This Day In Snookland...Jobs, Jobs, Jobs (Not)!

ShiningALittleLightOnTheLotusland
PropStenMachineVille

I first noticed this one late on Friday when David Akin unleashed a series of serial blurbs on the Twittmobile within which he expressed his total flummoxxedness at the fact that our (not) Premier and her surrogates and wizards, not to mention the local Lotuslandian pro-media, were all wurlitzering the falsehood that BC is holding the line on its fantasmagorical ability to make gazillions of jobs appear out of thin air, mandarin oranges, and big budget junketapaloozas.

Or some such thing.

And then, on the weekend Mr. Akin put up a detailed, well researched proBlog post where he took the denizens of Snookland, and their enablers in the local proMedia, to task for their propagandizing/stenography:

...Clark’s government, having staked a good chunk of her political fortunes on the BC Jobs Plan she announced on Sept. 22, 2011, now gets cheered or jeered once a month when Statscan publishes the scorecard on how Clark’s Jobs Plan is doing.

Perhaps in anticipation of a few jeers, the BC government was out early with a press release trying to spin some silver linings into what was otherwise a rather dark cloud. The press release announced that “B.C.’s investment in job creation provides stability” and seemed to rather hope that you wouldn’t look under the hood or examine any of the facts too closely.

The press release notes, for example, that if you look at the year-over-year job numbers for B.C., things don’t look that bad. B.C. job creation record is fourth overall! Just one problem with settling for fourth: The premier quite loudly promised to be number one. That’s what I heard when Clark spoke to the B.C. Liberal convention at the end of October and it’s what The Vancouver Sun’s Jonathan Fowlie (and many other B.C. reporters there) zeroed in on as the key takeaway from the speech:

“We have set out these bold goals and we are reaching our targets,” she continued, adding that while she will announce additions to the plan in the weeks to come, it will form the bedrock of her party’s campaign.

“I’m going to run in the next election on the strong economy. I’m going to run on (being) number one in job creation,” she said.

And yet, the press release issued by Clark’s government concedes:

With 29,400 job gains since November 2011, B.C. ranks fourth compared to other province.

If you’re going to run-on being number one, probably best not to point out to voters that “We’re Number Four!” And it’s true, year-over-year, B.C. trails Quebec (+109,200 net new jobs), Ontario (+85,300) and Alberta (+38,900) .

But —

If you measure the year-over-year performance on a relative basis — the percentage change in the number of employed people — B.C. is doing much worse than fourth. It’s actually sixth or, to put it another way, fourth worst. B.C. has year-over-year employment improvement of 1.29 per cent, just ahead of Ontario’s 1.27 per cent improvement but behind Newfoundland (+3.79%), Saskatchewan (3.07%), Quebec (+2.78%), Alberta (1.82%) and Manitoba (1.36%). In fact, as the astute reader will have already noticed, B.C.’s employment growth over the last year is the worst among the Western provinces...

Or, put another way, the Jobs Plan of Ms. Clark has done absolutely nothing except plunk us down in the middle, at best.

Now.

It was good of Mr. Akin to actually go through all kinds of real (i.e. Stats Can) numbers before he came to this inescapable conclusion that no current proMedia pundit located in Lotusland is willing to trumpet with Doc Severinsenish style, elan and swagger (take that PBrown!).

Interestingly, however, until quite recently there actually was a reasonably objective homegrown group in British Columbia that did the same kind of digging, number sifting and analyzing.

And they came to exactly same conclusion as Mr. Akin.

In fact, they came to the same 'stuck-in-the-middle-with-you' Stealer's Wheelish conclusion about the entire Gordon Campbell/Christy Clark 'Golden Era', and they even noted that the Gordon/Christina record was essentially the same as that of the previous Dipper regime way, way back in the 'bad' old 1990's (the latter, achieved, of course, WITHOUT a massive tax shift from the corporations and the well-off to the backs of everyone else in the province).

Actually, to be more precise, in the dying days of the Dipper regime (i.e. in the new millenium year of 2000) we were doing as well, or slightly better, in each of six of key indicators than our position in the Olympic hype-heap/megaproject moola-assisted year of 2010 just before Mr. Campbell was run out of Lotusland on a rail that the people of British Columbia no longer owned thanks to the other thing that happened during the Golden Era, which was the gargantuan public to private asset shift.

And just who (or what) was this homegrown group who was doing all this analyzing and concluding and ranking you may be asking?

Why, it was a little provincial government-sponsored outfit called the 'Progress Board'.

And it was set up by Gordon Campbell.

And, surprise (!), in one of her first acts after after she gained control of the BC Liberal government, Christy Clark killed it.

The Progress Board, I mean.

But, based on what we have seen of Ms. Clark and Wizards behind her curtains so far, perhaps that was not the least surprising in retrospect.

After all, as Mr. Akin makes clear above, it would appear that there is no room in Snookland for fact-based truth-telling amongst all that propaganda and stenography that is being catapulted onto the Six O'Clock news five days a week.

Regardless whether or not that 'news' for 'real' or bought and paid for.

OK?


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Paul Willcocks, who wrote the 'death of the Progress Board' linked to above, also wrote an important piece about the people behind the numbers who lost their jobs in BC last month...here.
Meanwhile, it is now a full week since the false Railgate affidavit story broke, and....You guessed it...The only proMedia piece on the thing is still just the original one by Mark Hume in The Globe...
Meanwileyercoyote...Rumour has it that at least one local media maven is getting ready to drop the bomb that Adrian Dix is secretly, with the blinds drawn and all the doors locked, reading 'that' book....You know the one by Rod Mickleburgh and Geoff Meggs about....gasp!....Dave Barrett.

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