Five women activists who were arrested and hauled away in handcuffs when they refused to leave the B.C. legislature building after a March 12th meeting with Ida Chong, the minister responsible for women’s and seniors’ issues in the Liberal government of Premier Gordon Campbell, have been banned for life from B.C.’s legislature. The five were protesting a complete funding cut to the province’s 37 women’s centres. Trespassing charges were later dropped.
The ban stands.
“This is nothing short of mean and vindictive,” says George Heyman, B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU/NUPGE) president.
“There is absolutely no reason why these women should be banned from the legislature. They are not a threat to anyone. All charges against them have been dropped. They did nothing wrong, and should have access to the legislature the same as any other British Columbian.”

Three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, [and the] illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. — Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly

Gordon Campbell lies to even more people

So begins Vancouver Sun columnist Stephen Hume’s April 24th column in The Observer section of the paper.
In his surprisingly hard-hitting column (this is the generally toadying Vancouver Sun, after all), Hume takes the Liberals to task for “millions wasted on a treaty referendum that accomplished nothing, millions more frittered away reorganizing social services ministries that have subsided into dysfunction and chaos, yet more millions blown to claw back a few paltry disability payments from welfare recipients, scores of millions squandered to buy back the same real estate the government unloaded in a fit of ideological pique with the previous government two years earlier.”
And, as Hume states, “that’s just for starters.” As The Vancouver Sun online is available only by subscription, VanRamblings has made Stephen Hume’s column available here, or by clicking on the link below.

Continue reading Liberals’ Progress To Date Looks Like A March To Folly →

Much like support by women across the U.S. for the Bush administration, support among women for Gordon Campbell’s Liberals is all but absent.
According to an Ipsos-Reid poll conducted in March, only five percent of women “strongly approve” of Campbell’s performance as premier. Ten times more British Columbia women, 50 percent, “strongly disapprove” of the way the B.C. Liberal premier does his job.
In a cover story published in Vancouver’s alternative newspaper this week, Georgia Straight news editor Charlie Smith reports on the changes to the welfare system that have increased the health, social and other risks of, mostly female, single parents, and the increase in child apprehension that has followed; changes to employment standards that have had a disproportionately negative impact on women; a $12.7-million cut in child-care services that has all but eliminated funding for before-and after-school care for children in this province; deep cuts in programme funding for women’s services; and dramatic reductions in funding for a raft of other social programmes, including deep cuts to legal aid, and the virtual elimination of funding for school-based hot meal programmes.
In total, while introducing dramatic tax cuts for their rich friends — in the process eliminating some 50,000 goverment-related jobs to pay for the tax cuts (mostly affecting women, and the immigrant community) — the B.C. Liberals have cut $5 billion from the provincial budget, while making devastating cuts to programmes which have disproportionately affected women, aboriginals, children, seniors, the disabled, and the poor.
In 2003, a United Nations-sponsored coalition of women’s non-governmental organizations, The B.C. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (B.C. CEDAW), released a damning report (here available in pdf form) providing insight into “the wholesale withdrawal of programmes and protections” for women and children since the election of the Gordon Campbell lead Liberal government, on May 16, 2001.

Drastic and discriminatory changes to provincial legislation and programmes have been made since May 2001 … that have had an especially pernicious effect on women and girls who are most disadvantaged and most vulnerable. Specifically, elderly women, and women and girls who are Aboriginal, of colour, disabled, lesbian, recent immigrants or refugee claimants, living on low incomes, or living in rural areas experience the harms … in particular and intensified ways.

In an accompanying Georgia Straight article to this week’s cover story, titled “In Their Own Words”, contributing writer Gail Johnson not only provides information on cuts of $843 million from the three government Ministries with responsibilities for child care, children, women, and families: the Ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women’s Services; the Ministry of Human Resources; and the Ministry of Children and Family Development, through the personal stories of women across this province, she reports on the real-life impact of the government cuts to programmes for women and girls of all ages, ethnicities, abilities, and economic circumstance.

One of the most repressive governments in North America, the Gordon Campbell Liberals are easily on par with the most far right wing elements within the Bush administration in terms of the policies which both governments have chosen to enact since taking power in 2001.
Although Gordon Campbell lacks the power to send soldiers to their death in foreign lands, as President Bush is doing in his misadventure in Iraq, make no mistake there are just as many men, women and children dying in British Columbia, as are American soldiers in Iraq, as a consequence of the devastating attacks on the poor enacted by Campbell.
Whereas in the United States a well-funded free press (not to mention, a plethora of blogs), and a much more open system of government, investigates and reports every incidence of Bush administration wrong-doing, in British Columbia a media clearly in the pocket of the government (think CanWest Global) daily fails to report the human casualties of the disastrous anti-social policies enacted by the Liberals.
In fewer than 13 months, Gordon Campbell’s Liberals will go to the polls. VanRamblings will seek in the coming weeks and months to report on the many misadventures of the provincial Liberals, and the harm their policies have caused to all British Columbians, since they assumed power on May 16, 2001. In the meantime, The Tyee.ca’s Paul Ramsey poses 10 rather tepid questions to consider in the lead-up to the next provincial election.