Legislation in the Legislature is quiet

Posted February 26, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Legislature

The politicians might be sparring at each other during question period and estimates, but it has been over a week since the Budget was announced and the Budget Bill (Bill 2) was introduced in the house.

What is missing is that there have been no other pieces of legislation introduced. Right now most of the time in the house has been spent debating estimates.

I’m guessing this is an election tactic – better to release “good news” legislation later than earlier. The government is likely to put a couple non-budget related bills into the house in March, and then have them debated and passed by the end of March. Apparently one of the major pieces of legislation to be proposed in the house will be the proposed Recognition and Reconciliation Act, dealing with the relationship with First Nations across BC.

Four years ago, most of the legislation dealt with implementing the budget and perhaps the most controversial bill was the proposed Civil Forfeiture Act. This was never debated before the election, and died on the order paper. The bill was re-introduced to the legislature after the election in a modified form and eventually passed.

Whether there is sufficient time to debate such legislation is rather irrelevant since the government can invoke closure, as they did in the previous session. Each MLA could give 20 minutes of debate in second reading of a bill. Since there are 34 NDP MLAs, this can be a maximum of 11 hours of debate per bill, plus committee time.

After today, there will be 4 weeks of time in the legislature, divided by a break week in the middle of March. Each week has effectively 17 hours (this is total time minus private members’ time on Monday, and statements/question period) of time to debate bills, and such.

The election has already started, but the last day in the Legislature will be April 2, 2009.

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Pundit’s guide to the BC Election?

Posted February 26, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links

Alice Funke runs the Pundit’s Guide to Canadian Federal Elections, a very good (and truly non-partisan) resource for those wanting to analyze all sorts of information relating to federal politics. She’s got good database skills which enable to her to seamlessly project political data (voting results, campaign expenses, etc.) onto the website for all to see.

She gave me a plug, so I will give one back to her here – her project is excellent.

I will say that my approach has been somewhat less systematic than hers has been – probably because my database-to-web skills aren’t where I would like them to be. Also, when it comes to analyzing candidate expense returns, I would love to do it historically, but it is a painfully manual process to extract them from Elections BC and read them – they also compress their PDF files to a resolution that makes your eyes feel like they’ve been poked with an cattle prod if you read the documents for too long.

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UBC ESM cancelled for the BC Election

Posted February 25, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: News

This is really too bad, but on February 24th, the UBC Election Stock Market for the BC 2009 election was canceled.

We regret to inform all interested participants that the Election Stock Market for the 2009 British Columbia Provincial Election and Electoral Reform Referendum on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, has been cancelled. Significant demands on Professor Antweiler’s time due to his extensive set of teaching duties during March and April, as well as co-organizing a major academic conferencee in May, make it impossible for him to operate, monitor, and administer the UBC-ESM. [posted 2009-02-24]

The ESM was a very good indication of participants’ views on the outcome of the election. It’s too bad that Werner Antweiler could not outsource the operation or otherwise streamline the time it took the operate the market.

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BC Conservative Party resolves internal squabble

Posted February 25, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Other Parties

Readers of this site may remember the cat fight that was going amongst previous (or people that claimed to be) directors vs. the existing directors of the BC Conservative party. This was also somewhat covered by a September 7, 2008 article on the Globe and Mail.

According to a February 16, 2009 press release by the BC Conservatives:

VANCOUVER: BC Conservative Leader Wilf Hanni announced today that the Supreme Court of British Columbia has made a determination on the legal issues that have been hanging over the Party for several months. Madame Justice Brown ruled yesterday that a group claiming to be the Board of Directors after a meeting in August of 2008 are not the Directors. This restores the previously elected Directors to control of the Party.

I could not find a copy of the ruling, but this apparently settles the issue with the legal jurisdiction of the party.

Barring a “Gordon Wilson” moment, the BC Conservative Party is not in a position to win any seats in this election, but they do have a chance of playing a “spoiler” role to the BC Liberals in some close ridings in the province. Currently the party has five candidates that have declared their interest in running.

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Kash Heed speculation

Posted February 25, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Liberals

West Vancouver’s top cop, Kash Heed, resigned unexpectedly yesterday, citing “personal reasons”. Some information on him can be found on Wikipedia (as usual, treat the information as “probable” but not authoritative).

An article from the North Shore Outlook on the situation can be found here.

He served for the West Vancouver police for less than two years. Speculation is rampant that he will be running as a candidate for the BC Liberals in the next election.

If so, Vancouver-Fraserview would be a logical spot, and Attorney General Wally Oppal can run in Delta South.

The political marketing is a lot easier with that arrangement – the BC Liberals can advertise Heed as the next Solicitor General (who would be a lot more charismatic than the current John van Dongen), while Oppal can defend his much-recently-attacked record as Attorney General in Delta South (his resident riding). It also mitigates a situation concerning the approach to how the BC Liberals may be able to defeat Vicki Huntington – the NDP will find it more difficult to directly attack Oppal on justice issues.

Of course, this speculation is completely moot if Heed has no interest in running politically this election.

(Thank you for BJ for bringing up this topic; I agree with your line of thinking on this topic).

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By-Election candidate expenses

Posted February 24, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, By-Election

I have taken the time to analyze the campaign financing returns of the by-election candidates. The deadline for them to file was 90 days after the by-election.

Please note the following are rounded to the nearest $100:

Vancouver-Burrard:
NDP MLA Spencer Herbert spent $62,100 (of which $57,500 subject to the limit); the vast majority of the contributions were through the BC NDP and the local riding association.

BC Liberal candidate Arthur Griffiths spent $91,400 (of which $80,600 subject to the limit); $54,200 was received from the BC Liberal Party; $16,200 raised through political contributions, and $25,000 via a loan.

Green candidate Drina Read raised approximately $2,700 and spent $2,700. I also might add she made a massive addition error on the second page of her financing form, where she low-balled her total expenditures by $1,000. Most of her funds raised were from contributions.

Conservative candidate Ian McLeod spent $2,400; all of this was transferred from candidate Wilf Hanni.

Marijuana Party candidate Marc Emery raised and spent $1,400; the majority of it was through contributions (and a generous $500 donation from his wife, Jodie Emery)

Vancouver-Fairview:
NDP MLA Jenn McGinn spent $67,200 ($59,500 subject to the election limit); she received $12,600 from corporations and trade unions, while the remainder was from the BC NDP and the local riding association.

BC Liberal candidate Maureen MacDiarmid spent $92,100 ($68,500 subject to the election limit); she received $5600 ($5300 from herself) through individual donations, and $86,400 from the BC Liberal Party.

Green candidate Jane Sterk spent $7,800 and raised $7,700; approximately $3,800 of the contributions were from “John Sterk” (husband/son?), and the remainder through individual and corporation donations.

Conservative candidate Wilf Hanni spent and raised $6,800; $3,200 of which was self-contributed, and $3,500 was from the BC Conservative Party. $200 was from candidate Ian McLeod.

Marijuana Party candidate Jodie Emery spent and raised $400; all of which were through individual contributions.

Analysis:
The BC Liberal party spent a total of $141,000 on this election, while the NDP spent approximately $90,000 on the by-election. The lack of fundraising during the campaign period was probably to be expected considering the proximity of the by-elections to the general election. The most notable difference in the way the respective campaigns spent money was in the “Research and Polling” category – the BC Liberals spent a lot more money in this category.

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Sean Holman buys a video camera

Posted February 24, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Liberals

It looks like the donations to the Public Eye have resulted in Sean Holman purchasing a video camera to put video clips of BC politicians up on Youtube!

One of the first ones he posted was on Wally Oppal’s future candidacy. Classic quote at the end of the video clip, completely taken out of context:

Who knows what tomorrow’s will uhh, happen tomorrow.

In fairness to him, it’s a real pain being on camera, sounding coherent for 30 seconds is difficult enough, let alone 5 minutes (try it with a webcam if you don’t believe me).

Going back to some serious analysis, the last answer pretty much gives away the fact that Oppal is considering not running again in the upcoming election. I’m sure a large element of this is also poll-driven. Oppal, if he runs in Vancouver-Fraserview, will be facing NDP candidate Gabriel Yiu in the upcoming election. Yiu ran in Burnaby-Willingdon in the previous election, coming in second against MLA John Nuraney by a margin of about 400 votes.

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Krueger grilled during estimates

Posted February 24, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Legislature

Normally supplementary estimates are a rather dry event – they are used to allow detailed scrutiny with respect to government expenditures. After question period, it was time for the Ministry of Community Development – the cabinet minister being Kamloops-North Thompson MLA Kevin Krueger, which was continued from Thursday. Thursday’s proceedings (pages 13835 and beyond) were rather routine.

On Monday, the tone changed. The minister started giving one-line answers such as “Asked and answered.” and “The member should read the record.”. He continued to give such answers until Nelson-Creston MLA Corky Evans gave a very passionate speech, including an accusation that somebody got to the minister and more or less told him to be silent for the rest of the estimates. You can view the video by clicking here, and choose the Monday, February 23, 2009 afternoon video, and fast-forward to about 1 hour and 50 minutes into the video.

After the minister answered (and looking very disgusted) “Repetitive questioning” to Corky Evans’ question, all hell broke loose and somebody in the background (a female voice, presumably from the gallery) said:

“Is that democracy in action? I’m ashamed to be a citizen of BC!”

The Chair at the time, Harry Bloy, called for the Sergeant-at-Arms to remove the person in question, before he was shouted out of the argument. Then he recessed the committee for five minutes, which turned out to be a 15 minute recess.

The rest of the estimates for the ministry went “normally”.

But this was a very interesting insight on the state of the legislature – it is quite dysfunctional.

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