Dear Sir:
Some friendly advice for Premier Christy Clark: I saw a play recently, Arsenic and Old Lace, in which the protagonists discussed earnestly whether they could take credit for the natural death of a hapless sole so they could add him to their body count of murder victims.
The point was moot, the argument absurd, but quite funny because it was intended to be. The play was a farce after all; it is supposed to be funny.
Following my loopy brain’s path it made me think of your efforts to explain how doubling B.C.’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is going to be good for the planet. I have to hand it to you; you are making a valiant effort to explain this. But if you were a character in that play expressing the tortured logic you have been using, you would have ended up in the same nut house that all the principle characters did.
Unfortunately, Premier, the spin can’t work, it isn’t working, and it won’t work. If you were going to write a play about your GHG sales job the only way to present it would be as a farce. It would be a good one, you can tell because people are already laughing.
We need to fix this so here is what you do Ms. Clark. Take some good advice from another old friend, Elsie Wayne, (former Mayor of St. John, one of only two Conservative MPs to survive the Mulrooney meltdown of 1993). In Elsie’s words, it goes like this: SHUT UP?!
You can’t win this point, so stop trying! It just makes you look disingenuous, so stop it. We are sick to death of disingenuous politicians. Grow a backbone like Teddy Roosevelt and say what you mean!
It would be a lot less disingenuous to admit that we are just going to ignore the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Target Act, and get on with it. In fact the honourable thing to do would be to repeal that act altogether and consign it to the ash heap of history. At least that wouldn’t be disingenuous. You wouldn’t need to spin it because everybody in the world could see you were telling the truth. It is also entirely possible that the government of Australia might pass a motion congratulating B.C. for getting rid of such a silly law. (That wacky Gordon Campbell, what was he thinking?) Hey, it’s happened before!
I guess there might one teeny little downside though. Repealing the act would strip away the last vestige of the mirage of a moral basis for the carbon tax, so that would have to go too. That’s okay we won’t need it because we’ll be living in debt-free B.C.!
Best wishes for 2014.
Dave Menzies
Terrace, B.C.