Convention Centre springs a leak

Posted April 28, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Liberals, Economy

The biggest costing failure of the government of the past four years has been the downtown Vancouver convention centre – the original budget was $495 million (mysteriously like the projected 2009 BC Budget deficit!), while the actuals have come around $880 million.

The government was probably breathing a sigh of relief when it finally opened to the public in early April – even though the project was massively over budget, it was a done deal, and would be out of the public spotlight during election time.

Unfortunately during a convention of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, a water main leak sprung and the centre had to be evacuated. According to the Province:

Convention-centre general manager Ken Cretney said the damage was limited to water damage and he doesn’t expect costs to be excessive.

“There’s no injuries or permanent damage, just a lot of cleanup,” he said.

Cretney said the leak was not due to shoddy construction. “It can happen anywhere, anytime, new or old buildings.”

Whether “it can happen anywhere, anytime, new or old” could be true. Or it could be not. In terms of public optics, however, the easy inference to make was that there might be something wrong with the construction.

I truly hope this was a one-off incident, but the timing of this has just been very unfortunate for the BC Liberal government, since it was anticipated that the budgetary failure of the Vancouver convention centre would have been a footnote of this campaign.

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In defence of John van Dongen and a discussion on speeding

Posted April 27, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, BC Liberals

The NDP are making full use of the resignation of John van Dongen’s position as Solicitor General and Minister of Public Safety today; they will have all of Monday to make as much as they can about this before it will die Tuesday and beyond. If the NDP try pushing it for longer, they will not stand to politically profit as much.

The reaction from the third parties, however, have been less than coherent. In particular, there was a special interest group against street racing that chided van Dongen for his behaviour, especially when they quoted van Dongen as saying (paraphrasing from memory) “he would do everything to stop speeders on our streets”.

The fact is that van Dongen wasn’t caught street racing; he was caught speeding.

Discussion on Speeding

It is a fact that a great deal of automobile injuries are caused by fast-moving vehicles. However, there is a huge difference between going 141km/h on the stretch of Highway 1 from Langley to Hope, and going down Knight Street at 91km/h; or down Front Street in New Westminster at 71km/h; the three are equivalently “dangerous driving” under the law (Section 148 of the Motor Vehicle Act), but one is inherently more safe than the others.

A perfect law would define “dangerous driving” as such, and let the police target such drivers. Unfortunately, the measurement of “dangerous” is not easy to nail down in court, and because of this ambiguity, politicians decided to target speed as a proxy for dangerous driving. Speed is measurable, and such measurement can be easily submitted as evidence in court, once it is proven that the speed limit was violated.

Ever since the history of driving speeding has always contributed to injuries; however, bad driver decisions (including high speed) are what inevitably cause accidents, not solely speed itself.

One of the first things the BC Liberal government did in 2001 was removing photo radar; this was a political decision, but it also was smart public policy in that it effectively amounted on a tax on unobservant (and usually non-local) drivers where the photo radar van was usually parked, and it was very difficult to manipulate statistics to “prove” that photo radar saved lives (which it did not). The government is to be commended on sticking to its guns with this decision, and not falling into the trap of other jurisdictions of letting photo radar becoming a source of revenue.

Advocates of strict speed measures state that removal of speed limits would cause more fatalities; contrary to this belief, the state of Montana in the past removed all speed limits on highways between 1995 to 1999, and discovered that fatalities did not increase during this time period. It turns out that, not surprisingly, people drive at speeds they feel comfortable with.

Only when there is an artificial enforcement of speed that you have two tiers of traffic appearing – people that want to drive at the ‘natural speed’ that is safe for the road, and another tier of people that want to drive at the ‘legal’ speed. Having all drivers on the road that drive at 10km/h over the speed limit is much safer than having half the drivers driving at the legal speed limit, and the other half driving 10km/h over.

Speeding also consumes an amount of police resources which could be better allocated to other divisions of traffic safety (e.g. truck maintenance inspections). Speeding also consumes a huge amount of court resources.

Finally, the government’s own report (Ministry of Transportation) from Spring 2003, Review and Analysis of Posted Speed Limits and Speed Limit Setting Practices in British Columbia, concluded that the speed limits in a lot of areas of BC (mainly rural) should be increased. The government took no further action with respect to this report.

If anything is to be learned from this incident, it is that after the election, the province should take a hard look at Section 146 of the Motor Vehicle Act, and consider delegating this down to municipalities to enforce within municipal boundaries, and let the municipalities decide whether they want to consume their police resources enforcing speeding.

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John van Dongen hands in his resignation papers

Posted April 27, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, BC Liberals

John van Dongen resigned as Solicitor General over the speeding ticket flap. I had thought that he would lose his cabinet position after the election, but apparently the BC Liberal party thought that preemptively doing it would mitigate any future election attacks on behalf of the NDP.

During the television debate one can imagine Carole James talking about how the BC Liberals can talk about crime but can’t even keep their solicitor generals in office. This resignation will not change things, but the party can now claim that they were accountable for their actions.

Resignation was a smart political decision which will save the party a bit of brief and make their position a bit more defensible for the duration of the campaign.

Attached is his resignation:

Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General and BC Liberal candidate for Abbotsford South John van Dongen released the following statement today:

“Last Friday, I released a statement confirming my request to have the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia and the Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles removed from my ministerial responsibly after I had been informed by the OSMV that they were implementing a prohibition on my driver’s license due to recent tickets I had received for speeding.

Over the weekend I have reflected on my actions. I have heard from those who have rightly criticized my driving record that has undermined their confidence in my role as Solicitor General. I do understand how my conduct in this respect has reflected poorly on the credibility of the office. In no way do I wish to allow my actions to distract from the tremendous work and ongoing contributions of the people who are working so hard to build confidence in our law enforcement system and in our efforts to improve public safety, particularly surrounding gangs and gun violence.

I have worked hard as Solicitor General. Over the course of the last year, I have met with people who have lost family members because of speeding and other illegal driving behaviour. I have let them down and I have let down my constituents who depend on me to set the highest public example. For that I am deeply sorry.

I hold the office of the Solicitor General in the highest regard. It carries with it a significant responsibility to reflect the policies necessary to make our communities safe.

This is why I informed the Premier this morning that I am resigning immediately from my duties as Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General.

I will continue to run in the upcoming election as a candidate for the BC Liberal Party in the riding of Abbotsford South and I will work hard to earn the votes and confidence of my constituents.

As I stated last week, I fully recognize the importance of public safety and compliance with the laws of our roads. I apologize to those I have let down with these latest actions, and it remains my hope that the public will continue to have confidence in the office of the Solicitor General.”

Previous analysis – Scandal hits the BC Liberals – John van Dongen.

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Taking the leap of faith

Posted April 19, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Liberals

When running a tightly scripted campaign like the BC Liberals are, you try not to take unnecessary risks. Just imagine what the handlers thought when they saw premier Gordon Campbell doing this:

This photo is courtesy of Westside Photography, which was referred from Langley Politics.

In the raw calculus of politics, this leap probably did more for his voter support than any speech could – it makes him human, something most politicians never let the public see.

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BC Liberal 2009 Platform Analysis

Posted April 16, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Liberals

The BC Liberal platform is a lot more colourful than the NDP – it uses a lot more pictures, and looks professionally designed from a layout perspective. Although content is much more relevant than presentation, the BC Liberal platform looks graphically better than the NDP and Green platforms. It comes with a size penalty – it’s nearly a 4 megabyte document, while the NDP platform was 1.5 megabytes.

When looking at it closely, the significant “tricks” that give the document the sense of professionalism include the header and footer “swish” and the Mac-like font. Also included are the sidebars, tables, quotations, bullet points, and bolding of election promises – which are well done, so whoever did the design with this document should be commended. The only production errors of note are that the hyperlinks that go beyond a single line are not correctly linked when you click on them, and missing data on the chart on page 21 (the dashed lines are missing for most of the years).

Both the NDP and BC Liberal platforms were about 55 pages, and I was curious on the word content. The BC Liberal platform was about 16,000 words and the NDP platform was about 15,000 words.

The following will be a commentary while going through the document (please note page references are document page references and not PDF page numbers):

Page 1: The quote of “This is the most critical election in living memory. Now more than ever, we need stability.” is the theme of the document – it is not grandiose, and is reminiscent of the 2008 federal Conservative campaign platform, which said, “A Harper Conservative Government will continue to guide the country on a steady course through global instability.” Saying “this is the most critical election” is political hyperbole, however, and I would claim the 1995 Quebec Referendum was the most critical election in living memory, if we are talking about Canada.

Page 3: Talks about the Open Platform, something I suspected would get mentioned, but otherwise is not mentioned in the rest of the document.

Page 4: More copy-editing from the 2008 federal Conservative platform – BC Liberals:

Our economy is precious, but fragile. This is not the time for risky experiments or on-the-job training. Now more than ever, we need a steady hand at the top. We need to re-elect Premier Campbell’s BC Liberal Government.

vs. federal Conservatives:

This election, Canadians face a clear choice. It’s a choice between the Harper Conservatives’ credible and affordable plan, and risky tax-and-spend experiments that will drive up the cost of everything from groceries to gas and throw Canada back into a deficit. It’s a choice between strength and weakness. And it’s a choice between moving forward and going back.

Interesting to see what the Conservatives can come up with in the next federal election (likely later this year) when the federal Liberals throw the quote about the deficit to the media again.

That said, the theme of confidence in order to maintain a good economy is important – the entire financial system operates under the premise of confidence and in an abstract sense this is very correct. It reminds me of something that Gordon Campbell’s brother, Michael Campbell has said in the past.

Page 9: The BC Liberals still stick to the $495 million deficit figure for 2009-2010, which almost everybody knows is not going to be the case. Also, the “balanced budget law” is mentioned, despite having eroded the credibility of the previously enacted balanced budget legislation (i.e. changing the balanced budget law to run deficits is somewhat contradictory to the original intention of the legislation).

Page 10-11: Outlines a very powerful fact on income taxation in British Columbia, which have significantly lowered in the past 8 years. I have written about this before.

Page 24: Interesting promise to give smaller colleges and post-secondary institutions the option of joining the U-Pass program. I would guess this would be a winner amongst students of such institutions, especially in the Lower Mainland where there is a significant public transit network. The U-Pass is $23.75/month at UBC and $26.09/month at SFU. Electorally speaking, would it get students to vote BC Liberal, compared to the NDP’s promises of “tuition freezing”? The BC Liberal platform has “tuition increases at the rate of inflation” which is still fairly small.

Page 26: Has a promise to “seek changes to allow the first $20,000 of seniors’ pension income to be completely tax exempt, with no penalties or clawbacks on any income earned above that amount.” – While this would be a complete winner amongst seniors, the only problem is that this would require the federal government to enact such legislation (especially on the taxes on the federal side). The other thing is that clawbacks are a major tax on income below $20,000, so the promise to not include clawbacks on income above $20,000 is completely irrelevant.

Page 29: The NDP platform called for hiring 168 new police officers, while the BC Liberal platform says that they’ve hired 168 police officers. What’s with the 168 number?

Also, it looks like the BC Liberals have adopted Mike Farnworth’s idea of wearing body armour to be illegal. I wrote about this earlier – if shooting people on the streets is illegal, will criminals adhere to an anti-body armour law?

The crime part of the platform is generally weak and is not going to help Wally Oppal’s chances.

Page 30: Proposes legislation that will move people with arrest warrants from other provinces to those provinces. An excellent idea.

Page 39: An interesting policy idea where if the federal government can get on board (this is always a big “if”), the provincial government will contribute the amount that would otherwise have went into income assistance to the level of EI payments for one year after EI expires for workers. As unemployment continues to rise in the province, a lot of people would find this an attractive cushion.

Page 48: Announces a new green energy advisory task force. This sounds similar to the Premier’s Technology Council, except dealing with “green energy”.

General thoughts:

A lot of the document discusses the government’s track record, which is logical considering that they have been in power for nearly 8 years. A lot of what was announced in Budget 2009 and previous government press releases feature in the document.

The political focus on this document is more of gradualism rather than large spending announcements. This “uninspiring” form of politics is very likely to sell very well to a public that is trying to ratchet down their own risk, especially as unemployment increases. It contains provisions to satisfy the base (especially the previous campaign promise with respect to small business taxes), while reaches out sufficiently to other non-base groups, such as the environmental lobby. Ultimately, the government’s actions have served as more of a platform than the platform document itself, and this is the message the public would receive if they actually read the document (most will not).

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BC Liberal Platform released

Posted April 15, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Liberals

The BC Liberals have released their campaign platform today; it is located here (BC Liberal site, local copy).

I will post some analysis on it later tonight once I have read it.

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BC Liberal election platform

Posted April 14, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Liberals

The BC Liberals will be releasing their election platform at 9am on Wednesday.

It will be interesting to see the influence of their “open platform” initiative, or whether this will get swept under the rug like the Conversation on Health.

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Corrected – BC Liberal and NDP 2007 vs. 2008 financing

Posted April 11, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: BC Greens, BC Liberals

Because of previous issues of the legibility of the numbers viewing financing reports from Elections BC, there were difficulties transcribing numbers which lead to balancing errors.

Kenn Faris at Elections BC has been of great assistance in getting a copy of some more legible numbers for the 2008 financing reports of the BC Liberal and NDP. The changes were not significant from the original post I made on the issue (including the subsequent analysis) but note that the 2008 numbers are 100% accurate:

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