Mr. Campbell’s Exaggerations and Misconceptions

by | Oct 20, 2024 | news

The article by former premier Gordon Campbell (2001-2011) in the Victoria Times Colonist (October 8, 2024). https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/gordon-campbell-in-this-election-your-vote-will-make-a-difference-9633547  is replete with statements, not arguments. He stated, “Some will say change can’t happen, but they are wrong. Change will happen if we all demand it and vote for it!”(1) That is exactly what was said by the electorate toward his (hybrid) political entity -libertarian(2)/liberal party (‘the hybrids’)- first elected in 2001 and ruled until their defeat in 2016.(3) 

In the article, he made two initial statements that are connected to his legacy. He stated that BC’s 2024 deficit (under the NDP), “…is estimated at another $8 billion. That’s more than the entire K-12 education system cost when the current government took over.” He’s comparing apples to oranges.(4) Singling out one service area and judging it according to a deficit that is related to a bigger animal is a non-sequitur (latin for ‘whopper’).(5)

This first sentence, referencing the deficit, is connected to his promise that there would be no cuts to the education sector; as soon as he got the crown in 2001 he and his party slashed funding for eduction.(6) Aside from saying one thing and doing another, cutting education funding for the next generations of a workforce is at best self-defeating; at worst, it is a sign of ideology driving policy. In fact, such decisions are not ‘common sense’, a phrase that conservatives often use to demonstrate their alleged fitness for office. This type of vague nonsense phrase is bleated without definitions, data or explanatory notes.

Mr. Campbell’s mention of a deficit raises an associated point. Government debt, deficits etc are more complex than Mr. Campbell wants to admit. It’s much simpler to state vague words and cast blame than to back vacuity up with facts. For example, the BC debt per capita (person) in 2001, (the first year the hybrid party was in power) was $8,852. By 2016, the year the hybrids were given liberty from government responsibility, the debt was $13,942. So much for consistency in remarks about deficits by another government. From 2017-2019 the debt/person was kept under $14,000. In 2020 the debt/person was $14,230. In 2024 that debt has reached $19,471.(7)

Why did this happen? Conservative pundits infer the rise in debt level cannot be ascribed alone to the pandemic. On this point they are incorrect.(8) The arrival of the pandemic in Canada was officially noted on January 25, 2020.(9) There is a direct cause and effect because of the decisions of BC’s government (and that of Canada) to help citizens with various financial packages during the crisis. These monies for citizens added to debt and deficit. So what? That is what governments are for: to protect and help their citizens in times of crisis. What would a conservative, neo-conservative or libertarian government have done? 

Most restrictions related to covid were lifted around October 2022. Soon after, the world was swept by a massive upswing in prices which was part of the cause of world-wide inflation or the cost of living. Of this we write later.

The second initial whopper has to do with two statements about current health care in BC. The first is, we have to, “stop wait lists in health care from deteriorating in growing death lists”. This kind of statement serves to heighten emotion and obscure the necessity for substance. In BC’s health system people in a given category who are in worse shape than others are triaged for treatment. The notion that a government would allow a system to exist that creates ‘death lists’ is ridiculous. It is also insulting to the extraordinary health care professionals who keep the system running in a shape where most people get the care they need most of the time when they need it. 

Then Mr. Campbell stated, “the [NDP] government randomly closes emergency wards”. This is false, and inflammatory. It is also hypocritical because his government made numerous cuts to the health care system,(10) and then, when the system began to develop problems, used those problems to argue that Canada’s health care was ‘in crisis’ and needed to be augmented by a ‘cheaper’ alternative; a private system.(11) This assumptive trope,(12) by libertarians certainly, and most conservatives, is that government is always, everywhere and in every jurisdiction inefficient and bloated. The only solution is to let loose the superior intellectual and managerial abilities of the private sector (capitalism without outside oversight).

***

There are three main statements that Mr. Campbell makes that need to be pulled out and apart for facts and veracity. These are crime, taxes and the cost of living.

Crime

Mr. Campbell wrote: “if we want to stop the revolving door in the justice system where dangerous people are put back on the streets; if we want to be able to walk down their streets without fear with their children; if we want to use their parks freely and enjoy their community centres with their kids — we need to vote for change.” Campbell, like most hybrids, is implying that crime is out of control, not just in BC but in Canada. Is this perception accurate? He presents no statistics or purported facts and no argument; merely an emotive, ideological statement.

What crime? Non-severe or severe? Adult or youth? In all of BC or in some towns and cities? Drugs, theft, white collar? Property and what kind? Civil or criminal? Etc. None of this is addressed by Mr. Campbell. There is a reason for such vacuity: it is easier to frighten people than to speak about facts. By frightening citizens a demagogue can get elected where someone who makes arguments is boring and unelectable.

The facts, accessible by any, especially a person who once was premier of this province, are the following. Crime as a whole in BC and in Canada is decreasing. “In 2022, BC’s police-reported crime rate (excluding traffic) decreased by 1.6%, from 74.8 to 73.7 offences per 1,000 population.”(13) Since Mr. Campbell seems most exercised by ‘dangerous persons’ and crime in BC, there are two examples to review. In 2021 there were in BC 15.3 violent crimes/1000 persons while in 2022, that rate was 15.3. The property crime rate in 2021 was 42.2/1000 and in 2022 it was 41.9.(14) So much for that conservative/libertarian trope.

Taxes

In his article he stated, “If voters want lower taxes, if they want more take-home pay, we can do that too.” He makes the statement but doesn’t ask why someone would want taxes lowered. Again, have a look at Mr. Campbell’s history on taxes as a politician.(15) There are three important questions that loom in the background of any talk of tax cuts. 

Tax policy is complex: complexity includes implementation, results, and interpretation after the results. A perfect example of this complex phenomenon is Mr. Campbell’s cuts to taxes in 2001. Let’s review.

a) Which taxes are we examining, who benefits and who is most negatively affected by tax cuts? 

On his first day in office, Mr. Campbell cut personal income tax by 25%, the corporate income tax and then corporate capital taxes. Personal income taxes in BC went from being at the national average to the lowest in Canada.(16) This sounds good, but the effect was to reduce services and to close certain social benefit programs, reconfigure them or hand them to private interests. The lower income a citizen has, the more they are affected by the effects of lower taxes. Higher income citizens benefit most because some social programs they would never need and their income goes up, and their taxes down, because the cuts tend to mean more for their bottom lines. The already wealthy are better off after the cuts than everyone else beneath their earning level. And they buy more exclusive stuff when blood is on the streets.(17) This process is typical of libertarian/conservative-backed political choices.(18)

  1. What is the purpose of taxation? 

To live in a civilized state. I like to pay taxes because I know that I benefit from the services I pay for through my taxes. I also know that some of the taxes I pay for I will never use but others will need them. I am happy to pay for taxes that do both. One’s attitude to paying taxes comes down to a choice between caring about one’s neighbour, about inequity and equity. One way to judge for whom to vote in an election is to ask what is meant by reduction in taxes and get whoever is speaking to state clearly who benefits. As above, tax cuts tend to benefit persons who are already well off and affect less wealthy citizens more negatively. There are always some persons who believe that they have more of a right to build their own personal equity without responsibility and so reduce their participation in social equity.

  1. How is funding for government services replaced, given cuts? 

It isn’t. Sometimes the services are eliminated. As noted above sometimes they are reconfigured, including eliminating unnecessary positions, and sometimes privatized. In other words, some social services are snuffed out without regard to how it affects the citizens who need them or reconfigured so that there are fewer people doing jobs that used to require more employees, thus reducing service levels (e.g. numbers of doctors, nurses or school teachers).

Cost of living

Mr. Campbell stated, “The cost of living is soaring because the government is addicted to taxes, not to performance.” This is another hybridean trope, and a confused one at that. It vaguely sounds like it is logical to put ‘taxes’ and ‘performance’ together in the same sentence, opposite to one another and have it make sense, but this is another whopper. Taxes, as we saw above, are a means for a government to create and maintain social programs that help some citizens some of the time to do more than survive, but to help them live with dignity, maybe even thrive and contribute back to society. To help some citizens in this way, governments need taxes to redistribute some monies to those social programs. Of course, some tax monies are needed for governance, the court system, education, basic maintenance on roads, civil protection, to deter outside aggression, and so on.

What has ‘performance’ to do with cost of living? Performance is the process of accomplishing an action. To be honest, I don’t understand what Mr. Campbell meant when he stated the phrase, so I can only guess. My guess is that as a neo-conservative or libertarian, he meant something like the following. If we reward the performances of (few) people in government who succeed in creating good government policies (with the fewest dollars possible) those divine beings will somehow do so without taxes.

In addition, it is argued by pundits that the recent rise in the cost of living(19)-since 2020- could not possibly have anything to do with inflation. However, the cost of living has not become high just in BC or just in Canada, but over the world, which indicates that it was not the fault of any one government, any one leader, province or country. So, blaming any of these individual entities is another whopper. BC and Canada are essentially in the same position in terms of debt to GDP as most other social democratic countries in Europe. Canada’s debt to GDP is approximately 94.1%.(20)As Eurostat, Statistics Explained (‘an official Eurostat website’) states (with stats and figures), “In the euro area the government debt to GDP ratio decreased from 90.8 % at the end of 2022 to 88.6 % at the end of 2023, and in the EU from 83.4 % to 81.7 %.”(21) It is not surprising that Canada’s debt to GDP is higher because the federal, and provincial, governments used their spending power in 2020(22) to support its citizens during the emergency. Yes, the federal government needs to address this issue, but blaming any government for a deficit in the wake of the massive economic crises is disingenuous. How will a conservative government deal with the debt/deficit? How will their inevitable cuts, if elected, help any Canadians besides the wealthy who can weather such economic storms better than anyone else? 

Yes, the cost of living (COL) has become higher, but the reasons are far more complex than Mr. Campbell states. COL is associated with inflation. Conservative voices will also blame this phenomenon on the ruling party, as if any one entity controls it, bounded by no less than the world, as the events in one part of the world affects all other parts. In the last three years, aside from the pandemic, inflation and the cost of living have been affected by massive shifts in unanticipated, new, weather conditions, the regular ‘forest fire season’, higher prices due to supply chain foul ups, war (especially Russia and its war on Ukraine) consequent rises in insurance rates, gas and oil etc.(23) Yet BC has the lowest debt-to GDP ratio compared to other provinces, something of which Mr. Campbell and other hybrid pundits don’t speak.(24)

While there are many points from which to critique Mr. Campbell’s article and there are more explanations for why he made them, there is one major reason that lies behind, not just Mr. Campbell’s statements or his words and actions when he was premier but lies behind most neocon, conservative, libertarian essays, comments, actions, tropes and motivation. It is a fundamental piece of dogma that any and all taxes are bad in that they restrict ‘freedom’ and steal from the pockets of consumers. 

This is an extraordinary attitude. Freedom is understood to be freedom to make money and spend it in any way I wish, without the demand for taxes. Another characteristic of the hybrids is that one should always pay for the goods or products one buys. Even at the base level of thinking about government and social policy in this way should make sense to anyone who wishes to live in a civil society. To do so means taxes, fairly divided amongst the population. This means adequate or progressive taxation. Persons who think taxes are theft are in fact stealing from others in the society in which they both exist. Otherwise, the impress of inequity, rather than the constant balancing act between the moral considerations of equity and taxes, becomes a defining characteristic of a given society. 

Mr. Campbell’s rant-as-essay in the Times Colonist reveals nothing of such considerations. 

Endnotes

  1. https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/gordon-campbell-in-this-election-your-vote-will-make-a-difference-9633547.
  2. Libertarians have been around for a long time but in the years of the Reagan-thatcher-Mulroney triumvirate its ideology had a new start. Its adherents are as diverse as any other group about their ideologies. However, libertarians believe that less, or even no, government is better, that taxes are theft and civil and social democratic governments are a threat to ts adherents’ ‘way of life’. Along with that phrase another is ‘freedom’. When such persons use these words, they mean their freedom, their way of life, and their money; not yours or mine.
  3. https://www.sightline.org/2018/11/01/2001-election-fptp-british-columbia-frustrating-story. See also, The Brief and Frustrating Story of the 2001 Election in British Columbia (sightline.org). 
  4. https://www.langleyadvancetimes.com/opinion/editorial-blame-gordon-campbell-for-current-teachers-impasse-2476166.
  5. There are numerous one-liner whoppers from Mr. Campbell: ‘Our health system is in collapse’, ‘the government (NDP) proudly prohibit a BC citizen from getting the same access to health care as a Quebec resident’, ‘temporary trailers at schools for school rooms means parents and children are not welcome’, etc., but we cannot analyze all of them. 
  6. https://thetyee.ca/News/2016/11/10/BC-Teachers-Win-SCC-Battle.
  7. https://www.taxtips.ca/statistics/bc-provincial-debt.htm.
  8. In a February 22, 2024 report, a Fraser Institute the authors claimed, by splitting the difference, that BC debt was 2016-17 was $14,275/person. They split the difference between 2016/2017 to come up with a figure of $14,275 but the accurate figures for each year was lost the same. $13,942/person and 2017, $13,885. The authors then claimed that NDP pundits cannot use the pandemic as an ‘excuse’ for the rise in debt. However, the NDP kept the debt per person under 14,000. The authors were wrong to infer that the pandemic was not in any way for the increase of debt/person. They were also wrong to infer that the next years to 2024 were not also affected by the repercussions of the pandemic and government response to it for the sake of its citizens. See https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/bc-government-projects-massive-debt-accumulation-and-british-columbians-will-pay-the-price. Authors, Tegan Hill and Jake Fuss.
  9. https://www.taxtips.ca/statistics/bc-provincial-debt.htm.
  10. How BC Is Making Fools of Past Health Spending Alarmists | The Tyee; https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/06/08/Bill29Dies/; https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/briefing-note-gordon-campbell-canadas-arch-health-care-privateer-and-author-of-the-worst-cuts-in-b-c-s-history-september-20-2018; https://www.heu.org/news/media-release/heu-statement-resignation-premier-gordon-campbell; https://www.comoxvalleyrecord.com/opinion/letter-admission-of-campbells-health-care-destruction-better-late-than-never-1588617.
  11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3378609; https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/private-health-care-taxpayer-money-1.6777470; https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/private-health-care-taxpayer-money-1.6777470.
  12. https://newint.org/features/2015/12/01/private-public-sector; https://www.epsu.org/article/public-and-private-sector-efficiency; https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/mythbuster-private-sector.pdf. See also; https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publications/GCPSE_Efficiency.pdf. 
  13. Crime Statistics in British Columbia, 2022 (gov.bc.ca).
  14. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/law-crime-and-justice/criminal-justice/police/publications/statistics/bc-crime-statistics-2022.pdf; Incident-based crime statistics, by detailed violations, police services in British Columbia (statcan.gc.ca).
  15. Campbell’s deficgis-https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/briefing-note-gordon-campbell-canadas-arch-health-care-privateer-and-author-of-the-worst-cuts-in-b-c-s-history-september-20-2018.
  16. https://thetyee.ca/News/2013/05/06/BC-Liberals-Tax-Shifts.
  17. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/13/ultra-rich-still-shopping-for-luxury-despite-inflation-recession-fears.html;https://visiblealpha.com/blog/luxury-goods-inflation-recession-and-defying-the-odds.
  18. 98 BC Liberal Falsehoods, Boondoggles and Scandals: The Campbell Era 45 | The Tyee; 117 BC Liberal Falsehoods, Boondoggles and Scandals: The Complete List | The Tyee; Gordon Campbell: The Forgotten Man | The Tyee.
  19. See note 6.
  20. Canada’s Debt to GDP Ratio | 2024 | Economic Data | World Economics
  21. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php. title=Government_finance_statistics#:~:text=In%20the%20euro%20area%20the,3.4%20%25%20to%20%2D3.5%20%25.&text=In%20the%20euro%20area%20the%20government%20debt%20to%20GDP%20ratio,from%2083.4%20%25%20to%2081.7%20%25.
  22. Canada Government Budget (tradingeconomics.com).
  23. Why the price of vegetable oil has spiked more than other food items | CBC NewsA multitude of factors has pushed up food prices. Statistics Canada attributed the rapid increase in grocery prices to weather conditions, higher prices for fertilizer and natural gas and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; Rising costs, inflation creating affordability concerns for Canadians | CTV News; Inflation: Seven reasons the cost of living is going up around the world (bbc.com).
  24. https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2024FIN0036-001472; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_public_debt.