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A new B.C. Liberal election attack ad claims when the NDP were in power, British Columbia suffered a 'decade of decline' and it warnsa New Democrat government formed by John Horgan will "take us back" to those times.

The ad allegesthat "when the rest of Canada was booming, the NDP took B.C. from first to worst in job creation, forcing 50,000 British Columbians to leave to find work," and that, "B.C. ranked dead last in investment and job growth."

The NDP reigned in B.C. from 1991 to 2000. The Liberals have been in power since 2001.

The Liberal ad cites Statistics Canada as the source of the information.

But are the claims completelytrue? Not according to two prominent B.C. economists, who analysed the assertions at the requestof our CBC Fact Check team.

"Sometimes, it's politics, in terms of how you shape the numbers," says Bryan Yu, deputy chief economist with the Central 1 Credit Union.

Jock Finlayson, executive director of the Business Council of B.C., agrees.

"Depending on the numbers you look at, they can certainly find some data that will help to embellish that or help support [their]argument," he says.

So, was the B.C. economy really that badunder the NDP in the 90's?

A check of the province's credit rating assessedby the Dominion bond rating service shows it hasbarely changed since 1991; from an "AA" rating until 1999, an "AA" minus rating through to 2004, then a bump to "AA" plus rating from 2007 to the present.

Stats Can figures, cited in the Liberal ad and checked by the CBC, show the first of the B.C. Liberal claims are partly correct that job growth slumped during a portion of the 90's when the NDP were in government and unemployment numbers climbed. Butthe rate of unemploymentwas also highunder the Liberals after they took power.

Unemployment peaked at 10.1% in 1992, the year after the NDP took power but dropped to 7.7% by the time the party was ousted from office in 2001.

Then, under the B.C. Liberals, unemployment climbed to 8.5% in 2002 shortly after the 9-11 crisis dropped in half a couple of years later but climbedto 7.7%in 2008 following the world economic downturn.

Our experts say internal B.C. policies have less impact on our economy, than outside forces.

B.C. Liberal Ad about NDP record in the 1990s says job creation declined. (B.C. Liberal Party )

"(Provincial policies) have some influence, but it's a lot less than people I think tend to believe," saidFinlayson.

"We had the Asian financial crisis in '97-'98, We had 9-11... and then of course we had the global financial crisis and crash in 2007all of these things had quite a big impact on B.C., and none of them have anything to do with the government of British Columbia, or any politicians in B.C."

Bryan Yu of Central 1 credit union concurs.

"I think it's difficult to say it's really reflective of the politics or policies in place at the time. It's largely a macro-economic driven event."

So what about the Liberal claim 50,000 British Columbians were forced to leave the province to find work under the NDP?

A Statistics Canada 2006 report shows there was an exodus but it extended during the early years of the Liberals as well, beginningwith "a net outflow in 1998, which continued until 2004" three years after the Liberal's took power.

B.C. Liberal party ad says thousands of job seekers left B.C. under the NDP because of bad economic policies but Stats Can figures show the exodus continued under the Liberals. (B.C. Liberal Party )

Most job seekers, the report notes, were attracted by the "surging economies" of Ontario and Alberta at thetime.

As for the Liberal claim under the NDP, the province was "dead last" in investment growth,Finlayson confirms B.C. was last among 10 provinces in the average annual growth of business investmentfrom 1991 to 2000.

B.C. Liberal party ad says the NDP was bad for investment and job growth. (B.C. Liberal Party )

But he warns that while the B.C. Liberal ad can claim the economic high ground right now because the province's economy is performing well, that might not continue.

"We do expect the economy to slow down here a bit in 2017-18," saidFinlayson.

"[But]an election is not the time to be careful," he said, referring to the claims made against the NDP in the B.C. Liberal ad.

"It's an age-old reality of political life."

See the original post:
Did the NDP really spark a 'decade of decline' as Liberals claim? - CBC.ca

Wave after wave of Islamic terror continues to crash upon the shores of Western democracies to such a point where it is difficult to go a week without an attack. Last week it was France again, the country has become a proving ground that the migration of Muslims is a conduit to mayhem. Last Friday police officer Xavier Jugel died at the hands of an ISIS gunman who shot the 37-year-old in the head during the attack and then wounded two other cops in the middle of Paris.

Jugel was no stranger to Islamic terror. He had spent time working in Greece to improve the vetting of migrants entering Europe. He was one of the first responders to the Bataclan attack in 2015 which left 130 dead and 84 dead in a truck attack last June in Nice.

This has not fazed American liberals. Over the years, former President Barack Obama denied the connection between Islam and terrorism. In 2008 he said, The sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer. Last July during her campaign Hillary Clinton tweeted: Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

The liberals tell us that the Quran is no different than the Old Testament, which tells of a time when Gods wrath spilled forth. Thankfully, Christians and Jews dont take literal instructions from the Old Testament. Still many liberals claim Islam is no different than other religions. They say attributing terrorism to Islam is nothing more than racism aimed at Muslims.

There were few apologists for Islam in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Republicans and Democrats wanted revenge. In October 2002 Clinton even voted for President George W. Bushs Iraq war. Much has changed.

Since Obama took office liberals have readily denied that Islam is the key component of terrorist killing. Today a great many liberals defend Islam. Some even believe that kowtowing to Islam is placating the Muslim masses by arguing that they are simply a misunderstood minority. But it is an evil that is readily apparent.

Liberals want to swing open the gates and allow Islams Trojan Horse entry. The evil they say is not in Islam but in President Donald Trump, a man they consider a racist and an Islamophobe. They ignored a Pew poll from a few years ago that said that 8 percent of U.S. Muslims think that suicide bombing and violence against civilians is often or sometimes justified. That equals about 200,000 Muslims in America who think killing Christians and Jews is jim-dandy.

The liberals are moving away from the ridiculous pretense that Islam is all about peace and only a few bad apples give this great religion a bad name. Ive always wondered why these apples come out of the Muslim barrel and not one out of the Mormon or Seventh-day Adventist keg.

The liberals give no thought to such arguments and instead are focusing on their new one that in some cases our prejudices against Muslims have caused something quite understandable violence. If only we treated Muslims better. But the liberals are working on that. Arab News ran a story that has been picked up in the U.K. The headline: Is Britain a soft touch for Islamist extremists?

Last month Indian publication Swarajya Magazine, which has a large following in the U.K., ran this headline: London Terror: To Win the War, The West Needs to Empower Reformist Muslims. The first sentence says it all, that it is the Wests responsibility to convince Muslims that they are victims rather than perpetrators.

I dont think this is going to sell to the family of the latest French cop to be murdered by ISIS.

The article goes on to say that Europe has become a focal point for radical Islam because, Islamists believe they lost their rising global clout when Charles Martel defeated the armies of the Caliphate in the Battle of Tours in 732 AD.

Seriously, the radicals are killing Jews and Christians because they lost an obscure battle 1,300 years ago? They must not be the dumb mutts that ISIS shows on television.

With the exception of sports, I dont watch much TV. I dont say this as a phony quasi-intellectual. I say it because I can hardly find anything worth watching on TV. I have tried. For example, I tried to get into the hit TV show Lost which is exactly where I found myself after two episodes.

Half a dozen years ago I watched the first couple of episodes of Homeland. The show was about a woman CIA agent keeping tabs on a U.S. Marine Corps sniper who was held captive by al-Qaeda but was released. The focus of the show was whether or not the former POW had been turned by the enemy and was a ticking time-bomb.

The series became a big hit for five years. Hollywood saw there was a cancer in the program that was poisoning the minds of viewers. Since the heroine was a counterterrorist agent, her focus was on terrorists. The writers and producers didnt like what was happening, that Muslim actors were given the roles of bad guys to such an extent that Islam was being associated with terrorism. I suppose they could have used Irish actors to play the terrorists, but the thinkers behind the show decided to go the other way. Last week, Mandy Patinkin who plays a CIA counterterrorist veteran said that the show had made white men in government and the military establishment the bad guys.

In an interview, Patinkin admitted that he regretted the negative portrayals of Muslims in Homeland. He even took responsibility for American resistance to Muslim immigration. Then Patinkin demonstrated he not only has a hugely inflated opinion of what influence he has as an actor, but demonstrated he is another Hollywood nut:

The facts are that the Muslim community is a gift, they are the fabric of what makes America great. [Refugees] are the safest citizens we have. Refugees in the United States of America are the safest possible citizens you can say hello to or invite them into your community, and I encourage everyone to please invite them into their community.

No word on how many Muslims Manny has staying at his place. But I am sure his kind words warmed the hearts of cold-blooded Islamists.

So give me the policies of Donald Trump, give me more mothers of all bombs and please restrict immigration. Canada is brimming over with Muslims. My first-hand experiences with more than a few have not been good. Perhaps it is because I find that they treat whites or worse yet, Muslims who have left the faith like my daughter-in-laws family with scornful disdain.

Perhaps it is my ignorance that gets in the way of understanding. There is a place in New York I could write for my edification. It is called the Islamic Thinkers Society, which is a great oxymoron. The groups goal is to restore the Islamic Caliphate and create what it calls an ideal Islamic society.

Good luck with that. Thousands of Muslims seem to be happiest when killing other Muslims. To me the crying shame is they are not very efficient at it.

The truth is that the situation with Islam is bad and getting worse. It is one more liberal enterprise that weakens the nation. At least Donald Trump understands we are at war with parts of Islam. Lets hope he can effectively deal with this war and not be handcuffed by the Democrats on Capitol Hill because if he is unsuccessful the United States will not be recognizable in another generation.

Yours in good times and bad,

John Myers

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Continued here:
Liberals apologize to Islam - Personal Liberty - Personal Liberty Digest

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Posted: Apr 23, 2017 12:01 AM

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.C.S. Lewis

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head. Eric Hoffer

Our kids are no longer taught about patriotism, morality, honor or self-reliance. Theyre not taught economics. Theyre not taught about the Constitution. The boys arent taught to be men and the girls arent taught to be women. In fact, if you find kids who know anything about these subjects, it is almost certainly because their parents bent over backwards to jam that knowledge into their heads.

Our society used to inculcate these values in schools, church and via our entertainment. It was a different and, in many ways, better world. Liberals try to portray everything that happened in Americas past as evil and backward, but when you look at statistics like these from Charles Murrays outstanding book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, try and tell me that this country hasnt gone downhill in the values were teaching our kids.

To get a sense of how different attitudes were in the 1960s, perhaps this will do it. These ever-married women were asked, In your opinion, do you think it is all right for a woman to have sexual relations before marriage with a man she knows she is going to marry? Eighty-six percent said no.

Starting in 1970, marriage took a nosedive that lasted for nearly twenty years. Among all whites, ages 30-49, only 13 percent were not living with spouses as of 1970, Twenty years later, that proportion had more than doubled, to 27 percent a change in a core social institution that has few precedents for magnitude and speed.

As the late, great Andrew Breitbart said, Politics is downstream from culture. Is it a shocker that millennials lean to the Left when they constantly have liberalism shoved down their throats by their schools, their favorite musicians, and Hollywood? Is it a big surprise that 51% of millennials do not support capitalism when we allow honest-to-goodness communists to teach them in college and liberals are publicly extolling the virtues of socialist hellholes like Cuba and Venezuela?

The Greatest Generation grew up storming Normandy and fighting the Japanese across the Pacific. Meanwhile, many millennials of the same age feel unsafe if someone they disagree with speaks at an event they dont have to attend on their campus.

Oh, and morality? Kids today grow up being told that morality is wrong because morality demands judgment. As Hugh Hewitt said, My analysis is that most faith based systems depend upon an absolute moral order. The declaration of things as absolutely evil or absolutely good, as sin or virtue, puts liberalism into a horrible position because its founded on no judgment on anything. As a result, any faith that is seriously practiced or understood is a challenge to the politics that depend on constituencies that would rather not be told that their choices are bad and their lives are not virtuous.

Additionally, as my friend Evan Sayet noted, everything liberals teach to kids is backward.

Justice demands that the good and hard-working be rewarded and the evil and the lazy be punished (if only by the withholding of the rewards of doing the right things). Modern Liberalism demands that the good and hardworking be punished as the recipients of an unfair advantage and the evil and the lazy be rewarded, their acts of evil and their failure all the proof the Modern Liberal needs that somehow they have been victimized by forces out of their control.

In the sixties, American kids were dreaming of building rocket ships and going to the moon. Today, theyre trying to figure out what gender they are and which bathroom they should be using. Its not an improvement.

This is where snowflakes come from. Its where the victimhood mentality comes from. Its why so many kids think theyre entitled to have whatever they want based on what we can only assume is the sheer gratitude the rest of us should have for their very existence.

As someone who has millennials working for him, I can tell you that theyre not a doomed generation. Theyre not all snowflakes. They can be just as successful as past generations of Americans.

However, to make that happen, we conservatives cant just keep going with the flow because its easier. We have to teach young Americans about the values that have made this the most successful, prosperous nation on earth.

To start with, we need to begin challenging the victim mentality liberals push on millennials. As I write in my brand new book, 101 things All Young Adults Should Know, Dont ever feel sorry for yourself. Dont ever seek pity from other people. Dont ever play the victim, even if you are one. Why? Its a mentality. If you wait for someone else to solve your problems, youre usually in for a long wait. Even if you do get help, you probably wont like the help you get. Hammer that message home to your kids. Also, buy a copy of my book. In fact, buy 30 and give them to all your kids friends.

Lets cut off the funding of state run colleges which discriminate against conservatives. Furthermore, if liberal kids keep tearing up Berkeley every time conservatives want to speak, then maybe Trump should send in the National Guard to keep order and protect their First Amendment rights.

Weve also got to teach our kids about capitalism, Christianity, and love of country, because that is what this nation was built on. Snowflakes may melt when the going gets tough, but kids who are taught good, conservative values will stand tall even when its not easy.

See the rest here:
How Liberals Are Poisoning The Minds Of Young Americans - Townhall

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Posted: Apr 24, 2017 12:01 AM

Understand that if America is stupid enough to let liberals take power again, they will persecute and prosecute normal Americans like us who dare to dissent. Thats not a guess or a prediction thats a commitment they have made to their fascist followers. Theyve seen what the truth can do to their schemes. After 2016, theres no way they are going to take a chance on another electoral rejection by us normals, so they dont even pretend to support free speech anymore. It will be one gender neutral being-one vote, one more time, and then never again.

Hold on. Thats clearly nuts, right? This is obviously crazy talk thats talking crazy, isnt it? Dont liberals love free speech?

No.

We know they dont love free speech because they tell us they dont, in both words and deeds. The whole free speech thing lost a lot of its luster for the libs when people like us decided to try it out. The liberals didnt count on that free speech was supposed to be their jam, a way to offend, annoy, and outrage us squares, to blow our bourgeois minds with their transgressive, no-holds-barred free thoughtery and critical thinkery. But they never intended for it to allow those banjo-strumming rubes living between I-5 and I-95 to express wrong thoughts and thereby win elections.

So now the progressives are trying to do something about it. Recently, every single Democrat voted to effectively repeal the First Amendment. You see, the words Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech were too expansive for liberals tastes because they prevented Congress from making laws abridging the freedom of speech.

This creepy idiocy was in response to Citizens United, a Supreme Court case that, to people who actually believe in free speech and not liberal fascism, conforms to the First Amendment by telling the federal government that no, you cant put people in jail for making a movie critical of Hillary Clinton.

Yes, you read it correctly. Democrats think that Congress should be able to make laws to put people in jail for making movies critical of Democrat politicians. Roll that around in your head for a while.

Now, they call it campaign finance reform, and their argument is that they arent really limiting speech - just limiting how people spend their own money. Apparently, under the First Amendment, we are allowed to say anything we want, but Congress can pass a law telling us that we just cant spend any money to actually be heard.

It would mean the government can tell us we cant buy paper, we cant buy ads, we cant buy video tape, we cant pay a film crew or writers, and we cant pay for airtime. Congress could even tell us we cant buy internet access to post our thoughts on Twitter or Facebook. And Congress, in the Dems utopia, could even pass a law not letting you spend a few measly pennies to buy my awesome book about how liberals will split our country in two.

Yes, they want to be able to ban books.

Other than that, under the liberals paradigm, we can speak to our hearts content, though only to people within shouting range. But dont worry. The official, approved mainstream media would be exempt and unofficial, unapproved media, well, not so much. Fake news and all that fake being defined as critical of liberals. Fortunately, wed have such unbiased, nonpartisan, objective outlets like the New York Times and CNN (starring noted free speech scholar Fredo Cuomo) to provide us open forums to air our conservative views. Also, we could get unicorns to skywrite our opinions for free using rainbows spewing from beneath their fluffy tails.

Whats still unclear is what prison sentence Democrats would impose upon someone who breaks the law by exhibiting a film or writing a book critical of Hillary Clinton. One year? Five years? Life in SuperMax? Come on Democrats, how long would you imprison someone for illegal speech?

And what should the penalty be for climate change denial? Since rejecting their weird climate religion is Earth-murder, or something, you would think theyd want to burn you at the stake or is that too carbony?

Then theres that clinical moron Howard Dean, who is ironically famous for his own bizarre exercise of the First Amendment. Leveraging all his intellectual fire power, he recently unloaded his mental squirt gun upon those of us who think the First Amendment means what it actually says. Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment, he announced on Twitter, apparently having discovered a constitutional exception that would allow Democrats to stifle any speech they choose to stick the hate speech label on. Which would, of course, be anything and everything we normals want to say.

This I dont like what you are saying so its hate speech now shut-up footnote to the First Amendment is well-known at our colleges and universities. These bastions of free thinking freely admit thinking that we normals have no right to think freely at all. The fact that California law enforcement is regularly ordered to stand back and allow conservative speakers and their audiences to be intimidated and beaten in order to silence them is just a preview of the new America that liberals dream of. If you imagine the unholy love child of the economic basket case/police state of Venezuela and the grim intolerance of your local campus, you have a pretty good idea of the new, fascist America the Democrats seek to breed.

Think that analysis is wrong? Well, heres a complete list of all prominent Democrats standing up against these free speech abominations:

_________________________________________________.

Liberals should be ashamed of themselves, but then they wouldnt be liberal if they were born with shame genes. So, since we patriots are the only ones who actually support free speech, what do we patriots do to protect it?

Whatever it takes.

We fight peacefully in the political arena, in the courts, and in the shrinking marketplace of ideas while we can, but we must also be ready to fight in the streets when those punky puffboys try to shut us up. No quarter, no compromise, no surrender we fight and win, or they shut us up forever.

Look, the left has told us what it wants the power to force us to be silent and submit. Thats not wacky supposition; thats not fevered imagination. They are open about their agenda, and its happening before our eyes. To pretend that our republic is not facing an existential threat from progressives who would use violence to silence their political opponents is to willfully ignore the evidence, just like a climate cultist ignores cold weather. And the violence has already begun: in fact, it is key to their plan for a free speech-free future. Today its gangs of masked thugs attacking us. Tomorrow, its uniformed men with guns or at least those few spineless cowards among our security forces will ignore their oaths to defend the Constitution in exchange for a paycheck and a pension dragging us off to jail for illegal speech. Or worse.

We patriots face a stark choice. We could choose the easy path of submission and hope that the left will leave us be if we just give in to their demands and give up on our right to participate in our own governance. But that wont ever work the true joy of leftism comes from imposing the leftists collective will upon its designated villains, and one guess as to the identity of those designated villains.

Hi.

No, they dont want to leave us alone that misses the whole point of being a leftist. A leftist yearns to be the one doing the bullying and dominating. If we give in, we will spend the rest of our lives with their soft, girly hands around our necks.

And if we are so gutless as to give up our God-given rights in exchange for peace, we deserve that pathetic, dishonorable fate.

But we wont give up. We wont surrender. No matter how hard they punch, as Instapundit urges, well punch back twice as hard.

It was funny seeing those antifa dorks get wedgies in Berkeley, but our enemies are serious about stripping us of the rights that our Creator endowed upon all men and women. Many of us are veterans or law enforcement, and our oaths to defend the Constitution even at the cost of our lives did not come with an expiration date. Millions more who did not take one of those oaths subscribe to them nonetheless. We promised not to let a fascist regime take hold, and we intend to keep our promise.

The First Amendment is followed by the Second Amendment for just this reason history will record that our peoples unique refusal to be disarmed by those who seek to steal our liberties was a key factor why we will never be Venezuela II: The Revenge.

Our only chance of avoiding a catastrophe is if our would-be progressive overlords understand that for us normal Americans, there are only two possible outcomes. And living at their mercy as their serfs is not one of them.

The outcome we want is that we normals live free in a democratic republic exercising the rights enshrined in the Constitution, whether because leftists choose to respect our civil rights, or because we force them to respect our civil rights.

The other alternative is that we die on piles of spent brass surrounded by the bodies of our enemies. Either ones cool but submission to slavery is not an option.

That un-American, wannabe fascist Howard Dean need only look at a license plate from neighboring New Hampshire to understand how this is going to end. Well either live free or die.

Go here to read the rest:
Liberals Want To Kill Free Speech, So We Patriots Must Fight Back - Townhall

How would you ideologically classify a political party that ran on a platform of tax cuts and balanced budgets? Youd probably say you need a bit more information, given cutting taxes and balancing budgets are hardly distinctive ideas. In Canadas 2011 election, for instance, Jack Laytons NDP, Michael Ignatieffs Liberals and Stephen Harpers Conservatives all ran promising to pursue this agenda, as have a rainbow of parties at the provincial level.

If I added that this theoretical party supports a carbon tax, safe injection sites for heroin addicts, and legalized marijuana, but opposes a major pipeline, you might think were in comfortably left-wing territory.

Well, youd be wrong, at least according to the Canadian news media, who have decided the ruling Liberal Party of British Columbia currently fighting for their fifth term in office are actually a party of the right. Read any mainstream coverage or analysis of B.C. politics and youll come across references to the centre right, right-of-centre, or right-leaning Liberals. No less an authority than The New York Times spoke of Premier Christy Clarks conservative British Columbia Liberal Party. The Vancouver Sun has started using Tory blue for the Liberals in their polling graphics, while a premier-ranking study from Vancouver think tank Aha! grouped B.C.s Liberal premiers in with other provinces Tory leaders on the grounds they were small c-conservative.

Its forgivable on some level. The press needs a firm party of the right fighting a firm party of the left to create compelling political drama. If youre a partisan of the NDP B.C.s provincial opposition its similarly in your interests to portray Liberals and Conservatives as interchangeable oppressors of the proletariat, as NDPers have been doing since Tommy Douglas first yarned about mice voting for cats.

Yet to call the B.C. Liberals conservatives because theyve experienced occasional bouts of fiscal responsibility, appeased business interests, or annoyed unions the sole evidence proponents of this theory point to requires broadening the philosophy of conservatism to the point of uselessness. The Saskatchewan NDP closed schools and hospitals across the province during the 1990s. Were they right-wing? The Alberta Conservatives ran six deficit budgets in a row. Was that centre-left? Is Dalton McGuinty a small-c conservative because a teachers strike occurred during his reign?

As Stephen Harper himself put it in a 2003 speech on ideology if conservatives accept all legislated social liberalism with balanced budgets and corporate grants then there really are no differences between a conservative and a Paul Martin.

The B.C. Liberals, for their part, have never fully played along with the right-wing role theyve been assigned. When I interviewed Christy Clark back in 2004 she called herself a middle-of-the-road Liberal, emphasizing shed been a provincial Liberal when we used to get 5per centof the vote (theres a popular urban legend that the B.C. Liberals are a new party or even the renamed B.C. Social Credit Party in reality, theyve been contesting elections since the 19th century). That said, Clarks Liberals are savvy enough to grasp a good thing when they see it. In their propaganda, they refer to themselves as a free market coalition welcoming anyone anti-NDP. The party uses the four colours of the B.C. flag red, white, blue and yellow in their branding, rather than one traditionally partisan colour, to push the notion that they transcend classification.

And it works, in the sense surveys generally show the partys base is roughly split between federal Conservative and Liberal voters, who tend to see in the party whatever they want. A recent Insights West poll had 49per centof federal Conservative voters describing the B.C. Libs as a right or centre-right party, while 37per centof federal Liberals called it left-wing or centrist. A narrow majority of British Columbians see them as either left-wing, centrist, or cant answer the question. Over 20per centof NDP voters, meanwhile, call it far-right.

Someone has to be wrong here. The B.C. Liberals can be called right wing by the press and even other conservatives, but if they reach this conclusion without using a strict, objective standard, the label simply makes British Columbias political debate lazy and incoherent.

Sloppiness with the right-wing label can also be rather unfair to the B.C. NDP, it must be said, since it defines their own leftism in such a crude and caricatured way. The B.C. NDP does not hate low taxes or love the idea of being fiscally irresponsible indeed, the party actually opposed the two most significant tax increases of the Liberal reign Premier Gordon Campbells 2008 carbon tax and his governments subsequent harmonized sales tax (overturned by referendum in 2011). The Liberals often creatively-calculated balanced budgets, meanwhile, mask a reliance on debt, unsurprising, given their election platforms including the current one tend to be brimming with conventionally big-LLiberal promises to spend more doing everything.

B.C.s former opposition leader, Adrian Dix, once complained that the partisan split in B.C. was like comparing Coke to Pepsi. If the B.C. NDP finds its way back to power next month, the outcome may prove far more meaningful for the party than the province.

National Post

J.J. McCullough is a political commentator and artist living in Vancouver.

Continued here:
Christy Clark's BC Liberals are left, right and centre, but they sure aren't 'conservative' - National Post