A thought occurred to me on hearing Mitt Romney oppose same-sex marriage. That is an odd position for a Mormon. Though most of them now disavow polygamy (which is illegal), his own immediate forebears were polygamists and he is personally the by-product of polygamous marriages. My point is that a marriage involving, say, 5 women… [Read more…]
March 29, 2012
BC’s next non-binding ‘fixed’ provincial election date isn’t scheduled until May 14 2013, but there is an increasing possibility that we’ll be going to the polls sooner than that. Not because the government is anxious to refresh its mandate, but because too many wheels are falling off the governing party. I won’t list all the… [Read more…]
March 26, 2012
At a dinner-party a while ago I drew some sharp disagreement by commenting that one-member-one-vote is a crappy way to select a party leader. While it has the outward form of more intense democracy, it sterilizes the democratic process. Selecting an internal party leader is a fundamentally different kind of process from fighting an external… [Read more…]
March 21, 2012
There is a lesson to be learned from some huge political fiascos over the past few years in BC, a lesson about the limitations of elected politicians. I am not sure it has been learned. This is a lesson which is quite independent of the ideological leanings of the politicians or whether their programs are… [Read more…]
March 8, 2012
A nasty smell hangs over Canada’s government. Our 2011 election makes the dirty games of the US Bush/Gore election (“hanging chads” in Florida, dubious computer vote counting in Ohio, Republican voter registration laws designed to block minority and low-income voters) look like minor deviations from fair practice. It is becoming clear that Canadians actually chose… [Read more…]
March 6, 2012
The word on the street is that within the ruling BC Liberal government daggers are coming out for Premier Christy Clark. About a year after her selection as Gordon Campbell’s successor, and just under a year before the next election, her standing with the electorate is sinking below the horizon, and she has never managed… [Read more…]
March 2, 2012
The way that the BC political scene has reacted to the collapse of public confidence in the provincial Liberal government has posed a painful dilemma for Premier Clark. Here’s the problem: Clark’s Liberals are really a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, aimed at keeping the New Democratic Party out of power. Coalition members retain their… [Read more…]
February 8, 2012
(an update of a December 2011 post) While controversy and First Nations resistance have held up Enbridge’s plans for an oil pipeline across northern BC for export via tanker through Kitimat, there is another massive pipeline-for-export project following much the same track which is forging ahead, with relatively little notice or notoriety until last week.… [Read more…]
February 7, 2012
Political manipulation of BC Hydro rates is not new, but it has reached new depths in the rollback of increases slated for the next two years, from 9.73 per cent to 3.91 per cent. The provincial government is cynically disguising the real costs of a decade of bad policy, and punting them past the May… [Read more…]
August 17, 2011
“First, the government creates a large niche for its corporate friends to profit enormously at the expense of Hydro customers. Then when the resultant huge rate hikes start to hit consumers, the government responds to the public outcry by eviscerating the publicly-owned utility, but leaves the private encroachments intact.” On one level, the BC government’s… [Read more…]
August 4, 2011
Global markets fell with a thud today. The Euro is in serious jeopardy, with Italy and Spain potentially heading toward monetary death-spiral scenarios. Their economies are both too big to be rescued by Greek or Irish-style bail-outs by the Eurozone, and even if they could be, neither the Greek nor the Irish bail-out is helping… [Read more…]
July 14, 2011
“The people who pay the cost of a crisis are almost never the ones who caused it.” - Aphorisms of Jim Quail, vol. 2 Like most political discourse of the past three years, both here and south of the border, the US debt-ceiling battle is about who will pay the price for the crisis. Do… [Read more…]
June 20, 2011
The push is on to identify and prosecute looters and vandals caught on digital images during the rampage following the Vancouver Canucks’ loss of the final Stanley Cup game. I suggest that people take a moment to look deeper into the events of Wednesday June 15. They provide a rare opportunity to see contemporary Canadian… [Read more…]
May 3, 2011
In legislatures elected by proportional representation systems, parties tend to form around particular ideological orientations and undergo a mix-and-match process of alignment and coalition-buiding in the assembly of governments and oppositions. First-past-the-post systems, on the other hand, reward big-tent parties, which internalize the assembly of coalition-building within party ranks. An obvious example is today’s Conservative… [Read more…]
March 28, 2011
The federal election-call has enormously complicated the political challenges facing newly-anointed BC Liberal Premier Christy Clark. Her most pressing immediate tasks are to re-unite her strained centre-right coalition, and to get through the pummeling that awaits the government in the June referendum on the Harmonized Sales Tax. Beyond those issues she needs to determine whether… [Read more…]
February 28, 2011
The BC NDP should not bet on the Liberal government disintegrating under Premier Christy Clark. Sure, there are tensions within the Liberal centre-right coalition. (What coalition hasn’t gone through that?) Sure, Clark has been known to engage her mouth faster than her brain from time to time. (Who hasn’t?) But the Official Opposition will have… [Read more…]
February 17, 2011
Not defamatory in Canada, according to the Supreme Court: “Why is it that there are so many incompetent people and that the language of work is Creole or Arabic in a city that’s French and English? . . . I’m not very good at speaking “nigger” . . . . Taxis have really become the… [Read more…]
February 11, 2011
Progressive groups are lined up on either side of the ongoing court hearing in BC about the constitutionality of Canada’s anti-polygamy law. That is not surprising, as the issues are complex and the best outcome is not at all obvious. What is Criminalized The crime of polygamy may invoke the image of coerced marriages of… [Read more…]
May 10, 2012
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