BC branded, and other follies
Dawn Paley of the sparklin weblog has put a succinct article she recently wrote online, outlining the BC Liberals’ agenda and its effects. Although I live in a city and almost never venture into the wild, I found these facts the most telling:
Believe BC, a high budget advertising campaign initiated by the BC Liberals to brand BC, highlights the splendor of natural beauty in British Columbia. Simultaneously, changes to the functioning of BC parks means that BC is now the only jurisdiction in North America, save Mississippi, without interpretive services in parks. All services have been removed from 45 provincial parks and those that continue to have services now have those services contracted out to private companies.
The BC Liberals have withdrawn support from the avalanche warning system, making Canada the only country in the world that promotes mountain tourism without publically funding an avalanche warning program. Environmental regulations have also been scrapped as the Forest Practices Code was eliminated in favour of industrial self-policing, fish farms that have popped up all along the coast are operating on the same modicum of industry self policing, and offshore drilling is being re-explored as a possibility for economic development in BC. Gordon Campell has publically denounced Canada’s commitment to ratify Kyoto. [More…]
To me, this illustrates how retardataire Liberal policies actually are. The mentality is to rely on exploiting the land and its natural resources in the most primitive way imaginable: namely, through using them up. Presumably, this will phenomenally enrich a limited, relatively small, group of people who may or may not actually live here. Somehow their wealth is then supposed to trickle down to others? I doubt it. Those with wealth will invest it in international companies that, beholden to their anonymous shareholders, will feel obliged to outsource skilled manufacturing as well as IT jobs to …China and India. Excellent trickle down strategy, that.
PS: Dawn starts her article by noting that the Liberals were elected in 2001, claiming 77 out of 79 seats in the Legislature, despite the fact that many people voted against them. I’m not sure exactly how this works here, but BC has a flawed “winner takes all” system of elections. That is, those who vote against a party effectively get no representation at all. As far as I can tell, this accounts for some of the wild swings in politics here: somewhat leftwing NDP one year, Socreds another, neo-Libs next, etc. There was a drive to change the system, but it didn’t get enough signatures. Maybe next time.
liberal society should provide not only collective freedom, but also collective responsability for safety, wellness, economical and other equalities.
or should equality, safeness etc. really be the result of endeavor, where some are more equal than others.. the achievement principle, you get, what you deserve.
why shold society dare and provide for safety? I think, it is mainly a question of organization, and thus, of life standart. maybe its liberal, to me, it’s benchmarking.
so I don’t understand how services for safety f.ex. in nature, could not be efficiently provided. why does it seem, that more and more ‘clusters’ of civilized world fall apart useless. burnout of the sistem.
disturbing aspect of the discussed fact remains to me, that corresponding to specific collective reason, its country provides public service and does not provide, following rules of ominous efficiency, with no economic means to achieve it, nor a guideline for essential standarts. so, the system would be a pure appearance of accidental abundance and not ‘our’ (of the relative collectiveness) life attitude, that has gotten its social parameters.
this could render things vane and kind of shabby.
Comment by Giuse — October 19, 2003 #
Giuse, for me the key word in your comment is “shabby.” It’s the perfect descriptive term for so much of what is going on in neo-conservative politics. It might even help explain why we’re so addicted to glamour: the veneer of the latter hides the essential shabbiness of our collective social life. As you said, the system becomes one of “pure appearance of accidental abundance” (I love that!, well put!), and never comes to reflect or represent our collective social attitude, for how else could it be that so much of what individual people express as goodness gets only marginal representation in the so-called public sphere?
Comment by Yule Heibel — October 20, 2003 #