Dear Editor:
I agree with everything Keith Baldrey has pointed out about the shell game the B.C. Liberals are playing with B.C. Hydro, and their accounting practices, which have been pointed out regularly by the Auditor General, but B.C. Hydro is not the only publicly owned and operated service the Liberals are playing shell games with. They are also playing games with schools and hospitals. The shell game started with the Liberals first passing legislation requiring school boards and regional health authorities to balance their budgets. The Liberals then claw back hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon taxes, leaving both schools and hospitals scrambling to find more ways to save money, and since they have already been cut to the bone, they have to resort to slashing jobs, and shuttering or selling off buildings.
Both schools and hospitals are publicly owned buildings and are necessary to provide services to the public, so does it make sense to anyone besides blind Liberals that the Liberals would give these public services a budget to work with, then turn around and demand hundreds of millions of dollars be repaid to the government through a carbon tax? I think all public buildings offering services to the public should either be exempted from paying this carbon tax, or the Liberals should increase the budgets by the exact amount the government is charging them for carbon taxes.
It's not like the Liberals are putting the money in this carbon tax fund on priority issues like improving public transit, not giving it to their corporate sponsors for projects they would have had to do soon anyway with their own money. Giving money to these corporate Liberal sponsors is corporate welfare in most people's world.
Wayne McQueen, Burnaby
