david hurd
Golden Star Editor
Local MLA says he is happy with certain initiatives outlined in B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s live televised address on October 22, but says Campbell is still missing the mark.
Campbell outlined a package of tax cuts aimed at re-invigorating the economy, but Columbia River-Revelstoke MLA Norm Macdonald says the changes are pretty modest and the address was over-hyped, and should have taken place in the legislature.
“It’s pretty modest stuff that he was talking about.”
Much of the changes to taxation, says Macdonald are re-announcements, with some of the timelines changed.
“It was a speech that was over hyped. It was clearly thrown together quickly.”
There were some things within it that I was happy about. It had been talked about for awhile, about the need to deal with property tax issues for a whole host of businesses and elements of the public, and they did deal with part of that with the removal of the provincial property tax, which is called the school tax.”
Macdonald says the School Tax is misleadingly named as basically it goes into general revenue.”
“If you look on your property tax, there are elements of it that are set by local government, and then there is an increasingly large part of it that is set by the province and goes into the province’s general revenue. That will be described in a number of different ways, but one of the ways will be the School Tax. It could be spent on anything, including education, but it doesn’t directly go to the local education system.”
Macdonald says the cuts going to industry will be a saving of about $50 million.”
“They’re cutting it to industry, and in our area it would be a cut primarily to the forest industry’s property tax, but not residential.”
“It is helpful to the forest industry.”
“Of course that’s a critically important part of the economy.”
He says that the premiere needs to do more to assist this important B.C. industry.
“What the premiere seems to have missed is that forestry has been in deep trouble for a better part of two years, and to date we still do not have a forestry plan from the government. The NDP had put forward a set of ideas and principles for dealing with the collapse of forestry in the province but we do not have anything from the government. With all the resources that our government has it is complete neglect on their part that they have not acted more energetically to help what has been the most important industry for this province for decades and decades, and to help rural communities that have been impacted by the downturn of forestry.”
“None of the measure [the premiere] talked about are really in any way huge. I mean they’re small reasonable steps. So overall I would say that it’s over-hyped.”
Macdonald is also concerned with the way the address by Campbell was delivered.
“The other point I would make is that the premiere made a speech that should have been made in the legislature.”
“He increasingly sees himself as more like a U.S. governor than he does the premiere of the province.”
“The legislature should have started sitting at the beginning of October, and this is a speech that he should have given to the legislature, and the fact that he didn’t shows a contempt for that institution.”
“It’s just wrong.”
“Now he is going to call the legislature back on November 20. I don’t know how long he’s going to allow the legislature to sit, but he should have left enough time so we can properly look at the spending and the legislative change that he has in mind. If he does the same thing that he did last May, where he forced through eight bills, created eight laws without the democratically elected members of the legislature to debate them, then again that is something that is fundamentally wrong.”
“The two main points that I want to make is that while there are some things, that when I look at, I think will be helpful to the forest industry in our area, overall he has not recognized the crisis in rural communities that has gone on well over a year. He certainly has done nothing to deal with the downturn in the forest industry, and the impact that has on the communities that are dependent on the forest industry, and that still is what Golden is primarily dependent upon. That forest industry has to be strong, it impacts the majority of people’s lives in Golden. What you would be expecting is a premiere to be dealing energetically with forestry issues, and he simply does not.”
“In his speech to the province on Wednesday there wasn’t the plan for forestry that needs to be there.”
“We always had government in B.C., going back 50 years that dealt with forestry as the priority that it needs to be, and you simply haven’t seen that with this government over the last seven years.”
“Essentially Gordon Campbell runs things himself, and he’s from downtown Vancouver, and I don’t think he gets the wealth that comes into Vancouver from rural areas, and it comes primarily from the forest industry.”
“So they have not made it the priority that it needs to be. So problems that have always existed for the industry, because of outside factors, the government hasn’t done what it needs to do to mitigate those, and to help communities through transitions, and to allow the industry to change as world conditions change.”