Saturday, November 26, 2016

According To Ron Obvious The BCNDP Should...


...Fight The Next Election With Both Hands Tied Behind Its Collective Back.


In his latest column in the Globe and (nolongerempire) Mail, Gary Mason first praises John Horgan and the NDP for taking a stand against the killing of grizzly bears.

And then, obviously,  Mr. Mason spends most of the rest of his screed taking Mr. Horgan to task for courting big money donors after first brushing aside the fact that the BCNDP have made it crystal clear that they will introduce legislation to halt this business if they are elected.

Because, well, this:

...Mr. Horgan, with the right, Bernie Sanders-type message, could have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through small $50 and $100 donations. He could have said no to the same $10,000 dinners Ms. Clark attends, driving home the distinction between his party and one that trades ingress for dollars...


Now, on a very superficial level that makes a certain kind of simplistic sense, right?

Except, of course, Mr. Mason seems to be unaware (or unwilling to tell his readers) that, under the current rules that the Clarklandians refuse to change, 'hundreds of thousands' in small donations doesn't mean squat when it comes to dealing the BC Liberal's Big Money Cronification-Of-Everything Pay-To-Play Machine.

How do I know this?

Well, I actually went and looked at the publicly available records of party fundraising from 2015.

And right there, in non-searchable, scanned-in black and white it says that the BCNDP raised $1,068,479 from contributions of $250 or less in 2015 (see pg 7).

Which is great given that it is almost twice the $592,440 BC Liberals received in small donations last year (see pg 8).

But here's the thing that really matters...

In 2015 the Clarklandian cronification machine brought in $9,379,808 in big money donations, more than $6 million of which came from corporations and commercial operations.

By way of comparison, the Dippers raised $1,983,011 in large donations, most of which came from individual citizens (i.e. less than $400K and $150K came from unions and corporations, respectively).

Which means that the BC NDP cannot win by exclusively courting small donors under the current rules that they cannot change until the win.

Because even if they could raise a clearly impossible $5 million in brand new money through small donations from supporters without money or power (or cronification leverage) the Dippers would still be way behind the BC Liberals.

And that's just based on 2015 numbers without knowing how things have gone in 2016 when Ms. Clark and friends have gone hog-wild with the secret big money meet-ups.

****

So...

Here's what I really have to say.

To hell with the obvious.

Because I, for one, do not want the only side that has a hope-in-heckfire of beating the BC Liberals to march into the upcoming election maelstrom without any money to fight the avalanche of crony-bought propaganda that is massing, golem-like, just over the New Year's horizon.


OK?


______
Why am I so upset about this codswallop given everything else that is going down in the local Lotuslandian proMedia at the moment?... Well, in addition to the fact that superficial obviousness was used, once again, by Mr. Mason to twist a story into something that it is not there  is also the matter of headline to the piece: "Controversial fundraiser leaves B.C. NDP as guilty as the Liberals". Clearly, one look at the actual numbers (i.e. the facts) outlined above demonstrates that this is patently false....But, then again, it did take a lowly idiot blogger such as myself about 93 seconds to look up said facts...If you get my drift.


.

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

playing nice and not complaining of BC Libs odious track record did not work at all last time for BC NDP.?

Anonymous said...

IMO-Site C is a 10 billion dollar lie.Let it die?

RossK said...

Spot on Anon-At-The-Top--

And in that one they had the money to do said complaining/explaining to great effect. This time 'round unfortunately, at the moment at least, they clearly do not.


.

Lew said...

Unilateral disarmament is not recognized as a winning tactic for a country at war.

There is no reason to expect the tactic to succeed in this battle either; no matter how much Mr. Mason and his masters would like the NDP to go quietly into the night.

Anonymous said...

Mr Horgan and the NDP should be very, very happy about all of this mass media attention.

First by Van Sun editorial board two weeks ago in honour of Liberal convention weekend, and now Gary Mason. Both prominately picturing and naming and smearing and flaming and falsely equivocating Mr Horgan as if he were the devil incarnate.

All this dirt and smear and frantic fundraising MUST mean Mr Horgan and the NDP are way, way ahead. Yes!



Anonymous said...

What's more egregious is the false equivalency that a fundraiser is a fundraiser. If Horgan has a fundraiser, people are paying money to come talk to a politician. When the Liberals have private parties with ministers as key guests, when it's 10-12 people, that's a situation where captians of industry are paying money to speak directly to people who can influence things today. That's not the same thing as a fundraiser in some hotel ballroom. It's not even close.

Watching people snigger about this on Twitter shows what an uphill battle this is, when otherwise sensible people don't understand the difference and think it's a good idea for one side to play checkers while the other is playing chess.

North Van's Grumps said...

Seeing as how the BC Liberals are rolling in cash, for advertisement and more than likely locked into binding contracts with the media ... the BC NDP should NOT do any advertising. The Reason. As it now stands the public is being bombarded by the BC Liberal GOVERNMENT, taxpayers money, promoting LNG.

Whenever we see the LNG advertising we turn it off, a waster of re$ources which could be used to help families tax burden eg. MSP, Education,

Anonymous said...

the bigger picture context is lost in the article as until the party in power changes the rules ,all are likely to engage just to survive the process.

Unknown said...

He writes for The Globe and Mail so he is anti NDP. This is not surprising.

Crankypants said...

This is just another example of biased reporting by the mouthpieces known as the MSM. Never let logic and facts get in the way of creating the news as we know it. Even when Mason railed against Christy Clark's fundraising excursions and $50k stipend he had to bring up the fact that other parties held somewhat similar fundraisers and John Horgan even got a new suit out of the deal. One could almost come to the conclusion that they may all be auditioning for future employment with the political party they seem to favour.

I personally find it obnoxious that the various parties are allowed to spend the amount of money they do during a campaign. All this does is allow the leaders to flit from riding to riding at the expense of the local riding candidates. The electorate gets very little information about the people running in their particular riding because of this. All this gets us is a good number of bobble heads.

We deserve much better from both the media, and more specifically, the political parties themselves.

Anonymous said...

Mason,palmer,bauldrey,etc are losing their audiences, and lashing out and acting childish. They are really out of touch and lack integrity and ethics. Ah well they will be remembered for their latest pieces of work just like the american corporate press. in my news finding circles I never comes across these creatures.

Anonymous said...

ivory tower toppling?

Eleanor Gregory said...

I cancelled my Sun and G & M subscriptions after the last provincial elections. Breakfast has been a much more pleasant experience since.

RossK said...

I have no inside knowledge on the extent of the collective slide (or not) of our local puffed-up punditry in terms of actual numbers of readers. However, overall the local proMedia is still a herd/club and thus what the puffed-up has to say still steers them. Thus, what they have to say does still have influence. In addition, when puffers parrot the codswallopanairanisms of the BCL wizardry it legitimizes said codswallop and thus influences the citizenry which is why I truly believe it must be called out each and every time.

______

Eleanor--

I still love to read newspapers in the dead-tree form. However, like you I can no longer bring myself to buy the VSun, not so much because of its blatant editorial slant, but rather because so much of it is just regurgitated blah, blah, blah in the extreme. As for the Globe, I'm down to Saturday's only.

Anyway...

Yesterday I was sitting, brunchtime, in a very nice little Commercial Drive eatery watching/listening to my new favourite musical duo when I opened the Weekend Globe's 'British Columbia' section and read Mr. Mason's latest. As you might expect, I went ballistic, so much so that my wife C. and our friend D., who were sitting across the table wondered what all the fuss was about. Because I try to go to things like this box-free I had to wait until I got home to look up the Elections BC numbers before taking both the headline and column apart.

Moral of the story...I hear you - brunchtime would have been more pleasant yesterday if I hadn't laid down my $5.05 on the way to the restaurant. Having said that, I though SQuinn's snark-free piece on Translink funding was solid.

.

Eleanor Gregory said...

I received a phone call a few months ago from someone at the V Sun asking me why I had cancelled my subscription. I told him that I was tired of the pro-BCL slant. He chuckled and then said would I consider resubscribing if he offered me a lower rate, say about 1/2 the usual rate. I said no. More chuckling and then the conversation was over.

G West said...

Funny that Ron Obvious, as a former so-called sports writer, would not appreciate that the NDP foregoing fundraising (using whatever means are available) against an entity which uses pay for play and sucks up every corporate dollar it can find would be tantamount to staging a hockey contest and having one team on the ice without skates. Perhaps he'd prefer Horgan give up his hockey stick too?
The ironic thing is that Mason apparently didn't notice the lead Editorial in his own paper on the 19 of November....

persey said...

RossK,

It appears that you are saying that all it takes to win an election is a whole lotta money?

What a sad commentary on our "democracy".

Sad but true.......

Anonymous said...

So if 2 people go to court trail before a judge and one is found to have taken 10 times the other does that mean both are just as guilty .No!
So you dont say just as guilty because that is out of context!

RossK said...

Anon-Two-Above--

I am NOT saying that.

However, I am saying that when one side has, essentially, unlimited funds like never seen before in this province the second side is hugely disadvantaged if it decides to go into an election where it will be outspent (at least) three to one.

And that multiple is arrived at without even bringing the first side's surrogates and turf layers into the equation.

Finally, most importantly, you can't make legislation, and that includes election donation legislation, if you don't win.


.

RossK said...

Sorry...meant the above for persey.

(and good to see you here again, old friend...sorry to be hard-headed and, in some sense non-idealistic, here but I think this is important in a very real-politic sense of the thing)

.

Anonymous said...


More professional media ways ... run down the replies from this thread.

https://twitter.com/ianjamesyoung70/status/802184401031348224


Anony-mousey

RossK said...

A.Mouse--

Ya, saw that...

Most interesting, don't you think, especially given that Rennie Marketing is now 'sponsoring' VSun Real Estate 'copy'.

As a side note, I always thought the UDI should be slipped into a cover of that old Sex Pistols song about Anarchy as in...."Is this the UDI".

Or some such thing.


.

Hugh said...

WTF?

"A massive Chinese insurance company with a murky ownership structure is buying a majority stake in one of British Columbia’s biggest retirement home chains, a deal believed to exceed $1-billion that would give Beijing-based Anbang Insurance an important role in the delivery of health care in B.C."

Retirement Concepts owns and operates about 24 retirement “communities,” mostly in B.C., except for several properties in Calgary and Montreal. What makes it even more attractive is that it also owns holdings of unused or partly developed land that would allow a major expansion of facilities in the future.

The company is an important part of B.C.’s health-care delivery system. Retirement Concepts is the highest-billing provider of assisted living and residential care services in the province. The B.C. government paid the company $86.5-million in the 2015-16 fiscal year, more than any other of the 130 similar providers."


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/chinese-company-anbang-buys-stake-in-bc-based-retirement-home-chain/article33065536/

Anonymous said...

Maybe John Horgan should announce his government would double the amount of government advertising prior to an election if his party becomes government.
That would please the MSM and maybe just maybe have them back off on all the attacks and hopefully wake up taxpayers to the amount currently being spent. John should tell voters that instead of spending 26 million like the Liberals did in the last election, he would increase that to %52 million because taxpayers don't appear to disagree with that type of spending by government.

Guy in Victoria

Anonymous said...

Further to Anonymous's suggestion above, perhaps the NDP should also adopt Trump's strategy: make some outrageous statements and don't worry about details such as 'truthfulness'.

They could start by 'revealing' that the Liberals are planning to privatize BC Hydro within three years, and rates will then double. They could also say that the Liberals have a plan to privatize all children's and mental health services and that selected provincial parks will be converted to new Resource Development Sites to generate jobs.

If these claims don't get the voters' riled up then nothing will.

Lew said...

Anon@9:53:

Your suggested "outrageous statements" are likely closer to the truth than we think.

davemj said...

With all the insane statements made by the insane idiots!! led by the most insane leader of the most insane Government with the crap of the most corrupt media whose claptrap is dictated and ordered by the majority owners of the radio,& print reporters brain dead hacks!!! Whose news comes from the Clarklandian B,S spin and whose family are employed by Cash Crunchy .Let,s make a list of all the media and backers from Daly,Martin,Goode,Baderdash,Palmer,Fletcher,Mason,Smart,Leslie,Geesus don't have not enough time to go on,but the list is never ending lest not forget the conflict commissioner and his son Lord help me Jesus we,ve wasted it so, Lord help us Jesus our soul is in your hands, Thanks Chris

North Van's Grumps said...

May 4, 2005 Pacific Gazetteer

The List

Highlights of Gordon Campbell's Record

43. Closed 113 schools.

44. Deleted 2,500 teachers (350 teachers because of declining enrollment; the rest because of government cuts).

45. Broke contract with teachers.

46. Increased class sizes.

47. Closed over 100 school libraries.

48. Cut special needs education.

49. Increased college and university tuition fees by 104 ....etc

Anonymous said...

Also?-IMO
C difficile deaths around 100 after health cleaning contract changes?
lied of BC finances condition when took over?
sold BCRail after saying he wasnt going to?
6 million paid out to for Basi Virk to stop BCRail court case?
got into legal trouble in Hawaii.?
said no HST then HST fail? -petition drive

Sold BC gas?
http://thetyee.ca/Views/2005/08/15/TerasenDeal/

sold out BCHydro by buying premium IPP/ROR contracts?

Anonymous said...

Anony-mousey coming back one more time.

So I went and had a look at your link to Rennie writing adver-copy-torial, or whatever, for the VS. Not being a reader, either (cancelled Post Media when they censored Margaret Atwood, the yellow wrapper thing) didn't know the VS had stooped so low.

Striking top-right slug-line-link (?) placement for "Elderly BC renters living in fear over rising rents", right above all flashing rotating Rennie ads, currently sandwiching Christy Clark's video of her parks privatation scam. Exactly makes a point. I've captured it for my scrapbook.

Also like your List. Great memory refresher. Bookmarked.

Anonymous said...

After reading the above, what I'm seeing is an election in 2017 that is a waste of time. Corporations have bought and paid for what amounts to a political entity, that is an organized conspiracy of criminal intent, to subvert the democratic process and allow the corporations free unrestrained access to governance and policy making. The individual voter is essentially powerless to enact change or have a say as to how his taxes are acquired or spent, or stop what can only be seen as organized white collar crime, in the guise of a so called democratic government.

Sounds like the national socialist party of the 1930's in Germany. Rights are stripped from the voter one by one. The voter and groups of people are segregated into factions. Governance through the courts will eventually give way to orders in council. The unused legislature is a monument to the demise of a healthy democracy.

What you have is a kleptocracy run by insiders and corporations. Your vote is meaningless, you assign your right to your candidate, but the political party whip, controls your candidate within the party, essentially removing your say in governance for the "good" of the party, and its insiders and supporters.

Congratulations.

Your now part of a pseudo economic dictatorship, run and manipulated for the benefit of the corporations and the elites. You finance their setup through your tax dollars.
Privatise assets, publicize debt...

You lose...