Further to my first post about the Battle in BC over the HST. Back when the petition was approved, the Chief Electoral Officer in the province was Harry Neufeld, he personally okayed the wording and approved the petition to go forward. That may have been a career-ending decision for him, because, on the final day of the spring session, Attorney General Mike de Jong stood in the house to announce, “I wanted to take the opportunity to advise members here before we depart that the clerk of committees, Mr. Craig James, has agreed on a temporary basis to serve as acting chief electoral officer for B.C.”
Bam! Just like that, with no discussion an appointment was unilaterally made that normally is given the courtesy of a vote by an all party committee. In the middle of a very sensitive and ground-breaking exercise in democracy, the sensible thing to do would have been to extend Mr. Neufeld’s mandate to see this thing through. Or, at least, to elevate the Deputy Chief Electoral Officer, Linda Johnson, who had been at that job for 19 years. Of course, timing is everything, in this day and age of Friday Afternoon Document Dumps and Sneaky Saturday Announcements. It’s become the modus operandi of these criminals to hit us fast and hard, and then depend on their good friends in the PostMedia (so ironic, that moniker!) to ignore the news.
Mr. James, Acting CEO, made a further partisan ruling when he made the announcement that the petition had reached its goal, he refused to make a public statement but notified VanderZalm by letter instead. Worse, he then deferred the matter to the courts instead of forwarding it to the Select Standing Committee as he was supposed to do.
Bill Tieleman,
snip “This week a
coalition of big business groups who have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the B.C. Liberal Party will be in B.C. Supreme Court in a legal action that could invalidate the
Fight HST citizens initiative petition signed by 705,643 voters.”
As if things weren’t bad enough at Elections BC, late Thursday the Globe and Mail published this story. ”The second most senior official at Elections BC is out of a job, four months after the independent body ruled against mailing pro-harmonized sales tax brochures put out by the B.C. Liberals.
However, Linda Johnson, who has lost her job after 19 years of service as deputy chief electoral officer, said on Thursday the move has nothing to do with the decision to halt the mailing.
Ms. Johnson said she met with acting chief electoral officer Craig James on Tuesday and was shocked to learn that her 28 years at Elections BC would come to an end.
“I was advised by Mr. James that he was reorganizing Elections BC and that my position as deputy chief electoral officer had been eliminated effective immediately,” Ms. Johnson said from her home in Victoria. She has had the job since 1991. ” snip
Read the entire article here…
So, the temporary Acting CEO of a supposedly non partisan Elections BC, is now re-organising the entire organisation. Starting with firing the most senior dedicated bureaucrat after 28 years of loyal service. WTF? Well, maybe it’s got to do with the fact that Elections BC was actually doing its job, within its non partisan arm’s length mandate. So Campbell had to, well, you know, break it…
You may ask yourself, why did she have to go? Well, revenge of course! She had signed the letter forbidding the Finance Minister from distributing his “information pamphlet” during the initiative campaign, because he had failed to register as an opponent to said Initiative! The Campbell Fiberals were so arrogant they didn’t notice their Teflon Coating had serious flaws (the emporer’s new clothes?). Andrew MacLeod at
the tyee has the whole story. Probably one of the best online newssites in BC.
After combing the MSM print media here in Victoria, Vancouver and BC in general yesterday and today, I am disgusted to report that no one there seems to think its newsworthy! So, I hope that those of you who do care, take a mental note and add it to the list of reasons to vote for change. The huge inroads on democracy and the war against the working class are not isolated to BC., not even to Canada, look further afield to Western “Democracy” in general. The UK. France, US, Greece. Things are not going to get better for us until we insist on a new system of voting, insist on human rights and justice for all, excluding the corporation.
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I wish I could comment but I’m just seething reading this. It’s no wonder you didn’t read anything about it in Vancouver papers; they’re both Canwest. What do you expect?
It’s wonderful to see your work on behalf of this abused province.
I just want to say that I think the pundits have got it wrong (deliberately or not) when they say that British Columbians are angry about the Harmonised Sales Tax. Only about the tax, as if we had all been blissfully happy except for the HST. Not remotely true.
In my view, the level of passionate anger against the Campbell government began almost immediately (2001) and Paul Nettleton, the BC Liberal MLA for Prince George-Omineca, was the first to speak forcefully against the Campbell Agenda … remember? the issue was BC Rail … then BC Hydro. And it just kept on … and on … punctuated by union-busting and cut-backs to social services while giving tax breaks to Campbell’s cronies in big business.
People are well and truly angry … and even the news media which virtually elected and re-elected Campbell, are swinging around to challenge the Campbell agenda.
With the BC Rail Political Corruption Trial getting under way again on Monday Sept. 13 in Vancouver, we may actually begin to hear evidence which will explain how BC Rail slid from public ownership into private pockets. Once we know that, we’ll know how BC lost again and again and again … until Campbell is stopped.
Thanks for helping to make that happen.
Thank you BC Mary. I will be watching to see what passes for justice in this case. We won’t let these important issues be buried by the bling they call news at PostMedia. We will cross post with all of the talented people in Canada and beyond and we will be the solution.
Thanks Kim for plugging the Tyee in this post!
By the way, much as I appreciate the Globe and Mail’s coverage, the first story on Linda Johnson being restructured out of a job at Elections BC was this one on the Tyee’s news blog: http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/BC-Politics/2010/09/09/DeputyGone/
You just keep pumping out those hard hitting news stories Andrew and we’ll keep reading them and cross-posting them for all to enjoy. Cheers!