With the BC provincial party leaders off the election trail today and preparing for the leaders’ television debate this coming Tuesday at 7 p.m. on a TV station near you, VanRamblings will seek to bring you up-to-date on the various peregrinations of BC Votes — Campaign 2005.
First off, though, VanRamblings directs your attention to a couple of new entries under Sites of Interest, top right. The Vancouver Sun offers BC Election 2005, an amalgam of election-related stories, quick facts, and blogs by Vancouver Sun reporters. Yvonne Zacharias is covering the BC NDP campaign, while Jeff Lee is covering the boy in the bubble campaign (whoops, I mean, the BC Liberal campaign), with Glenn Bohn relegated to covering the also-ran, lacklustre Green Party campaign.
Then, for your amusement (we’d laugh, if we weren’t crying so loud, and the cuts weren’t such a tragedy) there’s the Amazing All-Purpose Full-Proof Never Fail Liberal Truth Translator, brought to you by the good folks at the BC NDP election campaign headquarters.
Human rights consultant and Director of the Poverty and Human Rights Project, Shelagh Day, recently spoke to concerned British Columbians about the erosion of social programmes in our province, including …

• The elimination of the Human Rights Commission in BC, replaced by a powerless adjudicating tribunal
• The Legal Aid budget slashed by 38%, a reduction in the number of offices from 42 to 7, and a decision by the BC Liberal government that the Legal Aid budget is not to be spent on family or poverty law
• Monies slashed from the Native Court Workers Programme
• The closure of 1/3 of court houses in BC
• The closure of Residential Tenancy offices, resulting in weakened tenants’ rights
• Immigrant settlement services cut by 15%
• The budget for the Ombudsman, Office of the Police Complaints Commission, the Chief Electoral Office, and the Auditor General slashed
• And, the elimination of the position of the Children’s Commissioner

A transcript of Ms. Day’s speech is available here.
Meanwhile, over at Tyee Election Central, Russ Francis’ latest story, titled Foiling Freedom of Information, takes the Liberals to task for weakening the Freedom of Information process in BC. Francis’ earlier story, titled ‘Open, Transparent and Accountable’, suggests that the BC Liberal government under Gordon Campbell has been anything but.