BC Politics

hey i live in rural BC and call bs on the negative labeling of hay seed.

this is the rural evangelical movement  stepping out i'm betting.

A federal by-election in Nanaimo has just been set for May 6.

i wd be interested in any information on prospects from our BC correspondents.

quizzical wrote:

NDP don't have a nominated candidate yet.

Chief Bob Chamberlin has put his name forward for nomination though and imv he will get it.

Liberals have Nanaimo Port Authority Chair Michelle Corfield who is also well known in the Indigenous community though not as locally.

both Conservative parties have candidates but i doubt they will factor in.

 

Will Paul Manly run for the Greens again?

Edit:

https://www.facebook.com/VoteforPaulManly/

I hope Manley takes the seat for the Greens. It would serve the NDP right after what they did to him in 2015.

And what the NDP did to him in 2015 wasn't mean-spirited in the slightest? Perhaps if the NDP starts to feel the consequences of its bad behaviour, maybe said behaviour will stop.

life better for you there Aristotled under your current government?

na it's not but hey you just keep on being holier than thou and see where the world ends up.

bekayne wrote:

quizzical wrote:

won't happen he maxed out last time all it will do is give the seat to the Liberals.

It was 33-23-23-20 last time, so no.

 

gd stuff ty makes me feel a bit better 

quizzical wrote:

won't happen he maxed out last time all it will do is give the seat to the Liberals.

but hey i guess your politics is framed by meanspiritedness and what you believe is better for others not those who actually you know live there.

Look, quizzical, I'd vote NDP if I lived in Nanaimo-but can you not see that there was no possible justification for Mulcair to bar Paul Manly from seeking the NDP nomination there in 2015?  That, rather than demonizing Manly for doing what anyone would have done in response to the treatment Mulcair inflicted on him for his principles-for a choice which essentially made it impossible for Manly to continue to work in electoral politics at all, to continue to work within the NDP for anything he cared about in any capacity at all-that Singh should have contacted him after replacing Mulcair as leader, admitted that what Mulcair did was wrong, apologized for it and invited him back?  I wish Paul wasn't running for the Greens myself, but after what was done, what other choices did he have besides just plain leaving politics?  It's not as though the party had any right to ask him to just support the candidate Mulcair permitted to be nominated and just stay in?  You wouldn't remain in any party that ever did anything like that to you, and I can't think of anybody anywhere who ever did stay loyal to a group that treated that person in that way.  

Manly's choice this time is the result of the NDP refusing to admit it treated him unjustly and refusing to do anything to make amends.

Ken Burch wrote:

quizzical wrote:

bekayne wrote:

quizzical wrote:

won't happen he maxed out last time all it will do is give the seat to the Liberals.

It was 33-23-23-20 last time, so no.

 

gd stuff ty makes me feel a bit better 

If anything, Manly might knock the Liberals into third or fourth place.  The key thing is that, this time, the NDP needs to nominate a candidate who speaks to the issues Manly stands for-none of which are things that would do the party any harm.

I live in the riding and I think Manly is going to win fairly easily by taking votes from both the NDP and the Liberals. The Conservatives will be hampered by the People's Party, who will win some votes. There are more than enough former NDP supporters that are unhappy enough with how Manly was treated in 2015 who in the absence of a local candidate would vote Green. I agree the Liberals may finish fourth though. Their second place showing in 2015 was a result of national trends and not because of any great federal Liberal strength here. 

Pogo wrote:

The NDP screwed up with Paul Manly. There was no way he was going to get the nomination so they could have just let it play out. However, I do wonder if there was some local issue with his candidacy, there sure wasn't a big fight from the local party to have him on the ballot.

I think it would have been an interesting nomination fight with no guarantee that he would win, as Sheila Malcolmson had a lot of support. Your speculations are groundless; there was no local issue that I'm aware of. 

R.E.Wood wrote:

What is wrong with BC's NDP/Green government? Why is it allowing this to happen? (This story is from April 17, so I'm sorry if it's been posted elsewhere before)

B.C. Quietly Grants Mount Polley Mine Permit to Pipe Mine Waste Directly Into Quesnel Lake​

https://thenarwhal.ca/b-c-quietly-grants-mount-polley-mine-permit-pipe-m...

Please read the article. The date on the article is April 17, 2017. The BC Liberals were in power at the time. The election was on May 9, 2017 and the NDP government, with the support of the Greens, did not take power until July 18th, 2017 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/41st_Parliament_of_British_Columbia). So this was a BC Liberal decision done on the quiet during the election, not a NDP/Green decision. 

The NDP passed legislation in September 2017, two months after taking power that ended corporate and union election funding: "The government passed legislation in 2017 that forbid corporate and union donations to political parties and set a cap on maximum personal donations of $1,225 a year." (https://vancouversun.com/news/politics/b-c-ndp-lead-political-fundraisin...)

It is not a coincidence now that corporations are banned from donating to political parties that the provincial NDP lead in political donations in BC as of this February 2019 article: "The NDP raised almost $2.05 million between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2018, according to new figures released Monday by Elections B.C. Compared to that, the Opposition B.C. Liberals raised $1.69 million and the B.C. Greens raised almost $439,000 in the same period." (https://vancouversun.com/news/politics/b-c-ndp-lead-political-fundraisin...)

Further  down in the article is a connection to an url which gives a breakdown on contributions to the three BC parties, showing 52% of Liberal funding coming from corporations, while 4% of NDP and 3% of Green funding came from corporations in 2015, the last year that would have been available at the time of the 2017 article. In other words, the BC Liberals were serving their corporate masters.

In 2015, the B.C. Liberal Party declared $9.9 million in political donations [PDF]. Of that total:

• $5.2 million (52 per cent) came from corporations
• $3.35 million (33 per cent ) from individuals
• $728,795 (7 per cent) from unincorporated businesses and organizations, and
• $24,075 (>1 per cent) from trade unions

In 2015, the B.C. NDP declared $3.05 million in political donations [PDF]. Of that total:

• $143,820 (4 per cent) came from corporations
• $2.49 million (81 per cent) from individuals
• $35,290 (1 per cent) from non-profit organizations, and
• $376,336 (12 per cent) from trade unions

In 2015, the B.C. Green Party declared $394,310 in political donations [PDF]. Of that total:

• $383,720 (97 per cent) came from individuals
• $10,549 came from corporations

  https://thenarwhal.ca/topics/bc-political-donations

   

Supreme Court Rejects Tsilhqot'in Appeal in Taseko Mine Case

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/supreme-court-rejects-ts...

"...Chief Alphonse says government and industry cannot be allowed to devastate a place of such spiritual importance simply for the pursuit of gold. The Tsilhqot'in also asked BC's NDP government to live up to its commitments to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by preventing the violation of human rights it says is caused by mining exploration at Teztan Biny."

Fat chance.

Good on them for starting this.

Groups call on B.C. to fund Indigenous monitoring of mines in traditional territories

As the province considers reforms to mining laws, 30 organizations are advocating for increased transparency and more independent enforcement — including an increased role for Indigenous communities to oversee projects approved on their lands

Indigenous-led groups, such as the Indigenous Guardians, should be tasked and funded by the provincial government to keep an eye on mining operations in their territories, the B.C. Mining Law Reform network is recommending to Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Minister Michelle Mungall.

The proposal from the network of about 30 local, national and Alaskan organizations, including community groups, First Nations and environmental groups, is among recommendations on government’s proposed changes to the Mines Act, which the group says do not go far enough and fall short of protecting B.C.’s environment and communities from mining risks.

The reform network, a not-for-profit group, was launched this spring to counter problems caused by weak mining laws and lack of enforcement in B.C. 

Among nine specific requests to beef up the province’s proposed mining reforms — including calls for greater transparency in environmental monitoring and a more progressive regime of fines and penalties — the group is also calling on government to “enable and fund Indigenous-led monitoring and enforcement programs for mining activities as well as other forms of independent monitoring.”

Community-based programs should train monitoring staff so information collected on mines in the area can be used to help inform management and decision-making, the letter to Mungall suggests.....

B.C. should disclose what fracking companies pay for publicly owned resources

For more than two years, the British Columbia government has vigorously fought efforts to compel the release of information on the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies that it doles out to fossil fuel companies each year.

It has either refused outright to release documents or it has handed over pages of essentially worthless information with all the dollar figures and company names blanked out.

Now, thanks to successive appeals to the Office of Freedom of information and Privacy by the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the public finally has details on just how extensive those subsidies are.

The list shows for the first time publicly the astonishing scale of the so-called “deep well credit” program and provides insight into how much companies that drill and frack for natural gas in northeast B.C. continue to be bankrolled by the provincial government.

Established in 2003, the deep well credit program was intended to underwrite some of the costs that fossil fuel companies incurred for drilling deep and later horizontal wells. Back then, such wells were far less common than today and companies that drilled them gained credits for doing so. The credits were then used to lower the royalty payments companies paid to the Province once the gas flowed. Companies only pay royalties at the end of the exploitation and production process.

In the 17 ensuing years, however, such wells have become standard industry practice, meaning that the credit program is effectively an embedded subsidy.

The new information that the government was compelled to release shows that in fiscal year 2018, a total of 26 fossil fuel companies earned a combined $703 million in credits. The biggest credit recipient at more than $143 million was Cutbank Dawson Gas Resources Ltd., led by Encana, a company that made hefty political donations to the provincial Liberals ($1.2 million) and NDP ($113,000) between 2005 and 2017.

When the credits received by the next four largest recipients are added to those of the Cutbank group, they total $464 million, which means that two in every three credits that year went to just five companies.

Included in that list is Petronas Energy Canada Ltd., the Malaysian-owned company that is one of the principle partners in the approved Canada LNG project, which when built will benefit from an array of subsidies including corporate tax breaks, discounted electricity prices and deferred provincial sales taxes on construction costs. If you see a pattern here, you are not alone.

Companies only get to exploit natural gas resources after paying for “subsurface” rights, which are obtained through one-time auctions by the province known as land sales, even though it is not the land itself that is sold but what lies beneath it.

Only after such sales, can companies drill and frack for natural gas. And only after that, do they pay royalties to the province on the gas produced, which recognizes that the resources are publicly owned.

Unlike Norway, which invests its royalty proceeds for the future, B.C.’s royalties go into general revenue. But the royalties flowing into the provincial treasury are rapidly shrinking. In 2018/2019, the total value of all natural gas royalties was $102 million compared to a decade earlier when it reached $1.3 billion.

Making matters worse, the amount of gas produced in B.C. has risen more than 70 per cent over the same time period, meaning the public received far less money as far more gas was produced.....

B.C. grants $1.2 billion in deep well subsidies to fracking companies in two years: new report

Fossil fuel companies drilling for gas in B.C. are benefitting from massive provincial subsidies that allow them to reduce the amount of royalties paid to the province, research by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has found.

Companies drilling and fracking for natural gas in northeast B.C. were bankrolled by the province to the tune of $703 million last year, a 45 per cent increase over the previous year when companies were handed more than $485 million in credits.

As deep well credits are used to reduce the amount of royalties companies pay to the province when the production process has ended, that means B.C. is increasingly out of pocket even though the amount of gas produced in B.C. has risen more than 70 per cent over the last decade.

The total in the deep well credit account now amounts to $2.2 billion.....

Here is my new provincial party. I am a member.

“Not only is it near-criminal that the government ignores substantiated, peer-reviewed science explicitly identifying fossil fuels as the primary culprit for this event, it is also stealing revenue from the pockets of BC families to feed billionaires hell-bent on accelerating climate change. Last year, BC’s total liquefied gas royalties were $102 million while the government sank almost eight times that amount into subsidies. Worse, output has risen by 70%. BC is getting far less than it is paying out, even while production increases.”

The Narwhal article revealed that for over two years, the British Columbia Government has vigorously defied disclosure requirements to release damaging information related to hundreds of millions in unreported fossil fuel subsidies. After multiple appeals to the Office of Freedom of Information and Privacy by third parties, the public finally has details on just how extensive those secretive dole-outs are.

BC Ecosocialists: “Via so-called ‘deep well credits’, the BC NDP/Green government is largely bankrolling some of the largest and most profitable fracking companies to ensure the province loses money on royalties for years. All this for a process that by most scientific and ecological measures should be banned. The BC Ecosocialists oppose fracking, along with all forms of future fossil fuel extraction.”

https://www.bcecosocialist.ca/newsreleases

"...We've been waiting too long for someone else to do it...So we've realized that if someone needs to do it, it'll have to be us, as frightened as we are about sticking our necks out and taking on the political establishment. Someone has to do this, if people are still going to believe in representative democracy and the possibility of a good future for humanity. And we know there's no time to lose. It's an emergency..."

https://www.bcecosocialist.ca/faq

Think global act local stay grassroots.