BC Conservative John Martin Says ” It’s time for a Full Time Attorney General!

BC Conservative John Martin hits the nail on the head by declaring this province needs a full-time Attorney General.

Lets take a look.

Firstly ,Minister Bond,probably still has her hands full cleaning up the mess(es) left behind by disgraced former Ministers Heed and Les over at the Solicitor Generals office,her other part-time job!.

If that isn’t enough to keep any two people busy,the Attorney General’s qualifications are now being investigated by an outside law firm appointed by the law society.

I would also expect Minister Shirley also has her fingers and toes crossed with this weeks visit to Ottawa by Minister Polak in her meeting with National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo. ( You remember how Minister Polak was taken to court over problems in the Ministry of Children and Family Development)

That is if she has any fingers and toes left to cross after all the problems with the Basi Virk File.

Makes you wonder,when the Minister takes her next call on the Hockey Riot file,if she will remember which hat to wear.

There must be days when Minister Bond feels like she is a at the PNE bashing the rubber gophers over the head with a mallet.

John Martin is bang on,the Province needs a full time Attorney General.

What do you think?

What would it be like to be Kevin Falcon?

Can you imagine what it would be like to be Kevin Falcon?

-You are a quasi Conservative playing second fiddle to a Federal Liberal!
-You are A Finance Minister who doesn’t know if the budget will be balanced.
-You are the Premiers designated fall guy for the HST
-You are overruled by your own department when you want to release a $780,000 pamphlet your government opted for tossing in the garbage.
-You read the polls and know that no matter how much of this mess you are tasked with cleaning up,the people who put you and your government in office are getting ready to fire you.

Right about now ,if you were Kevin Falcon, you are probably wishing you had somebody of your own you could throw under the proverbial bus!

More dirty politics from Quebec.

We are truly fortunate that the leader of the PQ is so awful,that even 7 of her MNA’s have left and joined another party.We are extremely lucky that a lot of things members vote on at Annual General Meetings of political parties in this country don’t actually make it on to an election platform and get brought into law.

To wit:Yesterday members at a PQ AGM voted a resolution that would allow John Q or Jean Q citizen to launch a citizen led referendum into independence.

What is wrong with this is that ( Other than referendums are very costly) this resolution could lead the very political party that proposed it to putting one of their own members up to launching a referendum so that they may distance themselves form it when it blows up in their faces.

These are the same people that only a week ago shanked potential leadership candidate Duceppe in the back when it appeared he was considering taking a run at Marois and her leadership.

This is more sleazy dirty politics from the people that told the world they lost the last referendum because of money and the ethnic vote.

Where did Ms.Marois stand in all this? No where,she waited until after the vote to join party members on the floor. Her leadership is so bad that that if she had taken a stance on this or any issue the party would have given her the middle finger and voted the opposite way.

Speaking of waving the middle finger,you should all do that to the Globe and Mail but I will leave that to Dean Skoreyko over at BC Blue to tell you why!

Come on Madam Premier Call those by-elections!

Come on Madam Premier show some leadership and call those by-elections.The folks in those two Provincial Electoral Districts deserve to be represented and it would be great to get those two future MLA’s in the house while the Spring session is on.

The NDP selected their candidate this afternoon in front of 32 voting members in attendance says the Agassiz Harrison Observer.See their story here.

Of course the BC Conservatives have not only selected John Martin their candidate but named him their Justice Critic.

Martin has also put the government on notice that both he and his party won’t tolerate garbage incineration finding its way into the region. This topic has the ability to split the BC Liberals down the middle.

The B.C. Liberals are already on their second candidate when the first one realized she was too Liberal to get elected!That nomination meeting will take place on February 4th. It is fitting that they would nominate their candidate last, because in all likelihood that would be the same place as that nominee will finish in the yet to be called by-election.

Meanwhile in Port Moody-Coquitlam we will have to wait until Feb.17 to see who the B.C. Liberal candidate is.Like everything this government does,it takes its time to do a simple thing like nominate a candidate and call a couple of by-elections.

Conservative Christine Clarke ( not to be confused with our week kneed Premier)and NDPer and former Clark buddy Trasolini are already in place and waiting.

Given the track records of sitting governments in by-elections ,and that last time their star candidate ,Premier Christy Clark,only won her seat be the hem of her skirt,I can understand why the Libs are taking their time calling these two.

When all is said and done,they will likely be up the Chilliwack River without a paddle.!

If you are a B.C.Liberal, You gotta be worried!

Coming on the heels of a lousy week in the polls for the B.C. Liberals, was yet another gaffe by Premier Christy Clark. This one happened on Twitter and was reported on-line in the Globe and Mail.You can see the article and Tweets here.

The Premier has a history of speaking before she thinks as evidenced back in the summer by Vaughn Palmer of the Vancouver Sun in his excellent piece of August 30,2011.
The Premier and her staff would be well advised to reread this.

So don’t laugh off her Twitter goof up so fast. This just pads her resume of ill-timed,quick talking mistakes.

Scary as it might be ( If you are a B.C. Liberal or a B.C.Taxpayer) ,this tweet might not have been a gaffe,your Premier might have thought going from 229 mining permits to 80 was a good thing.

How does that make you feel?

Polls

One of the interesting events in the run up to any election is the release of the various polls. In British Columbia,with an election a little over a year away,the “run up” has begun.

Today a poll was released by Forum Research Inc. and has been presented in a piece online in the Vancouver Province.You can read the story here.
What does it mean? Is it accurate?
From the story in the Province you don’t know. The reason is that although they tell you they queried 988 people for the survey,the writer conveniently left out some important demographics. If you knew where these people lived and the percentage breakdown of how they voted in the last election,you could have a different,more accurate result.

So what do we take away from this poll?

Last year this same firm said Christy Clark was the best bet to beat the NDP at the ballot box.See the press release here.

Eleven months later her and her party are toast.

What does this mean? It means there are a lot of Nervous Nellies ( A Liberal expression circa Jean Chretien 1993) in the B.C Liberal Party Executive and Caucus.

What will happen? Who knows, but the soon to be called by-elections could have a lot more to do with the Premier’s tenure than most people think.

Two losses and the The Premier could be forced out!( Imagine if those two losses are third place finishes)

Hang on to your hat,politics in B.C.is about to get very interesting.

Politics at its Dirtiest!

Yesterday a story appeared in La Presse about Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc misusing funds and paying a Bloc staffer with money out of their parliamentary Budget.Today the National Post followed up with an English version of the story.
Mr.Duceppe,has subsequently said he is stepping away from politics to defend his integrity.

I can only imagine most people reading these stories and discussing the events debating about whether he/they did it or not.

That is exactly the question whoever released the story to the press wants you to ask. However,it is not the one you should be asking.

What you should be debating is this: If this has been going on for 7 years why is the story being released now. Surely,somebody inside the Bloc or PQ knew.They could have let this slip out sooner,why now?

The answer of course is that Duceppe has been throwing up trial balloons about the executive of the Bloc deciding the fate of the PQ’s current leader,Pauline Marois.

There has been speculation that Mr.Duceppe has been trying to push her out and take over the leadership himself.

Could this story have been slipped to La Presse by a Marois sympathizer in an attempt to thwart Duceppe from making a come back? Of course!

However the PQ are not the only one with something at stake here. Right now the party is not polling well.If Duceppe had have forced Marois out and brought the PQ back into prominence then their sister party,the Bloc may have also made a comeback federally.

This would have hurt the NDP who is already smarting from a recent defection and it also would have hurt the Liberals who are trying to make a comeback( on the backs of the NDP) of their own.

Remember the interim leader of the NDP is a former Bloc member as are numerous members of the NDP caucus. The NDP defector was of course also privy to all of this and quite likely now so is her new party.

So any of these people could have leaked this to La Presse.

You can speculate all you want,but this is politics at its dirtiest!