Liberal Vote Lost!

May 11, 2005 -- This posting came to me from one of the many mailing lists that I am on. Rafe Mair hosts a daily talk radio show on 600 AM. Rafe Mair is one of the most respected political commentators in British Columbia. His posting below concerns the 2005, May 17th provincial election.

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By Rafe Mair


It seems that Premier Gordon Campbell will not be coming on this
show prior to the election, as promised. The reason, no doubt, is
that he might actually have to answer some tough questions backed
up with cross-examination. I frankly couldn't care less. Contrary
to what politicians would have you believe, they are not good for
ratings and, at any rate, we're not in ratings.

Let me this morning simply speak as a voter, and if the Premier
were here, I would make the following comments.

I voted for you in 2001, Premier but there are a hell of a lot of
things you have done and left undone that make it impossible to
vote for you again.

I didn't expect you to ignore the Auditor-General's report and
the report of the public servants in the Finance department, made
available to you immediately after the election, demonstrating
that the NDP left a surplus of $1.57 billion ...and since you
knew that, I must point out to you that when you said "it was
worse than we thought" and the province is in "a serious deficit"
that you would tell such a clear falsehood. Moreover, when you
gave the well-off, a $2 billion tax break on your first day in
office, you gave the NDP surplus to the likes of me, not the
homeless, the sick, the elderly in need of a long term bed or to
those who badly need a helping hand.

I didn't expect that you would hire a kissing cousin of yours,
Doug Walls, who was an undischarged bankrupt under investigation
for stealing $1 million, to look after $600 million of our money
in the Children and Families Ministry ... I didn't expect you to
deny you knew the man, even saying that your wife doesn't know
all her cousins when in fact Walls was a prominent Liberal, a man
you had stayed with and that you had gone all the way to Prince
George so you could lease a car from him.

I didn't think you would be so mean-spirited to instruct your
Speaker to refuse party status to the NDP.

When I voted for you I didn't expect that you would renege,
twice, on a deal with Crown prosecutors where both sides would
accept the arbitrators' decision.

I did not expect the Campbell government to increase the public
debt of this province by 4.3 billion dollars so that they could
arrange a surplus in the last year to bribe the voters with.

I took you at your word when you promised you wouldn't sell BC
Rail .. now are we to accept your word that you won't sell ICBC
or BC Hydro?

I didn't expect the homeless to increase by 75% under Gordon
Campbell.

I didn't ever expect to see my province as a place where a poor
person, often mentally ill, could go to jail for begging.

I didn't elect the Campbell Liberals to see food banks increasing
the number of children it serviced last year by over 41% and the
adults by 16%.

I expected the Campbell government to keep its promise to build
5000 new Long Term Care beds. As listeners will know, this is
likely the single most important Health problem because as the
baby boomers get older, the shortage of long term beds becomes
more important - the presence of long term patients in acute car
beds is the main reason surgical lines are so long
 .. so we have this curious result - because older people who
need long term care are in acute care beds, their seniors
colleagues, perhaps family or friends, can't get the elective
surgery required because there are not enough acute care beds.

I can't believe that the Premier, his health minister and his
minister in charge of long term beds would make a promise to
build 5000 long term beds and to make that promise on my show
several times then renege. I cannot believe that suddenly, out of
the blue, comes an excuse that there were too many LTC beds in
bad shape so they had to look after them before building new beds
.. an excuse that we didn't hear until Shirley Bond was made
minister and she had to scramble for an excuse to get out of the
credibility mess the government was in.

I didn't believe that Gordon Campbell would lift the moratorium
on fish farming and then, after two Pink Salmon runs in the
Broughton Archipelago were all but wiped out, would refuse to
save this year's run by fallowing the fish cages which produced
the sea lice that have been destroying the smolts as they migrate
to sea. I honestly didn't believe my ears when you told my
audience on March 1st this year that not only would he not help
the wild salmon but that he would take no responsibility when the
run fails next Fall!

I cannot believe that I heard the you in the leaders' debate
boast that you had reduced unemployment in an aboriginal Village
from 85% to 30 % ... that instead of being ashamed of yourself,
you would boast about coming to the aid of native villagers by
bringing in a filthy business like fish farming, thus insulting
them, and further damaging wild salmon stocks the absence of
which is what caused the villagers the problem in the first
place.

And this leads me to the future - I cannot support a man and a
party that is going to hand out fish farm licenses all up and
down the coast as soon as he is elected and will open up the
British Columbia wilderness to his pals, both here and abroad, so
that tourists can shoot our Grizzly bears and Mountain Sheep.

Moreover, I don't believe that the present prosperity has much if
anything to do with the Liberals and everything to do with the
increase of commodity prices over which the provincial government
has no control whatever.

This premier and this government, with a couple of exceptions,
have been mean-spirited, philosophically opposed to helping those
who need it, destructive in the extreme of the environment and
come to the people with no vision except to say elect us, we're
better than the NDP.

Make the environment an issue - it's yours to lose.