THE RECORD
January 31, 2001

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

After General Douglas MacArthur was fired by President Truman in 1951, for wanting to attack China, he came back to the States and ended his farewell speech to Congress with the dramatic tearjerker : "Old soldiers never die....they just faaaaaade awaaaaay !"

I wish we could say the same for old Tories. They never seem to fade away, just take over other parties to shed their soiled image and dirty linen, then start all over in the same groove. When being a Tory became too hot Wacky Bennett took over the Social Credit Party to start with a clean slate. When it collapsed around the necks of his successors, under a daily barrage of scandals, big business bought the BC Liberal party for Gordon Campbell. Under his direction the Party became the BC wing of the Reform Party advocating the screwball policies of Preston Manning, preparing for Western separatism leading to the dream of Wacky and Manning Sr. of the joining up with the USA.

When the Reform Party came to a dead end it too had to look for a new name and at first it became the CCRAP then the Alliance. Meanwhile the BC Liberals are still swimming under a phony flag carrying a phony name, not to mention phony policies. Nevertheless BC may fall for this scam dished up by Campbell & Co.

With the media under corporate control we've been subjected to the daily propaganda barrage of how the BC economy has been mishandled by the present government, how good it is in Alberta and Ontario, BC's horrendous debt, how the Liberals will turn around BC's economy and so on down the line.

The problem is that apart from vague rationalizations and hot air promises the BC Liberals have no platform. This brings back the time when Gordon Campbell was still a Socred provincially and a Tory federally and Bill VanderZalm was the fair haired boy of big business. The election gimmick then too was that the Socreds had no platform and the people gobbled it up. When the candidates were asked questions by the media, the Socreds remained silent. In our local paper all the other candidates answered the questions put to them, except Alex Fraser and Neil Vant, running under the Socred banner. It must have hurt poor old Alex to the bone as he was never known for silence.

Now we have the same situation, with the exception that although the Campbell crew are talking like parrots, they are only speaking platitudes without any substance. Well, there must be BC Liberal candidates within the range of this paper, so I just can't resist the temptation to ask them a few questions:

Did you vote PC when Brian Mulroney was the leader in 1984?

Did you vote for him again in 1988, supporting the FTA and the GST?

Did you vote Socred in the Bennett and VanderZalm days?

Did you support the deregulation of the oil and gas industries by Mulroney?

Did you support the privatization of BC Gas?

Do you know of any deregulation or privatization scheme that lowered costs to the public?

Do you support the sale of ICBC to private companies?

Do you know what the privatized insurance rates would be for young and old people, farmers and so on?

Do you support the right of private insurers to cancel policies without cause or explanation, so that other companies can grab the victims under the "assigned risk" clause?

Do you know what the "assigned risk" category means under private insurance?

Do you support plans to sell BC Hydro to multinational energy companies?

Do you know the consequences of deregulation in California and other States?

Do you know what the citizens of BC would have to pay to private companies?

Do you know that BC has the second lowest electricity rates in Canada, after Quebec?

Do you know that BC has the second lowest debt load of all provinces, behind Alberta?

Do you support Western separatism and the possible absorption of BC into the USA?

Do you support the dismantling of the civil service and privatization of services?

Do you know how much people have to pay for privatized services in other provinces?

On the subject of the economy the BC Liberals are constantly in the news with promises of how they will turn the economy around by making it business friendly, lowering taxes, inviting job creating foreign investment.

Between 1980 and 98 about 65 percent of BC's forest industries fell into foreign hands. The investment in the industry amounted to about $17 billion, or close to $1 billion per year. This huge investment not only hasn't created a single job, instead we have seen cuts in jobs in the industry, the vast majority under Socred, now called BC Liberal governments. What has changed? How will foreign investment create jobs under a new Socred government. The stock markets kill any company that creates jobs. Does Mr. Campbell have some secret agreement with speculators to permit job creation under his government? How much are the forest and insurance industries paying into the Liberal Party's coffers? Is it for good government for the people, or for the privilege of unlimited exploitation?

Copyright (c) 2001, West's International