The Vancouver Province is reporting that the B.C. NDP have accused the Liberal government of hiding an $800-million budget deficit this year. The budget forecasts a surplus of $197 million for 2013-2014, following several years of deficit spending. Ralston likened the 2013 budget to the financial plan laid out by the Liberals ahead of the 2009 election, which turned out to be a deficit.
"The B.C. Liberal government's election year budget is deliberately designed to hide a deficit of close to $800 million in the current year," Ralston said at a news conference in Vancouver. "In our view they are artificially and deliberately suppressing expenditure growth in order to falsely claim a balanced budget." Ralston said the government included unexplained asset sales to put the Liberals back in the black.
Finance Minister Mike de Jong dismissed the claim and said “if the NDP have a plan, they should present it to British Columbians, de Jong said. "The NDP, as always, wants to spend more," he said, which will lead to higher taxes, worsening credit and higher borrowing costs for B.C."
Wait a minute… that’s exactly what the BC Liberals have done. Bruce Ralston, a duly elected MP from Surrey has accused the Christy Clark government of faking their pre election budget. Is that true or false? NDP stereotypes aren’t relevant.
CBC is reporting that the fake budget includes speculative revenues from natural gas royalties and asset sales. That’s exactly what Bruce Ralston said. Selling assets to balance the budget is very short sighted. You can’t do that forever. You have to eventually balance the budget. Especially when they sell off assets at fire sale prices to insiders who contribute to their political campaigns like at the Campbell Heights Industrial Park in Surrey.
The BC Liberals from Gordon Campbell to Christy Clark and beyond to the Surrey wing nut high jacking, has constantly been the most corrupt and arrogant government in the history of the province. You can’t live a lie forever. Sooner or later people will wake up and smell the coffee.
I happened to get some spam recently claiming to be from Carol James about this very subject. In it she claims the fake Liberal budget hides the $800 million deficit and states: "How did they do this? - Unrealistic growth projections - A fire sale of assets that hasn’t even happened yet - BC Hydro profits that simply don’t exist."
Unrealistic growth progressions. That’s always convenient in a pre election budget. Oh yeah we project we’ll be making much more money as soon as we finally leave office. The fire sale of public assets is a huge concern. That is a one trick pony they keep riding into the dust. As I’ve said it’s always accompanied by fraud where insiders make millions at the taxpayers expense. They ripped off $2 billion from the public purse in Campbell Heights. Who knows how much they stole in the BC Rail fire sale.
BC Hydro profits? That is just plain FRAUD. Every year they keep deferring this huge out of control BC Hydro deficit tax payers will one day have to pay for. The smart meter scam made it worse but that wasn’ t the real cause. Campbell’s Liberals were the cause. They are the ones that broke BC Hydro and turned it into another Enron. Them denying that and claiming a profit from BC Hydro for an election budget is FRAUD. It is a criminal, act. They should be in jail.
The Campbell government privatized part of BC Hydro. I’m not talking about Terson gas. That isn’t the problem. That was just duplication. The problem was with the BC Hydro they did privatize. The brokers who sold power to the public company at an inflated rate which totally ripped of the taxpayers. That was another criminal act that desperately needs to be repaired.
These private brokers (B.C. Hydro's Powerex subsidiary) were charged with Enron in California for false billing. Now we see the same thing here in BC where consumers including struggling seniors are left with no legal recourse for insanely huge bills. These fraudsters are snatching purses from seniors. The private brokers selling power to BC Hydro at an inflated price is a huge scam that affects all of us.
The Vancouver Sun reported that Questionable bookkeeping methods by BC Hydro have put ratepayers on the hook for $2.2 billion in public debt – with no apparent plan in place to recover the money, Auditor-General John Doyle warned in an audit report. Doyle said that if Hydro stays with the practice of deferring large debts rather than paying them back and balancing its books each year, the total debt will swell to $5 billion by 2017.
I complain a lot about the misery the crack and crystal meth dealers cause on the street. Yet that doesn’t nearly affect most of us in BC like this huge scam at BC Hydro. This is gonna gouge us for years to come. The BC Liberals who did that and are hiding that criminal act with a fraudulent budget claiming tax revenue from BC Hydro need to be charged and arrested. Why that hasn’t happened is absolutely astounding. It is way worse than BC Rail ever was.
