Quote:
Originally Posted by whatnext
So it turns out the BC Fiberals scrubbed a whole bunch of recommendations to fix ICBC from a 2014 Ernst & Young Report while they continued to siphon money out of the corp to balance their budgets:
...Those urgently needed actions to cut ICBC’s rising claims costs were hidden from B.C.taxpayers, arbitrarily rejected, and unilaterally deleted from the March 2015 final report by former finance minister and current Liberal leadership hopeful, Mike de Jong.
He admits as much, incredibly, making no apologies. He almost seems proud of his perfidy, doing his own best impression of a human airbag.
If then transportation minister and current co-leadership contender Todd Stone is to be believed, that draft report was doctored by de Jong without his knowledge.
He claims he never even saw that unvarnished analysis, despite the fact that he was the minister who commissioned it. He suggests that he was essentially hoodwinked by de Jong and willfully kept in the dark like the happy mushroom he was....
https://www.straight.com/news/1025306/ma...cs-icbc-fiasco-guaranteed-drive-you-nuts |
The Liberals deserve nothing less than decades in the wilderness for the way they have (deliberately) mismanaged Crown corps. The fact they try to deflect this back to the NDP is breathtaking arrogance. "Eby has had a report on his desk since July! How dare they not have already fixed a problem that was years in the making and hid from the public!"
And of course we have lots of people falling for the privatization trap in response to this, just as the Liberals and their donors want. Not understanding that it would have been much easier to guarantee the sustainability of public insurance for decades to come if they hadn't had successive governments raiding the treasury for money.
Too bad we've become so apathetic. Outside those who watch politics regularly, I don't see a lot of anger. And people should be livid over the way the Liberals mismanaged the public insurer and conspired to hide the facts from the public. $400 a year in rate hikes is a lot of money — even the
prospect of it should outrage people.
A scandal of this magnitude 20 years ago would have set off a nuke in Victoria. The cynic in me is worried thatm not only will the BC Liberals will get away with what they did, they'll work with private interests and lobby groups to flip this around and get public opinion on side against the NDP if the new government doesn't fix (read: privatize) ICBC right away. What the Liberals did was essentially embezzle funds from Crowns, not just ICBC, to pad the general ledgers. Think about it. The kind of thing that very well could and should land people in jail.
Either way, if this is the end of the BC Liberals' useful life as the free enterprise party of our generation, most of these corrupt and bought pols will just resurface in 10 years like many of the disgraced Saskatchewan PCs did in the Saskatchewan Party.
