Hey, it’s an election year

Dear Editor: As an addicted media hound, I can’t help but being amazed at the almost instant and amazing transformation of our Christy Clark government in the last few months.

After three-and-a-half years of increasing every taxpayers burden through yearly increases in hydro, ICBC and virtually every fee charged by government services, we’ve now made it to the promise land. MSP premiums will be cut by 50 per cent even though B.C. is the only province to charge them in the first place. All of a sudden money is being thrown at schools, hospitals, infrastructure and roads that have been underfunded or ignored for the past three and a half years.

Even the Minister of Children and Families has become instantly engaged in an issue of a family with a Special Needs person as reported by Global TV instead of her usual no comment/no action because of the privacy act. Our hard-hatted premier has even come out to say she recognizes that rural areas and small towns haven’t enjoyed the largesse of the multitude of well paying jobs that all of those government ads tell us about.

The solution is to increase the high-speed Internet availability in these small centres so Microsoft and Apple and all the big companies will flock to places like Summerland, Invermere, Spuzzum, and maybe even Clearwater although none of these towns have a Starbucks as of yet.

The point of my rant is not to necessarily advocate the other guys because from years of experience, I wouldn’t trust them to not do the same. Unfortunately, it seems the object of the political game is to not serve the electorate anymore, but to say anything and do anything to stay in power for the benefit of special interest groups that fund the individual parties and keeping their cushy jobs.

Because recall legislation makes it all but impossible to hold a government accountable in the midst of their tenure, we are at the mercy of watching this same scenario repeat itself time and time again. Andy Richards

Summerland