task that should have been done when she first was a minister back in the early 2000’s.
The B.C Liberals have worn out their welcome with me and a lot of people. Like me those folks went through the motions in the last election because they did not want the NDP to form government.
We have suffered the nineties ( Known as the decade of destruction) under the NDP and continued the suffering in the 2000’S ( known as the decade of deceit) under the BC Liberals.
With the calling of the By-election today we begin ( for some of us continue) the process of restoring our illustrious province to one of respect and dignity. We want to return British Columbia to all those families who have been taxed and gauged over the last 20 years.
It’s time for real change in British Columbia, it’s time to correct the problems that the true spoilers of the wealth in BC Have caused, it’s time for the BC Conservatives !
Family day: Phone calls from the Unemployment Line
This week,apart from the budget,all the talk has been about next years family day. The newspapers are full of interviews from ecstatic parents detailing how they can hardly wait to spend an extra day off with their families.
Turns out a lot of them might not have to wait until next February to achieve that goal.
If they close, the cost will vary dependent upon what those employees normally get paid but it is still a significant increase to the bottom line.
What is a business to do? Apparently a lot!
I have had several calls from clients in the last week advising their full-time hours have been cut back to part-time hours. Those same people advise at the same time their places of work have added new part-time employees.
I broached this topic at this weeks Chamber of Commerce meeting with several business owners I converse on a regular basis with and the consensus was that a lot of business are streamlining and doing just that.Changing full time jobs to part-time jobs and having employees work less regularly and in a lot of cases not qualifying for statutory holidays at all.
Increased turnover? Maybe? But there are a not many places to find a new job.
This is actually nothing new. if you can afford it,go to a restaurant of your choice 3 times in the next few weeks and see if you get the same waitress. Probably not and this trend would be why.
