WhereTheDeanGoesThe
ClubFollowsVille
In response to our query about the Dean's first memo, the boss of the legislative press gallery has released a second more fulsome memo in the pixels of the VSun.
It starts like this:
Premier Christy Clark left it to cabinet minister Amrik Virk Thursday to respond to the information watchdog’s devastating findings about the culture of coverup inside the B.C. Liberal government.
Clark knew very well what was coming. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, respecting protocol, had shared her findings with the government in advance.
The government fired back with a legal letter, disputing some aspects of the report and seeking more time to respond. Denham, to her credit, stuck to the scheduled release time of 9:30 a.m. Thursday...
Which, to mine own eyes at least, indicates that Mr. Palmer, like us, did enjoy the fact that Ms. Denham ensured that the release of a public report was timed such that it would be discussed by the public's representatives in, you know...public.
Which is a good thing.
Right?
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Mr. Palmer goes through 3 or four of the journalistic 'W's in his piece but, as so often seems to be the case in his coverage of this (and the previous) BCL government, refuses to go anywhere near the fifth one otherwise known as 'Why'.
And, for those of you wondering (and/or scoffing)....Of course Mr. Palmer responds to what we discuss here at this little old F-troop list blog....Ha!
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The Wars Come Home
1 hour ago
25 comments:
Damn!
Would have taken the under (per your previous post), for quite a bit of change!
Dean beats me with a clear over!
(Reason #10,349 why I should never bet!)
Mike
Mike--
Me too, actually....
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o/t
How science helped to swing the Canadian election
http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/oct/21/how-science-helped-to-swing-the-canadian-election?
And while I'm o/t:
How was the reaction to the strategic voter's guide?
There were a larger than usual number of comments - how many hits did it get?
One is wondering WHY the B.C. lieberals are so good at deleting all those emails. A reasonable conclusion: they are up to no good and if the public found out, there would be a recall of MLA's immediately.
Hacking is such a bad practise but there are days like this when it would be entertaining to find out what was "deleted" if a group such as Annonymous found their way into the information.
We have had the Highway of Tears situation going on for more years than I care to remember. Now there are deleted files on the subject? Just another reason Canada needs an inquiry into the 1,200 Murdered/Missing First Nations Women. What are the B.C. Lieberals hiding?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/clarks-open-government-promise-a-complete-utter-sham/article26963105/
Edward Snowden and the NSA have shown us there is no such thing as permanent deletion. If the BC Liberals really want those emails, they just have to ask our American cousins for them.
Actually, as a member of the '5 Eyes' consortium Canada does have access to them now - maybe CC should call JT and have them forwarded to the FOI office.
Definitely an step up from the late Friday afternoon toilet flush.Bravo Ms. Denham! I think Mr. Palmer should go hat in hand back to his old job as rock critic for the Vancouver Spun, um, Sun.
O/T Anon-Up-Thread--
Thanks for the link to the piece by Michael Halpern...In addition, in the realm of 'basic' science a really big problem is that, essentially, the decisions on how to run the major granting agencies are squeezing the 'discovery' projects out of labs across the country in favour of more mature translational/applied/big bang/commercializable projects. There are all kinds of bad things about this, but (at least in my opinion) the worst aspect is that it is negatively affecting the young, sharp kids in the game the most. Why?...Well, it is those kids who most often doing the real discovering which means that they are not, by definition, proposing to do 'late stage' and translatable projects. Thus, increasingly, they have a very hard time getting funded. Canadian biomedical researcher Jim Woodgett wrote eloquently on this subject recently.
Regarding the Strat Voting post...Ya, it was pretty popular (although it took a while for me to remove all of the slime that accumulated during all the shilling I did all over the place)...Usually the blog receives about a thousand visits a day...Saturday to Monday last week accumulated about 6K (the big day was Saturday)...While satisfying, this was nothing compared to the attention this place got when I wrote quite a lot about the teachers' strike from a different POV than the majority of the proMedia...Of course, there were lots of good places to get info on Strat-Voting this time around.
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eaf--
This goes back to 2003 and the then BCL premier's then right-hand-man...It has been dubbed by some to be the 'Dobell Doctrine'.
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Anon-2-Above--
Most excellent point.
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Anon-Above--
Bravo, indeed, for Ms. Denham...Wonder if this will trigger the usual response from the Clarklandians for those independent officers that go crazy and start acting, you know, independently.
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The nice thing about blogs is they document what went on at the time. Thank you for the re-fresher course on the subject.
it might be about time there was a law which had "penalties" for deleting government business. Not slap on the hands, but penalties, such as not just large fines, but when you're in office/power money is no barrier, but real live time in jail. It may sound harsh, but how else can some be convinced that democracy includes government business being part of the public's right to know about what their government is doing.
“I thought that everything was being done properly,” she [Premier Christy Clark] told reporters. “There hasn’t been any complaint about the way I function.”
On the contrary, through 2½ years and four reports from the information watchdog, the accusing finger has been pointed straight at her office.
She came into office vowing “transparency and openness.” Instead she delivered a mockery of those promises. - by Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun
I don't think VP remembers how to say 'Dobell' because that would condemn his own silence; and so, he keeps talking about the last 2½ years while conveniently ignoring the 12 years before CC's premiership.
SH
I couldn't place Dobell, so I googled him...I forgot about this slap in the face to decency:
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/09/06/Order-of-BC/
ps, Anyone have a Coles Notes version of the litany of BC's bad actors? My blank about Dobell, has me wondering who else has been lost to my memory. I would like to have that at the ready, to expose re-worked history generated by digital influencers and assorted government apologists.
how low can BC go.
http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/natural-gas.aspx?timeframe=18m
"You got to get rid of these" p26
https://www.oipc.bc.ca/investigation-reports/1874
Petition
https://www.change.org/p/premier-christy-clark-technology-innovation-and-citizens-services-minister-amrik-virk-opposition-leader-john-horgan-andrew-weaver-vicki-huntington-disable-the-delete-button-and-more-premier-clark?recruiter=53590257&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=share_twitter_responsive
It beggars belief.
BC Liberals claim it has no records related to health firings - by Rob Shaw, Vancouver Sun
CC says: "In core government, we produce something like 220 million emails a year..."
Anybody know how much storage that would be? a Terabyte? a Petabyte?
Some maths...
52 weeks in a year...
5 work days/week, or 260 working days...
minimum vacation is 3 weeks, or 15 work days (most get more)...
12 work days off for holidays (New Years Day, Family Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Victoria Day, BC Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving, Remembrance Day, Christmas & Boxing Day)...
So, about 233 working days (and we won't even try to figure out how many work a flex week with every other week being only 4 work days).
Premier Christy Clark says government produces over 944,000 emails per DAY.
Even if we were to count all 365 days as (cough) productive (/cough), the total would still be a stultifying 600,000+ emails a DAY!
It beggars belief.
Given some 40K employees, that would be a reasonable 25 per day average, which might still be high but if you count every copy generated from a large cc: list, etc, it seems doable. Say they are mostly little meeting announcements with the occasional big attachment, average an even 1KB per message, and you've got 220TB per year, which Amazon Web Services will charge you $6000/month to store. Mind you that also assumes your system foolishly keeps duplicate copies of identical emails (from/to/cc) doesn't compress, etc, which hopefully it isn't stupid enough to do. But assuming much more expensive storage, fancy software, etc, etc, etc, do we value this historical record at a $1M per year? An unknown variable is whether storage costs will fall faster than the archive grows or not, but at a minimum they will fall a bit, so each years incremental addition of data will cost less to hold than the last.
Thanks all...Apologies for the slow responses...Day job, etc. getting in the way of blogging.
For those not familiar with the 'Dobell Doctrine' you might want to have a look at...This..
And I highly recommend two recent posts from the two Pauls...Ramsey and Willcocks.
(watch for a secret edition of the 'Keef Report' in one of the above links!)
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And...To return to Paul R.'s cost calculation above...That means we could get 11 years of total storage for the cost of one Bogus Bollywood Bonanza.
Imagine that!
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The V. Sun's Rob Shaw gives a bit of a historic overview of BC's FOI laws.
I note that Rob Shaw is on the Twit machine proclaiming the NDP started all this e-mail secrecy back in 1999 and Christy has just been following their lead.
ProMedia usually jumps to the defense quicker than the week or so it took this time. Must be losing their touch...
At the risk of dating myself, there was no email (practically speaking) in 1999. Or perhaps more accurately, most politicians like me never used email in 1999. It was some newfangled thing. So hard to argue, even for the media, that email secrecy started during ndp.
Stone
Quotes
Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure.
If you live long enough, the venerability factor creeps in; first, you get accused of things you never did, and later, credited for virtues you never had.
@Glen Clark:
Exactly. But as with so many other examples, they’ll try to make the argument anyway. Especially the self-imagined journalistic titans in the legislative press gaggery.
The real issue is that even if it was true you started it, the BC Liberals have been promising complete transparency for 15 years (more if you consider their promises in Opposition) and have received serial condemnations for and recommendations to fix their actions to the contrary while in government. There is much proof that instead they have taken subterfuge to record-setting lows.
I would argue that the deliberate destruction of our valuable government property for their self-interest and contrary to BC statute constitutes breach of trust under the Criminal Code of Canada, and far more serious sanctions exist there than those under the provincial Offense Act from which the BC Liberals retroactively pardoned themselves.
What Lew said.
And....
Why aren't the Lotuslandian proMedia Club members pouring over every inch of the public record trying to figure out what was going on in the Premier's office during the verifiable period when all those Emails were being destroyed IN THE PREMIER'S OFFICE?
Come on you people who are supposed to be informing us know nothing peons about what is really going on in this province...
Do it.
Give us a timeline.
We double dare you.
Sheesh
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BC Hydro maxed out at 80 20?
PAYMENT TO THE PROVINCE
Under a Special Directive from the Province, the Company is required to make an annual payment to the Province (the Payment) on or before June 30 of each year. The Payment is equal to 85 per cent of the Company’s net income for the most recently completed fiscal year unless the debt to equity ratio, as defined by the Special Directive, after deducting the Payment, is greater than 80:20. If the Payment would result in a debt to equity ratio exceeding 80:20, then the Payment is the greatest amount that can be paid without causing the debt to equity ratio to exceed 80:20.
No Payment has been accrued as at June 30, 2015 as the Company’s debt to equity ratio is at the 80:20 cap prior to the calculation of the Payment. As at March 31, 2015, $264 million was accrued and the Payment to the Province was made in June 2015.
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