The BC Throne Speech this week is a strange document.  It is a defense of a complex web of deceits, a new and ever expanding litany of lies and an attempt at in your face bravado.  This is not the stuff of a normal throne speech that sets out a constructive plan for the future building on the promises of the just completed election.  In this case one is served up a tale of a disempowered government pleading to have us believe that it is a victim rather than the author of its own misfortune.

It is never edifying to hear the powerful speak of themselves as victims.

The speech is replete with claimed blameworthy targets.  An unpredictable economy, an unforeseeable federal demand to implement the HST, dishonest welfare recipients, the misguided BC Utilities Commission, selfish agencies of the government itself and shadowy political opponents have apparently all conspired to trap the government into measures it could never foresee the need for and presumably never liked until now.  In this vein it pathetically tries to explain the long list of dire measures never once mentioned in the election just two months ago.

Perhaps the saddest tale of woes is that of how the economy kept changing unexpectedly and with such little warning that the government couldn’t tell us the truth in the run up to and during the election.  Sure the recession was a surprise to many when it first revealed itself last fall.  The problem is that in a desperate attempt to get through the election the government piled lie upon lie in its reports to voters on the impact of the recession.  In the new year, when most including this writer accurately predicted that government revenue estimates were off by a number of billions of dollars, the Premier simply attacked the author’s of such reports as political enemies.  More unbelievably the government tabled a budget in February that was completely and deliberately false.  The revenue numbers were lies and the deficit estimates were a complete fiction.  Yet all through the election the Premier insisted they were accurate and based on the best information available.  Even its friends in the BC Business Council found that too much to swallow, and after the election began to prepare the ground for the truth to come out.

Then there is the HST.  According to the Premier this major change to taxation never even occurred to him until after the election. This is so preposterous that several pages had to be devoted to a pathetic plea to believe him.   Ditto with the claim that his pork barrel driven private hydro projects produce cheap power when it is needed when it was clear to all who looked including his own Utilities Commission that they produce their electricity in the spring when BC has a surplus of much cheaper power from its publicly owned hydro plants.

So the speech goes on and on attempting to build a defense for the continuing and prolonged deceit.  And none of it convinces at all.  It is simply a pathetic litany of the unbelievable and the preposterous.

Of course the story of adversity requires that the government step up and act to complete the narrative arc.  And so all of the things the government knew it was going to do but wouldn’t tell before the election are set out.  A record deficit, a new tax, cuts in programs, pay freezes, attacks on agencies, welfare baiting, emasculation of the BC Utilities Commission as retribution for trying to protect rate payers and other similar “initiatives” complete the story.  All responses to the victimization of the government by alien forces far and wide.

That is why of course the government has told such a tale of woe about the economy, trying now to make it so much worse than what it said earlier.  After all it needs a justification for all of these actions it knew about and planned much earlier but would not come clean about because of the election.

Of course all governments try to focus on the positive during elections.  What makes the Campbell government performance so reprehensible is the extensive and deep rooted web of lies and deceits that were involved.  It is one thing to promise a rosy future.  It is another to repeatedly lie when challenged and to construct an election program around a web of falsehoods and lies.

In BC, citizens have the means to punish such behavior.  It is time that recall is called into action and that government candidates answer for all of this.