CKNW Editorial
for October 26, 2001

I met a friend and former colleague at lunch the other day and his remark was that those dumb Liberals will keep every stupid promise they made. Cynical though that remark may seem, he has a point.

In the first place the Liberals didn't have to make any promises - they just had to show up at election time. But many of the promises they did make have been made into foolish pledges by the passage of so little time. Although the countervail on softwood lumber was not a surprise, the size of it was. The recession hitting the United States shouldn't have been a surprise but the Liberals surely didn't take it into account when making election promises. The state of the Province's finances should come as no surprise since the man who is now Finance Minister was braying loud and long that the NDP had overestimated its revenues and underestimated its expenses.

But most of all, no one could have predicted September 11.

What has happened is that the Province and the world have changed so much since last May's election that the Liberals ought to be re-visiting some of its promises. Not all, by any means, but some of them. It was foolish to give the size of tax break that the Liberals handed to everyone, especially those for whom it made little difference. Even the most optimistic of economists knows that this money doesn't come back into the economy quickly and it may not come back at all if times are tough. To the extent that they can, the Liberals ought to re-visit this issue.

The cutbacks should be handled with considerable care. To begin with, they are not all profit. If you lay off someone making $50,000 and paying $20,000 n income tax BC not only loses its share of the income tax it also loses sales tax revenue and may have to pay out welfare. Moreover, anyone who has ever been there knows that it is the invariable practice for senior bureaucrats to replace lost help with contract workers there may be no saving at all - the cost is simply transferred from one vote to another. Moreover - and this is even more notorious, Bureaucrats laying off bureaucrats will always do so where it hurts the voter the most so as to inflict political pain on the government. This happens throughout the system. For example, if a hospital is cut back it's not the size of the administrator's expense account that it hit but bed pans so that patients will feel the cuts and scream to the media and anyone else who will listen. There is another issue - layoffs tend to occur for a short term budgetary exercise. Governments are notoriously bad planners and cuts they make today may not make sense next year and in fact may well raise expenses in other budget years. Ministers of Finance and Premiers operate on the "we'll-face-it-when-the-time-comes theory. I think the government would be very wise to do several things. I think they should get rid of the notion that the budget can be balanced by 2004. People to a large extent will understand - those who won't weren't going to vote Liberal anyway or will forget, or both. I think they should sell as much "hardware" as they can including the ICBC investments and use the proceeds to immediately embark on a major Long Term Care program. Every patient they transfer from acute care to long term care saves a bunch of money and shortens the elective surgery list. I think they should put doctors on salary. There are lots of problems with this but the savings outweigh the problems and we're talking major bucks here. I think that the Liberals ought to create a BC Hydro type company to finance capital costs of highways, hospitals and schools. If W.A.C. Bennett could mortgage hunks of concrete sitting in a river, you should be able to mortgage capital costs. The NDP tried that but didn't go far enough. To do so would be embarrassing to the Liberals who scoffed at the NDP's capital budgeting but that will pass - just as the people forgave Bennett senior from promising in the 1963 election not to nationalize the BC Electric Railway Company then doing it right after the votes were counted. The trick, as Bennett knew, was to see huge edifices popping out of the ground, full of working people, before the next election.

It's all very well to cut here and fire there but good times or bad, the world rolls along. Our world needs new hospitals, schools, bridges and roads. No longer can the government move these expenses off budget as previous ones have been able to do but a properly capitalized corporation, with income being paid from the things built - meaning tolls, rent from school and hospital districts and the like - makes such a notion, in my opinion acceptable to the public ... at least to the public that is likely to vote Liberal.

And as Mr Bennett senior might have said, "my friends, that's the name of the game."