In my opinion the investment community has no confidence in the BC Liberal government anymore. They could offer to give away the resources of this province for free and still not create jobs. Their sound bites are like listening to a confused schizophrenic ruling with a magic 8-ball.

Funding social programs doesnt get votes… falsifying numbers and budgets do. So expect us to hear more lies about how many jobs created and how much money we have.

I am confused as to why we’d want to carry on with this government then. Over 14 years of them and we still don’t have an economy that is strong enough to support social programs? If this was 2001, this would be an acceptable thing to say. But when exactly does the plan pay off? How many decades?

Social programs can make things a bit easier on people who live in poverty but it can never reduce, let alone eliminate it. Until we recognize and take steps to deal with the number one “root cause of poverty”, it will remain.

What is that root cause? People doing the things that result in poverty. Most people in poverty are that way because of what they’ve done or haven’t done. Two of the biggest things that prevent poverty (according to a study in the US)are finish high school and get married. People who have done that have a much lower chance of ending up in poverty.

In the UK, more than half the people living in poverty have a job.

From the USA before the mid-1970s economic growth was associated with falling poverty rates. If that relationship had held, poverty would have been eradicated in the 1980s.

The decoupling of rising growth and falling poverty, however, means that Americans are working longer and harder but becoming poorer and less economically secure.

Does anyone know where we can find the BC stats to prove that jobs will solve the problem? It has not been proven in other jurisdictions.

It is obvious to me that the people in charge do not understand the nature of the problem, not only in BC but elsewhere in the industrialized western world.

Jobs …. its easy to say, isn’t it?

Where do I see some adjectives such as “meaningful”, “well-paying”, “full-time”, “equal access”, etc.?

So what kind of jobs are being talked about here? Since special interest groups are against, dams, mines, pipelines, refineries, gas plants, oil and gas development, logging,etc.

So Bill, what jobs?

Unless consumers are provided with a form of income that is NOT ‘costed’ into the prices of all products being made and available for their necessary or desired consumption there will always be a disparity between the total prices of goods and services available for sale at the point of final retail and the total amount of incomes available to meet those prices. We currently attempt to bridge this ever widening gap by a number of means which only defer the problem, and can never really solve it. These deferments only come back to haunt us later, and will grow in magnitude over time. Increasing employment to the point where we had 100% of the available workforce working will NOT solve this problem, (unless we either want to continually destroy what we can currently never buy, or we want to turn the clock back to an age where “all craft was handicraft”, and eschew all modern industrial processes completely. A very high price to pay either way to try to make a failing financial system seem as if its infallible.)

Special interest groups?

Pick a job, and one can find a special interest group against the job or the work product of the job.

Interesting thing is, one can find at least one other special interest group that is for that particular kind of job or work product.

What is the purpose of bringing special interest groups into the discussion?

We subsidize industry through “incentives” because the industries argue that they will create4 jobs.

Problem is, that new industry will create new jobs ….. and then start on the way to improve their efficiency by removing jobs. In fact, that is the measure of efficiency, more product with a smaller workforce.

So, people get left by the wayside. Even countries who produce a lot of services and products and have to import “guest” workers, have poverty, unless they create programs which help those who are left behind for various reasons, most often beyond their control.

First of all what amazes me how people can keep on voting this same Liberal party back in BC. In all the years I can not think of another party that has been as corrupt as the BC Liberals. The BC Liberals do not have a jobs plan. The only thing the know how to do is spread the BS around to get re-elected. They don’t even want to support education. Child poverty is the highest in Canada. According to the premier it is family first but she means family last. Jobs plan was the famous “LNG”!

Hers and the record of the socreds ( so called liberals) speaks for it self . They are either the most corrupt or the most incompetent provincial government in canada . The numbers don’t lie but she does . She’s still babbling the neocon mantra of being an island of stability in a sea where everyone else is drowning . That is a bald faced lie . They should not be allowed to use the title of liberals . They are anything but liberal .

“What is the purpose of bringing special interest groups into the discussion?

That comment for real?

Yes one can find a group that is for the job but because of our left wing ding media media and education system which group gets to make the most noise?

“Just imagine, as we head into the New Year, if we had spent half of what we spent on the Jobs Plan on reducing poverty.”

Where does the money come from to fight poverty? Jobs will reduce poverty right, comprehend.

There will always be poverty for one reason or another, the issue is to reduce it, for that jobs are needed.

First of all the min.wage has to be increased to a living wage. We have too many people now working for a min.wage and these are not just students. The min .wage earners have lost all their purchasing powers. People are crying that they can’t raise the min wage because a hamburger might cost 25 cents more but they think nothing of it to pay a dentist $1500.00 to get one tooth fixed or $125.00 an hr to get their car repaired. At $10 an hr a person living alone can barely survive.

Interesting I get thumbs down for wanting jobs. Is that from those who have learned to scam the system?

I don’t think so seamutt . It’s probably because of your disinformation about the media being controlled by the left . This is one of you biggest stretches . The vast majority of think tanks are just a little right of hitler . Tha vast majority of newspapers, TV , magazines, radio are owned by the likes of David Black , Conrad Black ( lord of cross harbour ) and Rupert Murdoch . Apparently you are the only one that doesn’t know this fact . Special interest groups ? Try the coal producers coalition and their ilk . You likely view them as lefties as well .

Increasing the minimum wage to a ‘living wage’ will have absolutely no benefit whatsoever if PRICES are increased correspondingly. This is what will happen because currently ALL costs of which any increase in wages are a part have to be recovered in prices. Otherwise those who are paying those costs are not going to be very long in business.

If poverty could be solved by simply increasing wages, it would’ve been solved long ago. Realise this, in today’s capital intensive economy wages and salaries ~ incomes for most of us as consumers ~ are only a PART, and an ever declining part in the economy as a whole , in ratio to the overall costs that go to make up prices.

There has to be a different way to credit consumers with enough purchasing power to augment earned incomes, a way in which these augmentations are NOT ‘costed’ into prices, if you ever want to solve the main cause of poverty. Try to do it by simply mandating an increase in wages and you’ll quickly find poverty will increase, not decrease.

Ataloss, the media is controlled by neither the ‘right’ nor the ‘left’, but by those who control FINANCE. You will NEVER hear anyone on the ‘left’ EVER attack the current policy that is administered by FINANCE for the priority of benefit by FINANCE. They will, occasionally, make a call for ‘public banking’, or the nationalisation of banks, or having the ‘government’ create and issue all financial credit, etc. This simply changes the name of the ADMINISTRATORS, who will be exactly the same people as before, and does absolutely nothing in regards to any change in financial POLICY. Which is fundamentally centralising in nature, and confers all power into the hands of those administrating the system. Bankers and socialists are in bed together, and always have been.

Look at all the past increases in minimum wage. Has poverty, overall, been decreased or increased afterwards? Working with bigger figures does not necessarily make anyone any better off.

Ataloss are you saying Hitler was on the right?

Did ya get the global warming off your solar cells?

Ataloss are you saying the MSM is on the right? really!

Yes . You have the wrong end of the stick on solar again . Solar panels absorb ions not the other way around . And yes they are . It’s really tough to have a conversation with some one that doesn’t know the truth and is unwilling to or unable to find the truth . Specially when it comes to natgas .

socredible– You can’t raise the min. wage by a mere 25 cents an hr and expect it to make a difference. I am talking dollars here not pennies. I guess your theory is you could be still working for $5 an hr and that would save the world.

“MP Bob Zimmer got himself in a little hot water during the federal election campaign when he suggested a getting a job would solve many of problems facing indigenous women.”

Might be simplistic statement on its own, but he was right. I have native women relatives and they all work and surprisingly have no economic, lifestyle issues outside the ordinary.

Not at all, oldman 1. Put the minimum wage up to whatever figure you think is a ‘living wage’, and whatever figure you choose will very quickly become a figure people grossing that wage will find they still can’t live on.

Not with the current financial set-up we have, where ALL business (or government) COSTS have to be fully recovered in PRICES (or TAXES).

Discounting the overlooked fact that raising the minimum wage by dollars, as you’re suggesting, will also increase a lot of other charges that will flow through and raise prices ~ things like employer paid WCB premiums, employer paid portions of EI contributions and CPP deductions, all things which are based on GROSS pay, and have to increase, too, and be recovered from prices ~ even though the employee gets none of this money in NET income, from which he has to meet those prices, there is a much larger factor at play which defeats the supposed benefits.

That larger factor is that labor wages, whatever they may be so far as a rate of pay is concerned, are DECREASING overall in ratio to ALL the costs IN TOTAL which flow through into prices. There has to be ANOTHER WAY to make up the growing difference. One that DOESN’T increase costs as it distributes the needed augmentation to earned incomes.

There are ways of doing that. But those who control our politics and politicians seem to be reluctant to look at them.

All raising the minimum wage will do, (and this is why it ISN’T vigorously opposed by many of the “powers-that-be”), is allow those people receiving such a wage to go further into debt. They’re increasingly mortgaging their future to pay for their present needs. Some will no doubt say, so what? At least they’re better off now, and in the future we can just raise the wage up again, and we can repeat the whole process. But WHY should we HAVE TO do that in the first place? And can we do that ad infinitum? Or will there come that ‘day of reckoning’ when it’s realised that what has been ‘borrowed’ can never be repaid? And when that IS realised? What do we, because it will affect all of us when we find what we thought we had, in terms of finances, we don’t really have at all, do then? Why not SOLVE the basic problem? NOW, once and for all? There is NO need to have anyone ‘poor’ in any country that can produce far and away in excess of what it’s people could EVER possibly consume. NONE WHATSEVER. Change the bloody accounting ~ it’s not set in stone ~ and make the ‘figures’ properly REFLECT the FACTS! It’s not that hard to do.

Seamutt wrote: “There will always be poverty for one reason or another, the issue is to reduce it, for that jobs are needed.”

Some people have jobs. The hurdle which many cannot get over is that those who have jobs are more and more becoming privileged people.

When there were not enough jobs to go around in some countries, there were restrictions put on “moonlighting”. Remember that term? That was in an effort to increase job opportunities for others.

Today most families with two or more adults of working age share more than one job among them. That was not the case 50+ years ago. Just as China outlawed more than one child per family, some countries outlawed more than one job per person.

Just look at one example of what we are doing. We are giving several categories of job classifications in this City not only a decent paying job, but we are also providing those who want it with overtime which puts some into the $80,000 to $120,000 per year earning category because it is supposedly cheaper to give them the double/hour rate than to have more regular hour staff.

Looking at it from another point of view, those individuals are hogging jobs and the City and other employers using similar approaches are aiding and abetting that philosophy. It is not as if many of those jobs require highly specialized skills such as doctors, engineers and others who require many years of advanced education to apply their skills.

Poverty, jobs, subsidies, rights, privileges, equity, compassion and much more are all wrapped up into efforts to reduce poverty in an age when some are living in a world of the privileged and some are on the outside looking in because they cannot join those of us who are born with a silver spoon in our mouths because we are members of that privileged class.

Socredible wrote: “There is NO need to have anyone ‘poor’ in any country that can produce far and away in excess of what it’s people could EVER possibly consume.”

In order to prove that we could produce in excess of what we could ever consume we would have to close the border, cut ourselves off from China, the USA and others and keep our products in the country and leave the products of others outside of Canada. In other words, we would have to become like North Korea as far as our economy goes.

We are not a closed economy. We allow our citizens to buy products and services from other countries who can provide them at a lesser cost to us because of their economic policies. In fact, they are not much different from our policies with the lumber trade with the USA. They increased the duties and we increased production to reduce our unit cost. That worked until their demand for lumber dried up.

We are not producing manufactured products in excess. Others are producing those in excess for us and we are paying for it in resource dollars – oil, gas, coal, potash, wood, hydro, wheat, etc. Most of the machinery and the technology, and these days even the specialized manpower to plan and operate the industrial infrastructures is imported.

Just look at how many of our medical general practitioners and specialists as well as technologists come from foreign countries. We can’t even educate enough people to meet our own needs, let alone the needs of those in other countries too poor to train their own.

gopg2015:-“In order to prove that we could produce in excess of what we could ever consume we would have to close the border, cut ourselves off from China, the USA and others and keep our products in the country and leave the products of others outside of Canada. In other words, we would have to become like North Korea as far as our economy goes.”
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No, that would not at all be necessary to ‘prove’ anything. We do just as you say we do. We are not a ‘closed economy’ and there’s no need whatsoever for us to become one. It would be foolish for us to even try. We produce relative surpluses in many products far in excess of our own needs here. Other countries have alternate relative surpluses. We TRADE. That does not change the equation one iota. NO modern industrial country, or trading bloc of countries, could fully consume ALL their own production at the financial costs of its making from the total amount of incomes distributed in its making. To do that, they either have to go further into debt, or get ‘money’ from outside their own country, or bloc.

I have to laugh…. “Jobs Plan”. I went to WorkBC a few months ago to see if there were any sources of funding for me for a program that I wanted to take. $5000 for 4 months which would get me into a well paying job to get me out of my min wage job. I would still be able to work as it was 2 nights per week so would only need tuition. NO help available because I’m Caucasian, single, no kids and not addicted to anything. I could apparently save up to get my tuition. This jobs program and WorkBC are a joke.

“when some are living in a world of the privileged and some are on the outside looking in because they cannot join those of us who are born with a silver spoon in our mouths because we are members of that privileged class.”

So in your world I am privileged because I have a good job. So in your world my hard work and planning that got me that good job means nothing. I know people and from my own family who have made comments about my job in jealousy but have not put in the time or effort to get where I am, comfortable, not rich. What do you say to those people?

I have also met many so called poor who have gotten themselves into that fix because of life style and/or would rather scam the system to be able to do nothing and I mean do nothing except plan for the next handout. Some poor are in their position mainly because of bad luck, health or otherwise, but I have found in my six decades they are in the minority.

PG Lifer–Truer words were never spoken. Maybe if you ran out of EI and were on welfare for three years you might have a chance. Is it possible you were told you just have too much education to be helped. The only thing this province knows how to do is put on Job fairs to make it look like they are really doing something.

I hear you PGlifer . It’s shameful how many valuable resources like you are squandered . Any government that squanders human resources like this should be kicked to the curb for removal . They not only are near sighted but are breaking the tenants of The UN Declaration of Human Rights , education paragraphs that were signed by our federal government . It would be cheaper for you to go to Norway where free education is offered to the world based on merit because they honour their signature . Not like canada where their signature is meaningless and honour is hard to come by .

“So in your world I am privileged because I have a good job.”

Actually, I do not feel that at all. I feel that you are privileged because, as you wrote, your “hard work and planning” got you that job. Not everyone is capable of doing that. Until they can, you are one of the privileged ones who can.

If you ever worked with people who hope to improve themselves, you will find that not everyone understands what “hard” work is and, when put to the test can do that “hard” work. They are also unable to plan their lives step by step in order to get there. They fear the hurdles; they do not have the ability to overcome the hurdles, whether it is their genetic, their environmental or their emotional makeup. In fact, telling them that it is “hard” work can put them off right from the start.

It often takes a team of experienced people to turn such people around. It takes family support. It takes community support. It takes people who believe in them. I can see you are not one of those people that can give that support. Or am I mistaken and you have actually helped others to achieve what you have achieved? It takes people who have achieved a goal to assist others to do the same. Looking down on them helps no one.

I have been a trainer in my occupations, helped people along, turned some around. Then there are some, well what can be said, in reality just a waste of air.

Socredible wrote: “NO modern industrial country, or trading bloc of countries, could fully consume ALL their own production at the financial costs of its making from the total amount of incomes distributed in its making. To do that, they either have to go further into debt, or get ‘money’ from outside their own country, or bloc.”

So, what you are saying is that all those countries are practicing economic colonialism without actually having the expense of occupying those countries and governing them in place.

Another way to put it would be that those countries are operating an unsustainable internal economy by their practice of relying on external “slave” labour. The practice of buying from “sweat shops” operators in foreign countries would be one such visible indicator.

It is good to read that you helped some along, seamutt. Not all can help and not all can be helped.

The last people who can help, in my opinion, based on experience, are what I call bureaucrats who follow guidelines and have no feeling what is needed to help. As with all vocations, there are those who excel and those who really are in the wrong vocation.

Just because one has an education and training in a specific area, has experience in that area, does not mean they end up excelling. They can be average and they can be mediocre.

I often wish that those who are mediocre would recognize it and try to improve or find another vocation they would be better at.

When one is in a position of trying to help those who appear to be marginal. it can turn into a real disaster, making matters worse rather than better.

PGLifer may have had such an experience just because he was a square peg for whom only round holes were available into which people could try to fit him. The filtering system was inadequate, likely because there was insufficient money. The system was discriminatory based on what appear to be unreasonable criteria.