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On Media Endorsements, Hidden Booze Taxes, And The End Being Near

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by Sean Orr | T-minus one day until the biggest election since the last biggest election and the biggest one until the next. Will the Wild Wild West continue unabated or will we have a government that reins it in? Will the corporatists pull off yet another “upset” with their packed war chests and cash-for-access dinners? Will the government that has presided over the opioid and housing crises be held accountable for their lack of action? Will the Greens play spoilers or collapse at the last minute? Will the polls be as wrong as they were last time and the NDP win in a landslide?

Have the myriad scandals, boondoggles and lies caught up with Christy Clark’s Liberals or will their brand of populism successfully dupe low information voters?

Behold, our own piss-poor excuse for the so-called “the fourth estate”: In B.C., hold your nose and vote Liberal. No, ‘perfect’ is not on the ballot, Globe & Mail. But one of the most corrupt politicians in North America is.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the richest man in Canada endorsed the B.C. Liberals for the second straight provincial election.

And so much for Postmedia employees discovering their own precarity:
Editorial: Liberals still best choice for B.C..

Dock Currie: “When the Globe and Mail, the Province, and the Vancouver Sun all line up to obligingly lick the boots of and endorse Christy Clark, you can’t keep trotting out this ridiculous notion that the ‘free press’ are stalwart defenders of the public interest, they’re not, they’re mouthpieces of class rule – from the owners right on down through the newsroom floor”.

But hey, maybe they don’t even need the sycophantic sophistry of Canadian media monopolies: Election ballots misprinted with mark for Liberal in Maple Ridge. And so it begins…

Et tu, Maclean’s? Will money and arrogance cost Christy Clark the B.C. election? Phew.

With just days to go before the vote, the premier still appears blind to the thing most likely to break her party’s 16-year grip on power: the growing perception that a cabal of powerful people—B.C. Liberal donors, lobbyists and corporate heads—are running the province in their own interest.

And yet one of Christy’s bigger scams has gone mostly unnoticed, especially since a B.C. Premier was once forced to resign for getting a deal on a new deck: Many questions remain about Christy Clark’s Dunbar dwelling.

Speaking of Dunbar: BC Liberal supporters are getting desperate. Wow. Editing a video to make David Eby look racist. Deplorable. And yes I just used the word deplorable.

Speaking of desperation: BC NDP desperately searching for some way to lose election. Laughing not on the outside, crying on the inside.

The NDP’s tradition of losing to incompetent and/or corrupt candidates is a long and storied one, not counting a 10 year period where the party embarrassingly won two elections back-to-back. Many NDP voters would view a Horgan victory as a betrayal of the values that they voted for.

Although it might not be up to them: With NDP on verge of kicking out right-wing B.C. Liberals, Weaver’s Greens punch left. And it’s working, the latest Too Close to Call poll has them at a shocking 18.5%.

Let’s hope most of them are those who would otherwise vote Christy, because if they are progressives then they are in for a nasty shock: As B.C. election approaches, Greens get cozy with Liberals.

And while Horgan made an impassioned plea to these “progressives”, Weaver had the audacity to call it a form of voter suppression. Last time I checked, asking someone to vote for you was called “campaigning”.

It’s also suspect because he previously supported strategic voting:

For those of you in the restaurant industry who are worried about liquor reform and the prospect of the NDP’s big government backing a bloated BCLDB: B.C. Liberals accused of secretly imposing ‘hidden booze tax’. In B.C., a case of Lucky Lager cost $34.99 in 2015. This year it’s $39.09. I mean, in saner times that alone would have cost them the election.

So if it isn’t a secret booze tax, foreign political donations, the stipend, tripled deleted emails, child poverty, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, frozen welfare rates, Site C, fighting teachers in court, raw logs, secret tax breaks, partisan ads, MSP premiums, shadow flipping, her free car, her free house, the photo ops, Mount Polley, George Massey, LNG, Kinder Morgan, quick wins, Om the Bridge, BC Rail, cash for access, Burke Mountain selloff, foster care deaths, Laura Miller, Ken Boessenkool, Amrik Virk, grizzly bears, minimum wage, BC Ferries, ICBC, Air Christy, the Translink referendum, forest fires, bus pass clawback, lying about driving down B.C’s debt, lying about B.C. having the lowest middle-class taxes, lying about the NDP hacking its website, lying about Linda Higgins being an NDP plant, lying about killing the HST, calling Horgan sexist, slut shaming Miley Cyrus, pretending to run the Sun Run, running red lights with her son in the car…

…then do it for Roderick: It’s Clark’s Turn to Lose Job, Says Wrongfully Fired Health Researcher.

On Ken Sim’s So-Called “Swagger” and ABC’S Class War

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In his latest read of the local news headlines, Sean Orr hones in on the recent Langley shootings, and the ongoing criminalizing and dehumanizing of the homeless population.