Thread: Gordo is gone!
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Old Posted Nov 4, 2010, 8:10 PM
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SFUVancouver SFUVancouver is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Hamilton
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I'm in the camp that never warmed up to Gordon Campbell and yet still supported a fair number of the administration's initiatives, especially on the infrastructure front. However, had the Canada Line, Convention Centre, carbon tax, school seismic upgrades, post-secondary expansion and captial projects, SkyTrain and bus fleet expansion, sales tax cuts, HST, pro-business investment climate, the Olympics, support for InSite, and (eventual, if limited) support for homelessness initiatives and housing, all been initiated by a different government I would have been just as supportive.

I do feel that there were many poor decisions made. Off the top of my head:
The way the HST was implemented.
Throwing support for the the arts sector into chaos.
Building Gateway highway infrastructure with a willful disregard for the effects this will have on land use decisions south of the Fraser and not coupling it with transit.
Reorganising Translink and taking away meaningful local control from the region.
Refusing to direct any portion of the carbon tax to public transportation.
Failing to provide adequate funding for special needs education at a time when demand is soaring.
Failure to build low income and supportive housing throughout the region and in quantity.
The $6 training wage and a frozen $8 minimum wage.
Cutting gaming grants to non-profits and the cultural sector while greatly expanding gambling in the province.
Welfare housing supplements that were frozen for most of the decade and are still inadequate to secure housing outside of the Downtown East Side.
Systemic problems in the Ministry of Children and Families that has put foster children at risk and associated failure by the BC Coroner's service to investigate the deaths of hundreds of children while they were wards of the Ministry.
The Special Projects Streamlining Act that was used to overrule the regulatory authority of the Squamish regional district with respect to the Aslu Run of River hydro project.

I appreciate that no government can please everyone and that fundamental ideological differences account for a lot of this, but I feel that many of the controversies I mentioned stem from an administrative approach that was dismissive of local authority and expertise, and overly secretive. Too many projects, including many I supported, seemed to simply be announced prior to any plan for implementation and then when valid critiscim about the consequences were identified and raised these were routinely ignored or met with demonstrably false assertions.

I think this decade was a prosperous one for much of the province and the Campbell administration can rightfully claim credit for some of this success, but the largess was certainly not tangible to many people and I think that the opportunity costs of the government's spending decisions may prove to be substantial as we move into this next decade. I do not think we are well prepared as a province for increasing energy costs for fossil fuels. I do not think that our public transit system is prepared to meet the mobility and lifestyle needs of very much more of our population than are currently using the system. I do not feel that a child born today in BC will have the same opportunities as my generation (Gen Y) to pursue a career of their choice and live comfortably on their income in this province, nor do I feel that my generation has the same opportunities to do these things as my parent's generation.

There are clearly limits to the powers of government and its ability to play a meaningful, positive role in our lives, but I think that there are countless things that benefit people and businesses immensely that can only be achieved when an adequate portion the limited resources of a society are pooled together via taxation. We have seen, clearly, that there is such a thing as poor administration, crippling economic policy, and too much spending by governments. We only have to look to Greece, among many others, to see the huge peril of going too far down the path of fiscal mismanagement, soaring deficits, and unfunded entitlements. Closer to home we only have to look to the United States to give us a sobering glimpse of the peril of going too far down the path of deregulation, monetarist policy making, and reliance on false economies. However I also think that we can see the cost of a policy of too little government spending by looking to our own province and the ranks of impoverished mentally ill people who are costing us more money living on the street, shelters, or squalid SROs than it would take to house and care for them in supportive housing.

Clearly there is a balance that needs to be achieved and I feel that this balance has been achieved unevenly in this province.
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Last edited by SFUVancouver; Nov 4, 2010 at 8:36 PM.
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