Rafe gives Christy some advice - like keep charging the HST, ignore public and First Nations anger over fish farms, private power, pipelines and tankers: "I have good news for our premier. If what I’m about to say is wrong, you have nothing to worry about. You see, Premier, I have this radical notion that the mood of the voter has changed – you evidently don’t, making it obvious (sorry to talk as if you are a slow learner) that if you just paddle along, down the happy old stream, why the voters, so afraid of the bad old NDP, will put you right back in government in 2013."

This is the fact Premier Clark must ponder and soon: will the public of BC simply accept these destructions of our beautiful province? Will they just simply shake their heads and go quietly? In my view they won’t. Through the ages the long-suffering public takes so much and no more. Read your history, Madame Premier – there comes a tipping point where the public will take no more and in my judgment we have reached that point. I beg of you, Premier, shake the scales from your eyes, look and think! This isn’t a right wing versus left wing matter but a question of right and wrong.

We’ve been going for about a year and a half and let me start by saying that both Damien Gillis and I are pretty proud of our progress...but 2012 will be the year that decides where we go in BC. Will we have more rivers destroyed for private profit? Will we see our province, my homeland and yours, turned over to the 100% certain destruction by oil pipelines and tankers? Will we continue to allow fish farmers to annihilate our sacred Pacific Salmon? Will we watch idly as Fish Lake is destroyed to set the precedent of more of the same? The wisdom of the ages, in the soul of our First Nations, is the wisdom we must listen to and apply if we want to save our province.

As is always the case, the public is the last to find out the government's plans, but it takes only a modicum of common sense to see that Harper's moving of the Environmental Assessment Process to the National Energy Board from the Ministry of Environment, the subsequently announced streamlining of the Environmental Assessment Process, and the budget cuts to the Ministry Environment resulting in fewer and fewer monitoring facilities and scientists to staff them or to write reports on environmental implications of resource extraction are all related to establishing a "single Canada–U.S. regime" for pipelines and other cross-border infrastructure.

The feds hold Premier Clark in a blackmail position – if BC is to be shown any mercy over the HST cock-up it must permit the Fish Lake project to proceed, make no noise on the Enbridge pipeline project and approve oil tanker traffic on the coast...The Liberal Party’s renowned fiscal prudence is a crock of crap. The NDP look like Ebenezer Scrooge compared to the government of wastrels we’ve been governed by for the last 10 ½ years. The Campbell/Clark government has more than tripled the real provincial debt, putting the province in hock for as far as the eye can see.

Read this report from the Vancouver Sun on BC Auditor General John Doyle's slamming of BC Hydro's shocking accounting practices.

"Not often do accountants engage in the bookkeeping equivalent of hand-to-hand combat. But there was some of that at a meeting of the public accounts committee of the legislature one day last week, as BC Hydro's chief financial officer and acting CEO Charles Reid squared off against Auditor-General John Doyle.

The occasion was supplied by the committee review of Doyle's recent report on Hydro's growing practice of defer-ring current expenses to future years. The flashpoint was provided by Doyle's bald assertion that although every penny of the soon-to-be-$5-billion balance in the 27-and-count-ing deferral accounts will have to be repaid, neither Hydro nor the government has any detectable plan to do so. (Nov. 30, 2011)

Read article: http://www.vancouversun.com/Auditor+finds+billion+snake+dilemma+Hydro+hard+swallow/5788297/story.html#ixzz1fDPdH0v4

Read this story from Mark Hume in The Globe and Mail on one particularly bad example of ecologically disastrous private river power projects (IPPs) in BC. The Tyson Creek project in Narrows Inlet on the Sunshine Coast actually involves a lake with a massive hole drilled at the bottom - resulting in major siltation problems in the fish-bearing streams and inlet below.

"There have been growing concerns in British Columbia about the impact of private power projects on streams and rivers. But we should worry about our lakes, too, according to a file of internal government documents related to the Tyson Creek hydroelectric project.

The documents, obtained by Gwen Barlee of the Wilderness Committee, track the licensing, development and subsequent but temporary closing of the project when it caused the usually clear Tzoonie River to turn the colour of mud." (Nov. 27, 2011)

Read article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/mark-hume/tyson-creek-experiment-ought-not-to-be-repeated/article2251369/

When you see what’s happening with wild salmon because of farmed fish cages, what’s happened to BC Hydro and our rivers because of sweetheart deals it’s been forced to make, what’s happened and is happening to lakes to be mined, to say nothing of the pipelines from the Tar Sands, then tankers down the coast, you must ask yourself where has the mainstream media been? The answer is short and clear: Up Big Business' ass. You simply cannot have a functioning democracy without a media that keeps pressure on the government.

Read this article from the Georgia Straight on the concerns of environmental groups over the prohibitively small amount of funding made available to participate in the Joint Panel Review into the proposed Site C Dam.

"A prominent B.C. environmental leader is slamming the Conservative government for achieving “a new low” by capping funding for interveners in the Site C dam’s joint environmental assessment process. 'While $19,000 [per organization] may look like a fair amount of money, when you’re talking about having to hire technical experts, lawyers, and researchers, it does not go very far, especially when stacked up against the kind of resources B.C. Hydro has at its disposal,' George Heyman, executive director of Sierra Club B.C., told the Straight by phone. 'So it’s an extremely tipped playing field.'

The provincial and federal environmental-assessment offices announced on September 30 that a harmonized environmental assessment process, including a joint review panel, will be undertaken for the Site C project. The proposed dam would be the third on the Peace River, alongside the W. A. C. Bennett and Peace Canyon dams." (Nov. 24, 2011)

Read full article: http://www.straight.com/article-546646/vancouver/groups-slam-site-c-assessment-funding-cap

Rafe discusses ways you can help us fund the Common Sense Canadian and introduces our new op-ed blog page for environmental issues in BC and Canada - "Your Voice". "Our 'hits' and regular emails from readers tell us that we’re making contact with a large number of British Columbians and that has become a unique 'problem' – more and more people want us to get involved with the war they’re having with the establishment over an environmental issue in which they are heavily involved. For this reason we have set up a page called “Your Voice”, where we welcome op-ed blogs on issues we don’t regularly cover."