Thoughts on BC Politics and More

Recent budget updates for the province of Alberta, and BC, shows how much of a difference there is in how finances are managed in each province! In neighbouring Alberta, their government continues to manage the province’s finances responsibly with the future in mind. In a media release today the provincial government of Danielle Smith's United Conservative Party show they continue to lead the nation in economic growth as they are forecasting a SURPLUS of $5.5 billion in 2023-24 ... an increase, they say, of $3.2 billion from Budget 2023 BC Finance Minister Katrine Conroy MEANTIME HERE IN BC ... Just two days ago we had news that the provinces NDP government, led by David Eby, is now showing that the BC 2023/24 budget will have a $5.6 billion DEFICIT How is it that Alberta can have a surplus of five and a half billion dollars while we have the same dollar amount as a deficit? I'll give my answer -- the resource industry of BC continues to be hammered over and over again b...

... on Wednesday, when the now NDP government began doing that very same thing, Furstenau didn’t hold back in her assessment. "The NDP have become the thing that they despised when they were in opposition,” said the leader of B.C.'s Green Party. It's a cutting criticism. Partly because it’s true ... CLICK HERE for the full story

... What we have not yet had is a permanent, properly funded commitment from all levels of government to ensure that the people of Canada have access to appropriate and affordable housing. We need all hands-on deck for this crisis, but the problem right now is that the federal and provincial hands are running around the deck promoting a blizzard of arbitrary measures. They are showing insufficient regard for the responsibilities of local and regional governments for community planning and the provision of infrastructure for water supply, sewage treatment, stormwater systems, transportation and other services that new development requires ... CLICK HERE for the full commentary

The plan to build a new eight-lane George Massey tunnel crossing is still almost three years from beginning construction, but already there are concerns about disruptions and damage from the project. Delta South MLA Ian Paton, whose riding encompasses one side of the Delta-to-Richmond tunnel, said members of the public will be shocked once they realize some of the projected impacts to popular trails, parks and water access. “People aren’t going to be happy about it,” said Paton, who recently published a social media video with BC United leader Kevin Falcon to highlight concerns ,..,. CLICK HERE for the full story  

Many cabins in the tourism-dependent area fall under zoning categories that restrict them to being used no more than 180 days per year “All we are saying is those are not suitable for long-term rental. They are purpose-built,” said O’Brien, who likened the community’s request — endorsed at a council meeting this month — to exemptions granted to designated resort communities. CLICK HERE for the full story

The British Columbia government goes up against dozens of health care and pharmaceutical companies in court today in a bid to get certification for a class-action lawsuit over the costs of the opioid crisis ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Island First Nations are looking forward to finalizing a deal with Western Forest Products that will give them more say over logging activities in their territories ... CLICK HERE for the full story

That putrid scent wafting across the country is the desperation sweating out of every pore of the Trudeau Liberal establishment in Ottawa. We saw it all last week as the Liberals belatedly tried to score political points against Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, who have been dominating them in the polls for almost six months ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Doctors in British Columbia have a new set of clinical guidelines for treating opioid use disorder. On Wednesday, the BC Centre on Substance Use published a new set of guidelines, replacing the previous clinical guidelines from 2017. The 2017 guidelines were published around a year after a public health emergency was declared in 2016 in response to a sharp increase in toxic drug deaths. A lot has changed since then, including an increase in research on opioid agonist treatment, or OAT, and what does and doesn’t work for patients, said Dr. Paxton Bach, an addiction medicine physician and co-chair of the guideline writing committee ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith confirmed yesterday she’s about to use her Alberta Sovereignty Act – the clearly unconstitutional legislation that even her United Conservative Party predecessor Jason Kenney called “a full-frontal attack on the rule of law.” “A government that pretends it can, at will, set aside any court decision, ignore the Constitution, is deciding to deliberately undermine the rule of law,” Mr. Kenney explained, shortly before he left office in the fall of 2022.  Warning that implementation of the act could turn the province into a “banana republic,” he said “the so-called Sovereignty Act would effectively bring us to the brink of separation from Canada” ... CLICK HERE for the full story

After a day of voting, the next candidate for BC United in the Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream riding has been decided. To thunderous applause, businessman Pavneet Singh beat out three other candidates and will now work hard towards election day next year. “Definitely, definitely excited, but the job is not done, it just started. I won the nomination. I'm a candidate for MLA, but I’m not an MLA yet. Our MLA is Norm Letnick, and I’m going to work hard with the local city and with everybody in my riding, talking to people, hearing the issues and we’ll go from there,” said Singh ... CLICK HERE for the full story  

Canadian Mayoral candidate got clandestine financial support from community leaders mobilized by Chinese Consulate in 2022 and 2018: "Intelligence Assessment" A senior Canadian politician running to lead a provincial political party clandestinely met officials inside a Chinese Consulate in 2022, subsequently becoming China’s preferred candidate, and winning campaign support from Consulate proxies, a Top Secret CSIS document alleges. Details of the Consulate meeting are contained in a sweeping CSIS “Intelligence Assessment” dated October 31, 2022.  Without identifying candidates by name, it details Beijing’s efforts to influence leaders of Canadian parties – at the federal, provincial and municipal level – before and after recent elections ... CLICK HERE for the full story

... The excitement they imagine stems from the estimate there will be one million job openings in the next decade. That number has been in play for more than decade and whichever party is in power always hails it as a sign of a strong economy. But the excitement turns to something different when you look closer at the labour outlook. When the plan for filling one million jobs in 10 years is compared to the all-consuming housing crisis, there’s not much in the way of jubilation ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Paper Excellence says paper operations at its Crofton mill will remain shuttered until at least the end of February, which is bad news for about 70 unionized workers who had hoped to be back on the job December 1. The latest extension means the curtailment will now stretch to at least eight months ... CLICK HERE for the full story  

We’re about a year away from some major changes to the political landscape in the Okanagan, Kelowna specifically. Already we know MLAs Ben Stewart and Norm Letnick won’t be returning. Steve Thomson retired long ago, leaving Renee Merrifield as our most senior provincial representative, lord help us all, and there’s no guarantee she’ll get in again. Bold words perhaps, considering the BC Liberals, now BC United, have dominated Thompson-Okanagan ridings since before Bill Clinton took office. But we have arrived at a different time and place ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Today, Canada will wrap up a two-day Canada-EU Leaders Summit in St. John’s, Newfoundland, the first such meeting since June 2021. Given the strategic importance of Canada’s relationship with the EU, Canadians should pay close attention to its outcomes. For the EU, its relationship with Canada represents a pivotal opportunity in the midst of growing global uncertainty: a stable, like-minded partner with enormous reserves of energy and critical minerals that is a friendly alternative to other authoritarian sources of these goods. One problem? Canada’s seeming inability to capitalize on this pressing demand ... CLICK HERE for the full story

This weekend, voting will start for the Ontario Liberal leadership as the contest between Bonnie Crombie, Nate Erskine-Smith, Yasir Naqvi and Ted Hsu reaches its final stage. The result will be announced on December 2. But before the winner is revealed, voting will also take place in the riding of Kitchener Centre, where a provincial byelection is scheduled for November 30. Joining me this week to break down all the latest in Ontario politics are Sabrina Naji of Queen’s Park Observer and Jessica Smith Cross , editor-in-chief at The Trillium CLICK HERE for the full podcast

The Canadian Human Rights Commission, which wields broad quasi-judicial powers, argued that a day off on Christmas is 'discriminatory'   The Canadian Human Rights Commission — an agency with broad judicial powers that is fully funded by the federal government — has declared that the celebration of Christmas is evidence of Canada’s “colonialist” religious intolerance ... CLICK HERE for the full story

BC Green House Leader Adam Olsen said government’s “chaotic legislative agenda” gives MLAs little, if any time to assess bills. “This House should be a democracy,” Olsen said Wednesday (Nov. 22). “It is not acting like a democracy. We have essentially given power to a group of people, the executive, and they have full control over what we debate, when we debate it and for how long we debate it" ... CLICK HERE for the full story

While the official election is not until October 2024, and the writ has by no means been dropped in B.C., politicians have been unofficially on the campaign trail for months ... ... On Friday, for the first time since crossing the floor and becoming leader of the BC Conservatives John Rustad will stop in the Tournament Capital to rally support for B.C.’s new fourth party ... CLICK HERE for the full story

As British Columbia emerges from its worst wildfire season on record and continues to recover from recent climate disasters, two of the province’s opposition parties are saying they would scrap the government’s climate action plan ... CLICK HERE for the full story

The Union of B.C. Municipalities says it would be “practically impossible” for municipalities seeking to remove tent cities to show shelter is available for all of the unhoused ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Retraining Alberta’s oil and gas workers for the solar industry costs far less than you think. The results of our new study clearly show that a rapid transition to sustainable energy production is feasible, as costs of retraining oil and gas workers are far from prohibitive ... ... many factors — including increasing electrification, reduction in renewable energy costs and climate policy — are aligning to annihilate Alberta’s traditional fossil fuel-focused energy industry. This raises a real concern for oil and gas workers’ jobs in the near future ... CLICK HERE for the full story

BC Conservatives unveil climate policy CLICK HERE for the full story November 22, 2023 Ahead of next year's provincial election, the Conservative Party of B.C. is unveiling its climate policy. Legislative bureau chief Keith Baldrey has the details of the party’s plan to eliminate the carbon tax.

“What we’re trying to do here, is we’re laying out clearly what the Conservative Party of BC wants to do for the people of British Columbia, how we are going to make sure that we can adapt and prosper as a province.” Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad said a government under his leadership would scrap the provincial carbon tax, low-carbon fuel requirements and other climate-related programs in promising to return $2.8 billion to British Columbians. A Conservative government would also reduce British Columbia’s reliance on imports of food and refined fuel by “dramatically” increasing domestic food production and developing domestic refining capacities. Rustad also promised to have a conversation with British Columbians about using nuclear power ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Will the B.C. government’s new legislation to allow multiplexes on single-family lots lead to a wealth bonanza for people who already own those properties? It was a question BC Green MLA Adam Olsen pushed hard to debate in the legislature this week, as MLAs attempted to unravel the potential consequences of one of the largest changes to housing policy in the province’s history. “This bill creates huge amounts of wealth for people who have generated huge amounts of wealth from being born at the right time, and separates and creates a massive, much larger gap between those who were not born at the right time and who did not get into the housing market, the real estate market, at the right time,” Olsen said this week during debate of Bill 44 ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Decolonization is a radical Leftist theory that has been pushed and promoted in institutions across Canada. Professors, students, politicians and journalists have all bought into this warped academic theory. So what exactly does it mean? CLICK HERE for the full discussion  

... Leader Kevin Falcon is wagering that when people learn about the cost to households from the accelerated climate measures, they’ll worry more about what the plan does to the cost of living than what it does to the temperature. The promise to scrap CleanBC is designed to counter the Conservative Party of B.C. just as much as the NDP government. BC United’s worries about being outflanked by the two-member Conservative caucus are now obvious to all ... CLICK HERE for the full commentary

At the same time Premier David Eby is asking the federal ­government to go easy on recovering some COVID-19 benefits, his own government is clawing back relief on the basis of a retroactive, unpublicized legal change. “Ironic,” said Ombudsperson Jay Chalke on Tuesday. He released an investigative report on how midstream changes to the B.C. Emergency Benefit mean the Finance Ministry is chasing tens of thousands of people — possibly far more — to get back $1,000 grants handed out during the pandemic ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Twenty years ago, it should have been obvious to all that the jig was up for newspapers and journalism was going to need a new ride. Print had a good run—almost 600 years—but the invention by Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web meant the era of massive presses and the power they bestowed on their owners was coming to an end. The only question, once Craigslist and Kijiji began boring holes in classified advertising, the economic foundation of newspapers, was whether there would even be time to save the furniture. Since the turn of the century, there have only been two alternatives for legacy news organizations: adapt or die ... CLICK HERE for the full story

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has been quiet on six weeks of rampant antisemitic hate and calls for violence against Jews and Israelis, but has published a discussion paper taking aim at the real source of discrimination – Christmas and Easter. The human rights commission says Christmas and Easter being holidays is discriminatory against non-Christians, making Canada a religiously intolerant “settler colonial state.” CLICK HERE as True North’s Andrew Lawton discusses the issue with Rebel News founder Ezra Levant

  The new electoral map in the swathe of ridings running from Durham Region around the City of Toronto and out around to Niagara Falls is a mixed bag for both the Liberals and the Conservatives. Both parties come out ahead in some ridings and further behind in others. At the margins, the map in this part of Ontario might seem slightly better for the Liberals than the Conservatives. But the biggest changes are to the net benefit of Pierre Poilievre’s party — and that’s over and above the significant shift we’ve seen in the polls toward the Conservatives, both in Ontario and across the country as a whole. This is the latest analysis in my series on the federal riding redistribution, finally completing its cross-country tour of the new electoral map ... CLICK HERE for the full story

SURREY – The NDP Government’s CleanBC program will inflict severe damage to the provincial economy, says the November 2023 edition of The Construction Monitor , published by The Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA) today. The Construction Monitor builds on the work of the Business Council of British Columbia and ICBA Chief Economist Jock Finlayson, who exposed shocking numbers produced by the provincial government’s own analysis of CleanBC. “CleanBC will put B.C.’s economy into a hard reverse and do so on a scale never experienced before in this province,” wrote ICBA President Chris Gardner in his introduction to The Construction Monitor . “B.C. is already one of the worst performing economies in North America… equal parts embarrassing and troubling.” The Construction Monitor includes several infographics to help the public better understand the economic and personal costs of CleanBC. It can be found HERE .