Kool-Aid drinkers. That's how provincial New Democrats have often described the Liberals and their past tendency to unquestioningly follow party leader Gordon Campbell's decisions - at least when the cameras are rolling.
But Public Eye has exclusively learned Liberals attending the party's upcoming biennial convention in Penticton could be debating a number of resolutions that appear at odds with the Campbell administration's policies.
Among them are calls to: establish a "committee or commission" that will develop a "goal-driven, consistent and funded provincial arts and cultural policy" - something the party's Port Moody-Coquitlam constituency association acknowledges doesn't presently exist.
A resolution drafted by the association states this needs to change because Liberals value "the contributions and sustainability of artists and cultural organizations as essential components of our society."
Of course, that hasn't stopped the party's MLAs from traumatizing those organizations with budget cuts. But we digress.
Another is to develop an alternative to contracting out community and municipal policing services to the RCMP.
The government has already come out against a similar proposal, having ruled out establishing its own provincial police force. But as a resolution drafted by the governing party's constituency associations in Powell River-Sunshine Coast and Kelowna-Mission points out, "The RCMP has had a number of organizational and personnel issues in recent years. Reforms have been slow in coming."
As such, those associations want the government to "work with Alberta and other western territories and provinces to examine a common police training and recruitment vehicle preparatory to create a regional police force capable of carrying out provincial law enforcement duties" and essentially reverse the cuts the government has already made to the province's geological survey branch.
The branch is responsible for producing the information mining companies use to determine where best to focus their exploration efforts.
But, according to the British Columbia Chamber of Commerce's most recent policy and positions manual, it has suffered "debilitating budget cuts totaling 18 per cent in the past two years."
As a result of those cuts, "The ability of the Survey to perform its mandate is seriously threatened," putting at risk thousands of mining-dependent, rural jobs.
It's against this backdrop that the Liberal constituency association in Cariboo North has drafted a resolution that would see the government "increase funding for the geological survey branch and for geoscience initiatives to increase exploration activities for new mines and create a positive investment climate."
That resolution also calls on the province to "speed up permit issuance on new/existing projects and mine development" and boost the budget for its mining and mineral division.
Still, those resolutions are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most constituency associations have submitted proposals consistent with where the government is already headed. Some just want to get there faster.
For example, a resolution drafted by the party's Saanich North and the Islands constituency association is calling on the Campbell administration to inject even more private sector involvement into the public healthcare system.
The resolution states -"long experience shows that government-run systems are generally more expensive and less efficient than private services."
As a result, the association wants the government to "support undertaking real planning to integrate private services into the provincial health care system, so that their efficiencies can help to reduce the costs, while maintaining quality with a single public payer."
Sean Holman is editor of the online provincial political news journal Public Eye (publiceyeonline.com). He can be reached at [email protected].
