Dermod Travis Pens a Letter to Santa
by Dermod Travis,
Dear Santa:
You probably don’t get Christmas letters from an entire province, but this year we hope you’ll think of adding B.C. to your magical journey. We know we’re asking a lot of you, but B.C. could really use a Plan B this Christmas.
You see it all started a couple of Easters ago. The Easter bunny – you know, the competition down the calendar street – came hoppin’ along and told everyone to put all their eggs into her LNG basket. All of them, Santa.
It sounded great at the time, really it did. Who could say no to a prosperity fund? A $100 billion prosperity fund to boot.
But it’s not working out so well and everyone just assumed that the Easter bunny had a few other baskets behind her ears if things went south. Well, Santa, it looks like she doesn’t. And a few of us – OK, most of us – are getting a little antsy.
Here’s the thing Santa, B.C. is developing a bit of a – how do you put it – reputation. Some folk say the province is akin to a never ending battle between huggers and frackers played out on a continuous loop, year after year after year.
Protests, environmental assessments (one or two, take your pick), injunctions, PR strategies (strained or leaked), appeals, human chains, petitions, more protests, SLAPP suits, social license permits.
Seriously, Santa, the list goes on and on.
And it ain’t going over so well with investors. Never knew they were such nervous Nellies. Heck, one tax break too little and suddenly they’re off playing in another kid’s sandbox.
Oh, that reminds us, Kinder Morgan could really use a new GPS this Christmas. They still seem to be using the one left behind by Enron.
Then, to top it all off, a few months back the Supreme Court of Canada told some of us that we may be squatters. On someone else’s land.
Look, we know you can’t stuff a massive GDP hike into B.C.’s Christmas stocking, but maybe this year you could get us a few of the things from our wish list.
A new way to reconcile competing interests in the province on economic development would be great. Like, wow, best gift ever. And it would be so neat if it came fully assembled.
We know you can’t till the entire province into an organic farm, but maybe you could show us a better way to use our agricultural land and market our products. No need to include those trade mission accessories that come with it, there are a whole bunch of folk right here in the neighbourhood who eat all the time.
In fact, we crunched some numbers last night and you know what, 16.3 million people live in Alaska, Alberta, Washington State and B.C. combined? Well, of course you did, but that’s still a lot of mouths to feed.
Speaking of which, any chance we could return that clawback toy you let B.C. play with a few years back? Not that we’re ungrateful, but it got into the wrongs hands. It really should come with instructions.
Between us, did you ever notice how uppity the Easter bunny gets whenever anyone says value added? You think she’d know that old saying: give a bunny a carrot and she eats a carrot. Teach a bunny how to cultivate carrots and you’re overrun with bunnies. Or something like that.
It would be fantastic though if we could add some value to B.C.’s natural resources right here in B.C. before we ship them off overseas only to buy them back in manufactured goods a few months later.
That new board game “How not to cut off your nose to spite your face” would be cool too. You know the one. The winner is the first to clue in that government cuts in one area may result in massive losses for government in another, thereby negating the original savings and then some.
The best part of getting a Plan B for Christmas, Santa, is that if the Easter bunny turns out to have only been partly right (still not looking good on that front BTW), we get the best of both plans.
Oh, nearly forgot. Please don’t go down the chimney at the legislature. Seismic issues. We’ll put the milk and cookies on the main steps.
Yours truly,
British Columbia
PS: If you can do anything about ferry fares, no grumbling from this quarter.
Dermod Travis is the executive director of IntegrityBC. www.integritybc.ca
Comments
What a bunch of crap!! Why would you post this Ben ?
BECAUSE of the crap we have running the province right now.
Let’s not forget the other gift we got for the Olympics. The $90 million dollar hydrogen fuel cell bus boondoggle. 20 of these units sitting around not being used. Three times the price of a regular bus, and no infrastructure to provide refuelling them except shipped in from Quebec every 10 days.
We were told it would be a green fuel cell highway from here to California. Now they are being auctioned off for pennies on the dollar.
Fast Ferries 2.0
My goodness, this guy has one massive sense of entitlement.
I’m starting to miss the Gordon Campbell days. Lord help us all.
Perhaps IntegrityBC could give us its definition of ‘value-added’?
My impression is that it should be defined as, “Any further process beyond the initial stages of any given product’s manufacture that can return its costs plus an additional profit.” That if it can’t do that, there is no value-added. Only additional cost that can’t be recovered in price.
I believe when actual value-added ‘can’ happen, generally it ‘does’ happen. Observable experience seem to indicate that’s the case.
In other words, where there IS a genuine opportunity for someone to actually do something and make a buck at doing it, somebody DOES.
I rather suspect that isn’t quite the definition IntegrityBC would give us, nor most of the politicians and other pundits endlessly extolling ‘value-added’s’ supposed virtues, particularly in creating ‘jobs’.
These poor souls might want to ask themselves someday whether the total incomes paid out if ‘everyone’ able to work was working and doing what’s being done now, plus all the value-adding imaginable, would those incomes ever add up to be enough to actually BUY everything produced in any same given period? At the total ‘costs’ of its making, as presently computed financially, even completely leaving out of the equation any allowance for profit entirely?
To save them the mental strain of such an exercise, I’ll tell you right now they won’t be. “Value-added” is as much a fallacy when that term is used outside its proper definition, as the idea that raising the minimum wage is going to end poverty.
The writer of this is entitled to his opinion as much as we are…
I may not agree with all he says but I think he made some good points.
And if nohing else the guy has an sense of humor and an imagination.
What a bunch of sanctimonius nonsense.
When you see laminated pine shelving at your local hardware store with a big “Made in China” sticker on it, then there clearly is something wrong with how our economy is being structured. Do they even grow pine in China? Probably pine grown in Russia, shipped to China as logs, milled and sold to Canada.
An hour’s labor is an hour’s labor, Huh, whether it’s performed here, or in China, or anywhere else. The only accurate comparison is what that hour’s labor actually produces, given the access to natural resources, the plant it has to work with, and it’s level of education in utilising both to the most productive advantage.
Viewed that way, ‘physically’ if you will, Canada and the United States would be far and away ahead in terms of productivity in the manufacture of forest products than China, or Russia, or most of Europe currently are.
Yet China is able to supposedly produce the same products that could be made here ‘cheaper’. That’s after moving raw materials from here, or somewhere else where they abound, half way around the world to a plant in China, and then returning the finished product the same distance to wherever it will be sold. It should be abundantly clear to anyone who considers this that the actual cost is not being reflected properly ‘financially’.
Anymore than the current price of a barrel of oil is an accurate reflection of the realities of supply and demand for oil, or what it actually costs to produce it. The figures are being manipulated are being manipulated. And as long as they can be, those figures are meaningless ~ and it towards making them meaningful again that we should be looking if we ever hope to solve our economic problems.
Typical that the extreme right wingers are bitching about this article and Gordon Campbell can stay in whatever hole he crawled into.No I am not a loonie lefty as others like to say,I am more of a liberal,middle of the road type of person, and I agree with this article on a number of points.
IntegrityBC is just turning out to be another left wing think tank, not unlike the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
This article would play well on The Tyee.
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