Dear Editor:
Burnaby-Lougheed Liberal candidate Steve Darling seems to be just too busy these days to show up at an all-candidates meeting.
Of course if he’s too busy to see me, a voter, then I’ll be far too busy to vote for him on election day. But maybe I should take some consolation from his absence in knowing that he would have slowed the candidate questioning process down even further whereby every candidate is required to answer every question. That really bogs the process down.
And so it looks like if I want to ask him a question, I’ll have to do it this way. My question to him would be: Does the B.C. Liberal Party still claim that the B.C. Utilities Commission is an independent organization? I ask because when I visited the BCUC public hearing last June and wished to ask questions about the Site C Dam and Smartmeters projects, I was told that those subjects are off limits and would not be discussed. That sounded very undemocratic to me since the panel had obviously been instructed by B.C. Hydro and the Liberal government to answer no questions on those subjects. I told the panel that they’re just puppets of the B.C. government, to which I received no response.
Maybe Steve, the media darling, thinks he can keep his hands clean by just avoiding such subjects and these public meetings. But he won’t do so without his lack of ability to meet the voters being reported on. I call that inexcusable.
Jim Ervin, Burnaby
