e-day -1

Between you & me I think the Liberals are going to win this provincial election. The general population are bouyed up by the idea of a rising economy. For some reason it’s okay to pay more for health care, get less of an education for your children, and slash government services as long as they keep telling us the economy is booming.

I was asked where I expect the money to support these things is supposed to come from and it actually made me angry. There’s lots of money in the system. Plenty of fluid cash in & out. It’s the allocation that needs to be looked at. Smarter control of spending. To hell with tax breaks for anyone, as far as I’m concerned. Just give me a great place to live and I’ll pay the tax.

In an era of sound-biting and one-lining and grossly over-simplifying the real stories the vast majority of us don’t really understand how the whole thing works. That would be fine except many government employees fall into that vast majority as well. It’s so easy to take advantage.

I don’t pretend to know enough about budgeting to tell the government it’s doing a lousy job, but it seems to me that smarter spending controls would all but rain cash on our heads. I’m willing to bet that we could recover 15% of expenditures each year with more efficient spending.

Any accountant will tell you it’s not the big budget items that kill you. It’s the nickels & dimes. I’m talking about plugging the holes. A whole department whose sole purpose is not to allocate the funds but to supervise the spending of those funds. And not by paper trails and signatures on forms but actual eyes-on contact. Call it maybe one supervisor for every hundred employees of the province. The job description would simply be to make sure that money isn’t running through holes in the deck. Office supplies don’t vanish; computers are upgraded and maintained rather than being replaced every two years; contracted work is justified and produced; expense accounts are verified; recycling programs are in place in lunch rooms; employee health is prioritized (if you’re sick stay home! Don’t bring it to work with you). A friendly check & balance system doesn’t have to repress. It doesn’t have to be money-grubbing and cheapskate. It can save millions every year- all straight back into the system, just by preventing the wholesale bilking of the treasury.

I’m speaking from experience, first & second-hand knowledge. Everyone in Victoria has friends who work for the government so you know what I’m talking about. I know that money runs like a river in some branches and literally can’t be found to save a life in others. It’s not a partisan problem. It’s just the inefficiency of such a large, many-tentacled institution. Nickels & dimes shower through the gaps in the deck.

Of course it’s not all nickels & dimes. As soon as someone hears the words “government contract” they tack 30% onto their invoice. If not 100%. Every one of us gripes about taxes and the lack of government funding and so forth so when we get a chance to grab some of it back we do it. Sanctioned white-collar crime. So the wheel goes around and in the long term we’re really only stealing from ourselves.

I guess that’s gurton’s justification behind his statement that the Liberals would run the province from a business perpective and would make a lot of people unhappy in the process: stop the gaps and recover the treasure we already have. Efficiency. A tight ship.

I like the idea, but I don’t see the payoff for my Liberal vote yet. And the money hasn’t stopped running through the gaps. So while I and many others feel some sort of vague reassurance when we’re told the economy is flourishing I can’t help but wonder why hospitals and schools are downsizing or closing, healthcare costs are rising, and the quality of education is diminishing. Where’s the money going?

Seriously, what good is a tax break if your quality of life goes down while your cost of living goes up higher than the value of your tax break?

Funny thing about the sound-bite society. We miss that bit.

Wal-mart is the biggest employer in the world. The biggest purchaser. So big that they can dictate to the market what price they will pay for an item, and the market has to find a way to do it. Domestic companies simply can’t do it and jobs are lost overseas to cheaper labour. On the one hand I love the pressure this puts on industry to stay competitive but on the other hand it’s really short-sighted idiocy and anyone who shouts “USA #1” on their way to Wal-Mart is the worst kind of fool.

I mention this because it’s exactly how I feel about incentivizing corporations to invest here. If you give Big Business tax breaks they may put down some shallow roots and you may see a brief shimmer of prosperity and low unemployment but as soon as you ask this major employer to contribute something locally besides a few hundred jobs… well, it’s cheaper to just leave. And don’t kid yourself that they’ll feel a momentary pang of guilt at shafting your economy. Loyalty just isn’t something that can be bought. They don’t owe you anything.

If you compete on price you will always lose to whoever can provide that service for less. In this case that would be just about anywhere else in the world, because the cost of living is comparitively high here in Beautiful British Columbia and it costs a lot of money to employ a large work force even at minimum wage.

Here’s my case: those that can afford it put their kids in private schools. Those that can afford it go to India for surgery to avoid months or years of wait list. Those that can afford it aren’t relying on the domestic system because it’s failing. At some point you have to ask why that is, no matter how much faith you have in this current “flourishing economy”.

To me this adds up to a broken system. The foundation can’t support the towers. Trying to build anything else on top is just going to make it less stable.

Forget partisan politics for the moment. Look at the system. It’s just too short-sighted. Band-aid solutions, they call it. By its nature we’re not going to see this change anytime soon. No elected party is going to suggest tearing down the system and starting over. That’s just me in my idealistic naiveté.

The argument has been suggested that the Liberals have worked hard to stabilize the economy and bring us back out of debt, and that then they can re-focus their energies on other priorities. It’s my opinion that this is little better than the NDP running the economy into the ground in the first place. I think the foundation needs to be rebuilt before the towers can climb any higher. And for me the foundation is our standard of living. Make BC a good place to grow up, be sick and live, and the rest will fall into place.

If the Liberals win this round I hope that the rest of the vote isn’t so diluted between the NDP and the Greens that we have a weak opposition. I would like to see some promises fulfilled and I can’t imagine that will happen without a very strong voice of insistence representing the actual majority of BC’s population.

*sigh* I do go on.

If you live in BC and you’re reading this I hope you care enough to vote on Tuesday. Not just for your candidate but for BC-STV, a plan that will do more for solving the actual long-term problems than the election itself.

And then I’ll shut up about politics for a while. I didn’t even mention that fab picture at the top.