Coleman exonerated

Posted September 30, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Scandal

The conflict of interest commissioner clears Rich Coleman.

The NDP will try to claim that the commissioner was somehow partisan in this decision, but it will not stick and this issue will be politically dead with respect to the May 2009 election.

The residual “known unknowns” for the BC Liberals revolve around the special prosecutor investigation of John Les and the ALR rezoning, and any resolution concerning the legislature raids approximately five years ago (which is going on at a snail’s pace).

Another uncontrollable variable will be the state of the economy and the commodity markets (of which BC is vulnerable to economically) but it will be impossible to predict until closer to the election date.

I highly suspect that if the election dates were not fixed there would have been an election called by now. As a humourous note, it would have been amusing if Premier Gordon Campbell said to the Union of the BC Municipalities (UBCM) that “We have lost the confidence of the BC Legislature. I will be going to the Lieutenant Governor and dissolving the legislature”, which is roughly equivalent to what the Prime Minister said before pulled the plug on parliament.

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Saving those Okanagan seats

Posted September 26, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Transportation

Removing the tolls on the Coquihalla Highway is a brilliant political decision, and indeed, a good policy decision - one that should have been made years ago. This decision will have an impact on the Kamloops and Kelowna-area electoral districts.

The Coquihalla Highway (and the Okanagan Connector linking to Kelowna) is a major feat of engineering. It reduces the time of a trip from the Lower Mainland by two hours, opposed to using Highway 3. Anybody driving this road will know it is engineered well (although the maintenance side of the highway has to see some improvement, especially in winter conditions).

This move will reduce the provincial government’s revenues approximately $57 million in yearly revenues, and this is offset by a reduction of $2.3 million in toll administration costs.

The NDP will have no defense to this other than by repeating the years-old news of the government attempting to privatize the highway, but this argument will have no sticking power whatsoever. It will also mitigate arguments that the Sea-to-Sky Highway should have been tolled after its improvements are completed.

The future Port Mann Bridge and the Golden Ears Bridge are currently the only structures that are slated to have tolls enacted on them - The Golden Ears Bridge will be $2.85 per direction assuming you have your car equipped with a transponder (similar to the device used in California toll roads).

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Municipalities offered an olive branch

Posted September 24, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: News

The government is (correctly, from a political standpoint) using this Federal election cycle to mitigate future negative news.

First is a press release (and details) concerning the partial mitigation of the senior executive pay issue. This forces Carole James and the NDP to use a more abstract and less politically catchy argument of “The pay scale still has a maximum of forty-something percent”. The deputy to the Premier, Jessica Macdonald, is also spending a few after-tax dollars of opportunity cost to prevent her from being a target of the NDP.

Today, there is the offering of an olive branch at the Union of the BC Municipalities (UBCM) meeting, where the province is offering to refund municipalities’ carbon taxes in exchange for the municipalities becoming carbon neutral by 2012.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out during the municipal election cycle - my quick take is that the province imposed a cost on the municipalities (via carbon taxes, of which the “revenue neutral” portion will not touch the local governments), and now the province is saying they will effectively take away the costs (in the form of a grant) as long as they are carbon neutral.

The only way I can see municipalities achieving the objective of carbon neutrality is a combination between operation and capital expenditures, but the bulk of the operational side will presumably by via purchasing carbon credits. Obviously, the municipalities have to model such costs - if it costs more to be carbon neutral than what they’re paying in carbon taxes, then there’s no point in doing this. If it costs less, then they will do it.

There was little detail in the press release and also no numbers associated with the cost to the province or the municipalities, so this one will play out further.

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Political lingo shift

Posted September 21, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: News

I noticed when Colin Hansen was on CKNW today, that he referred to the carbon tax (which I do not recall he ever mentioned by name) as the “pollution tax” or “a tax on pollution”.

This of course, is lifting Stephane Dion’s synonym for the carbon tax.

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By-Elections not to be called until after October 14

Posted September 21, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: By-Election

Premier Gordon Campbell confirmed on CKNW that the by-elections will not be called during the federal election. From CKNW:

Premier Gordon Campbell says he won’t call two by-elections in two BC ridings until after the federal election on October 14th.

Campbell says he would have called the by-elections for Vancouver-Fairview and Vancouver-Burrard but decided to hold off once the federal election was announced.

I will guess he will hold off until after the municipal cycle, so probably a December 2008 vote. Just imagine if you’re a resident in one of those ridings - you will be experiencing four elections in less than 7 months.

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Quarterly budget report yields surpluses

Posted September 17, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis

The quarterly report was released by the BC Government.

The bulk of the unprojected $970 million extra surplus came primarily from natural resource royalties and bonus bids (for lands) - to the tune of just over a billion dollars. Corporate income taxes were also higher than expected - another $383 million in the government’s bank accounts.

On the downside, personal income tax revenues were down, in addition to the property transfer tax and the provincial sales tax. Forestry has been absolutely slaughtered, down 28% from the already low projections. The carbon tax is only active in the second quarter, so we will have to wait a few more months to receive data on that - although note that fuel taxes were only 2% off budgeted expectations - whoever modeled that projection should be commended.

One buzz-phrase that I have heard introduced for the first time was debt from government operations, which means the debt that has not been allocated to specific government ministries (e.g. Education, Health, Highways, etc.). You are hearing this because the overall debt of the government has been increasing - currently forecast to be 36.7 billion dollars. The debt at the end of the government’s first term in office (March 2005) was 35.8 billion, although the amount from operations has declined from 14.5 billion to 6.3 billion.

The 8.2 billion dollar difference is due to allocation, rather than a reduction in provincial debt. Approximately 2 billion extra debt is allocated to education, 1.7 billion to health, 2.4 billion to highways/transit, and 1.3 billion to BC Hydro. Essentially the current government has done nothing to the current level of debt - it has remained at around the 35 billion dollar mark (plus or minus 10%) since the NDP lost control in 2001.

I am wondering why the Minister of Finance was told to spin the debt figure in this way - simply saying that the debt has remained stable is a more truthful, although a less politically sexy statement. I’m expecting fiscal management to be part of the BC Liberal platform, especially in an economic climate that is going to be less favourable to the province.

As a final statement, whoever produces these reports for the finance ministry should be commended - they are very easy to read documents.

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No Fall Session

Posted September 12, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis

The government announced yesterday that there would be no fall sitting of the legislature (normally scheduled from October 6 to November 27). The main reason given by the government was that there was no legislation that needed to be advanced in the fall - essentially there were no laws that were urgent matters to be taken forward.

The reaction from the opposition NDP was relatively predictable - that the government is “hiding” from the actions it has taken and that the government is avoid debate on issues facing British Columbians.

The media reaction has also been relatively adverse to the government - more so than two years ago.

The analysis of this decision is as follows.

One is that the NDP made a lot of noise in the 2006 calendar year with regards to the fall session (which was also canceled). I am guessing they did this to discourage the government from doing exactly what they did this time around.

Constitutionally speaking (section 5 of the Charter), the legislature has to be open once a year at a minimum.

Whether the legislature is open or not is rather irrelevant to whether law gets passed - in a majority government situation, the government can open up the legislature at any time, force the passage of law and enact the legislation. An example of bringing legislation through was on May 29, when multiple bills were passed and closed on a single day.

The only privilege the opposition has is being able to delay certain legislative actions for three days - they exercised this right in November 2006 when the government brought in a Special Committee to Appoint a Representative for Children and Youth by refusing leave and filibustering for the next three days.

The BC Liberal government has been facing a lot of heat with respect to issues of “arrogance” - this is seemingly what one of the campaign planks the NDP will be running on. The question they had to make was whether the “heat” the government would take by not having a fall session would be worth the incremental damage they would take by having the opposition formally question them on controversial decisions made over the summer.

I think the government made the correct decision politically - they will be airing out their laundry over the next couple months, and by the time that early next year comes along, it will presumably be all feel-good from there on in.

This would be paralleling roughly what was happening four years ago - the government was trailing the NDP in the polls, but were able to pull it together by the May 2005 election date. Is this their strategy for this time around? If so, will it work?

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Mustel confirms no provincial polling

Posted September 9, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Polls

Mustel confirmed that there will be no provincial polling until well after the Federal elections are over - which means to confirm the last Angus Reid poll (showing the NDP up 41% to the BC Liberals’ 38%) we will have to wait in suspense for one, and possibly two election campaigns.

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