Enjoy your holiday on our nickle

Um, the legislature is still sitting. Why is she leaving now? Especially considering the lib’s most important piece of legislation, the bill to repeal the HST, is yet to be tabled. She needs to be here to answer questions about it.

Philiphine labour moblity barriers.

Code for cheap labour???

Im not saying that people on this board are cynical but ………………..

May as well get Philipinos, the 4 billion we are giving people not to work in this province is working well.

People are VERY cynical when it comes to Christy Clark and the BC Liberals. And for very good reason. They’re still engaging us in a race to the bottom. They focus on ‘jobs’, when their real focus should be on personal ‘incomes’, and whether of not they’ll buy MORE relative to the prices (and taxes) of goods and services we need and want, or are they continuing to buy us LESS.

Those who believe the BC Liberals are a credible centre-right alternative to the left wing socialism of the NDP are deluding themselves. The POLICY of both is one and the same, with the BC liberals putting up a weak, rear guard re-action because it has nothing new or different to offer. So it only can try to delay what the NDP would do ~ which won’t work anymore than it will when the NDP is finally elected and actually does the inane again. Surely we can do better than that

Recall the last Asian tour Christy took was launched with great fanfare, the Princess Warrior herself at the prow of a ship loaded with raw logs, slashing her sabre on her maiden voyage of conquest…then she disappeared. No ticker-tape parades, no red carpet roll-outs, no cameras flashing, most of her trip unreported.

Then, without a whisper of her return to BC, news broke that there had been some inappropriate favouritism toward the spouse of one of her office staff (a cushy contract that should have been publicly tendered.) This bit of continual bad news for Christy completely overshadowed the trade (sell-out) junket. Her clandestine return left the distinct impression there was trouble brewing in the upper echelons of the BC Liberal party, almost as if some one let the favouritism thing slip by the vetting process in order to make Christy look bad. And it did.

We have to assume she’s made better preparations this time. All new advisers and handlers. And she also unleashed Bloy and Krueger to snap and snarl at the opposition. Still, it is curious she’d chose now to go when there’s such a heavy load of bills to legislate in the next week. Really have to ask: what’s going on inside the BC Liberal party that require such distractions?

Maybe she left a bunch of proxy votes before she left?

“the bill to repeal the HST, is yet to be tabled”

That will surely be a hotly debated item. I hear the NDP will be voting against it … ;-)

“Surely we can do better than that”

Yup ….. and we can do better than that in the City of PG, and likely in the Regional District, and most certainly federally as well ……

BUT, we aren’t. Doing better in politics is not in the card in Canada nor in the USA ….

Unlike Alberta, we do not have the oil clout they have …..

BUT, and it is likely primarily because of the oil dollar, we are doing better as a country than most others in the world in the last few years as the world is going through a recessions, or whatever they want to call it.

So, we need bertter parties, better candidates, and most certainly more knowledgeable and interested voters ….

Then we will see some cahnge down the road …. or will we ..??? not in my lifetime, that is for sure.

socredible: “Those who believe the BC Liberals are a credible centre-right alternative to the left wing socialism of the NDP are deluding themselves.”

You conveniently forgot to mention who is a credible alternative to the NDP.

I can hardly wait to hear how many millions of jobs Crispy’s holiday will produce for BC and how many thousands of cheap foreign workers will arrive on our shores as a result.

Using up her travel allowance is all she’s doing. Mother’s day gift to herself.

No need for cheap foreign workers if the entitled ones would suck it up and go to work!

“That will surely be a hotly debated item. I hear the NDP will be voting against it … ;-)”

They might. There is no chance it is the same PST system we used to have, there will be lots of goodies in there for big business. The working class will get to make up the decrease in revenue, just as we did for the HST. Now you know why all the items that were exempt under the PST weren’t exempt under the HST.

…and why they’re waiting until the last possible moment to introduce it in the leg, to cut debate short and call summer recess.

“You conveniently forgot to mention who is a credible alternative to the NDP.”
——————————————–
That’s just it, Johnny, there isn’t one. Those who describe themselves as being center-right are in the same position the British army was in at Dunkirk. Trying to make a victory out of a prolonged retreat.

The BC Liberal slogan in 2001 was, “Tax cuts work!”. And they do. But we have less of our incomes left untouched by Victoria today than we did then. Did they practice what they preached? Why not? Could it be that their land-pimp mentality doesn’t discern the difference between inflation and prosperity?

According to the head of the Certified General Accountants Association, in recent testimony before a Parliamentary committee, people on average nowadays are $ 1.53 in hock for every $ 1.00 of disposable income that’s left them.

And they’re not just borrowing to purchase the big ticket items that we might expect many would finance that way, but increasingly now borrowing just to live.

And what does the BC Liberal government propose to do about THAT? Or the BC Conservatives? Or BC First? Find a way to reverse the trend, before we have NO disposable income left to us at all, and not only citizens, on average, but their governments as well, are as hopelessly in hock as Greece?

No, they bring in an HST that not only taxes your spending from earnings, but also taxes your spending from BORROWINGS. Before you’ve even earned the money, “your” government is taking a cut of it.

That’s not a sign of a government being fiscally responsible, it’s a sign of one that’s morally bankrupt. We’ll get the NDP back in. And they’ll repeat past mistakes, and we’ll soon lose patience with their incompetence. Although I expect it may be a more honest incompetence than what we’ve had for the last decade. But surely we can do better? Are we so dumbed down in our understanding of money ~ which, after all, is simply (supposed to be) an numerical REFLECTION of physical realities and expected potentialities ~ that we attach more importance to the abstraction than the reality itself?

Clark on a trade mission — that is ludicrous.

Well said Socredible!

I wholeheartedly agree with most of what you said Sociable except the derogetory remarks about the NDP. I am of the opinion that the NDP need a clear majority in order to strut their stuff. They haven’t had the clout that we gave the Liberals or the Conservatives and now I hope that they will. Then we will see just what can be done in this province. IMO

I believe that the NDP blew the best chance it ever had of making meaningful changes when it didn’t encourage Corky Evans to take over as its leader. He, alone of all the New Democrats I’ve ever heard speak, had a pretty good conception of what should be done ‘financially’.

The stuff that they’ll strut, if the voters do take another chance on them, will not be very much different from what we’re currently getting form the BC Liberals.

On the whole, I think they’re presently a Party composed of people who are more honest than the current government. But only in the sense that they haven’t exhibited the same propensity to issue outright lies that the Liberals have, and have restricted themselves to simply not telling us the whole truth.

Of course, they may not even know the whole truth. Which might be even more scary than if they do, and are just remaining silent about it.

Fundamentally, it’ll be more of ‘tax and spend’. Til there’s nothing left to tax, and the spending still hasn’t accomplished the desired results. If bettering the lot of all of us is what’s desired.

Japan is desperate for liquid natural gas. They have plans to shut down their nuclear power plants and replace it with liquid natural gas. We should be doing everything we can to help them. If the floor to spent fuel pool number four collapses (its compromised and they have no way of fixing it)… then we are all done. They say it will be the equivalent of 5000 Hiroshima bombs in radiation contamination. Enough to make by some estimates large portions of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable… we are directly downwind on the west coast of North America. One more earth quake of the right dimension and we are done. I’m all for helping them get off their dependence on nuclear power.

The South Korea mission I am sketchy about as it seems to me its only about a race to the bottom and nothing in it for the people of BC. The South only wants trade if its good for them, and they will not buy value added from BC. We need to negotiate strong and smart with them.

The Filipino trade mission is interesting. Huge potential synergies (lumber, wood power poles, bio energy, tourism, hospitality workers, sea food, beef, and Canadian finance and know how)… many possibilities that are not yet tapped. The Philippines are the most important American ally in the Asia Pacific having been an American colony, wide spread fluency in English as an official language, and a common Christian heritage diminishing cultural barriers to trade.

The Philippines suffered terrible misrule through much of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s dictatorships and are only now recovering… on the Southern Island of Mindinao, an island with the population of Canada, their main port city of Davao at 4 million people has the fastest growing economy in all of Asia the last few years, and some say will be the next Singapore or Hong Kong type port city in South East Asia. I believe it with huge money planned for port expansion as a South East Asia hub, light rail transit, new highways, and magnificent highrise towers (the fastest growing hotel market in Asia)… but most importantly they now have the same free enterprise mind set that we as a nation had 60-years ago that made Canada and America what they are today.

The big threat to the region is the way China is acting in the South China Sea area claiming mining rights to Filipino Islands and fishing/oil and gas rights in 5 other nations exclusive zones. Just last Thursday Chinese media (government controlled) warned of war with the Philippines, and sent a flotilla of 6 war ships to Filipino waters due to arrive later this week… America and Manny Pacquaio are back stopping the Philippines.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/9258225/Chinese-media-warns-of-war-with-Philippines.html

Christy Clark may very well be landing in Manila (third largest city in the world) in time for the Chinese to declare war on the Philippines.