Editor, The Times:
In regards to the new provincial budget, B.C. Finance Minister Carole James stated matters so well: “The past government racked up surpluses simply for the sake of surpluses while not investing in people. We will never have a truly prosperous province unless everyone in B.C. can share in that prosperity.”
While official opposition MLAs smugly boast of and promise “balanced” budgets past and future, they callously omit the human(e) equation, as though very tight finances are of any good to the large portion (if not the majority) of British Columbians who are struggling to make ends meet.
Assuming they even were genuinely balanced and not just creative accounting fudge-it budgets, spouting nonsensical platitudes that simply by being in the black the budget will leave sufficiently more money in B.C.ers’ pockets in these financially tough times is insensitive, at best.
Meanwhile, the conservative B.C. Liberals’ money-first agenda and policies have already enabled rampant money laundering in the casino and real estate industries, with the latter’s corruption resulting in the current housing crisis.
It seems the only entities that weren’t denied government (i.e. taxpayer) subsidization were those of big business, especially the fossil fuel industry, regardless of the latter’s relatively few permanent full time jobs actually created for B.C.ers.
After three decades of following politics, it still bewilders me how some of these politicians attend weekly religious services in good conscience and sleep well at night.
Ode to the political animal: Politics is the art of compromise, politics at its moral peak, though this moral peak indeed lies below a dead sea’s level; but the compromise of ethics and integrity is politics at its moral natural state—a state in which the media beast must be fed, will feast from the politicians’ tin can filled with naught but the spin man of the political animal.
Frank Sterle Jr.,
White Rock, B.C.
