Sales tax war resumed
The good doctor at The Gazetteer diagnoses a similarity between issues underlying the now debated transit sales tax and the late and unlamented HST. RossK is focused on the tax…
Norman Farrell
With Ian Jessop, CFAX1070, Mar 3
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Political football – winners and losers
Senior governments download responsibility for delivering services but seldom include taxing authorities adequate to match spending demands. The download trend is demonstrated in a report by The Columbia Institute: British…
Everything is awesome
Few students in BC graduate from post-secondary schooling laden with debt, according to Andrew Wilkinson, Minister of Advanced Education in British Columbia. Wilkinson asserts there is no student debt problem.…
Setting priorities
I’ve written about politics influenced by a captured and compliant press. This is from a helpful Canadian Press article published by Macleans Magazine weeks before the last BC election: …A…
Agenda journalism
Black Press political reporter Tom Fletcher, whose wife is a Public Affairs Officer for the BC Liberal Government, occasionally recalls the nineties: The dark decade, the dismal decade, the decade…
British satire continues
I enjoy Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, a BBC Two satirical program now in a third series. BBC TV is not readily available in North America without use of a proxy…
Frugality, thy name is not TransLink
Opinion researchers Insights West concluded in 2013 that an increase in sales tax was the least favoured funding option for TransLink. Nevertheless, that’s the option preferred by most municipal politicians…
Norm Farrell with Ian Jessop, CFAX1070, Feb 19
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
I will comment about BC Budget 2014 after more study but I’ve read a few reports from media stenographers. Studying detail takes more time than rewording notes issued by the…
Executive sweet
Thousands of BC government employees lost jobs to privatization and service cuts. Even more lost income through reductions in employment and pension benefits and, with efforts to reduce public services…
Sales tax not only way to pay for public services
CCPA Budget Submissions Natural Resource Royalties Reform, Iglika Ivanova, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, October 2014 BC used to collect well over $1 billion per year from natural gas royalties,…
Horgan with Jessop, CFAX Feb 12
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Pray, don’t pay
During famine of the 19th century, Irish people dying of starvation were told to pray for God’s help while traders loaded ships to carry food to England. Referring the poor…
Readers speak
I had planned today to relate a story from a few years back, about what might have been rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I rode on a harrowing flight…
Politics of opportunism
In a Times Colonist Op-Ed, Bercove, Madden and Coste wrote, We have the choice between trying to build an industry of uncertain benefit based on a finite resource that is…