B.C. businesses advocate against their own best interests

The ads that the Independent Contractors of B.C. and the Coalition of B.C. Businesses were running, supporting the B.C. Liberals, and claiming an NDP government would threaten jobs and incomes, are examples of a profound misunderstanding of business's own best interests.

Aside from being misleading--it was NDP deficit spending in the '90s that kept the economy functioning during the Asian meltdown, by building schools and providing other public services which supported people's jobs and purchasing power--these ads attacked the party which would actually do the most for business. In addition to being more attentive than the Liberals, who tend to take business support for granted, the NDP's policies in themselves are good for businesses, especially smaller ones.

For example, the tourist industry often expresses concern about the bad impression the homeless make on visitors. The homeless are there because the Liberal Government refuses to provide the supportive housing and other services the mentally ill and addicted need. Why do B.C. businesses support a party whose parsimonious ways make conditions worse for business?
It's not as if the Liberals were good fiscal managers. On the contrary, their propensity for saving a few dollars in the short-term almost invariably leads to greater spending later on. For example, after refusing to pay $18 million to bury a high-powered hydro cable, the Liberals are now on the hook for upwards of $70 million to buy out the very home-owners the government fought against for so long.

Or how good was it for B.C. businesses when the Liberals shovelled over half-a-billion dollars into the German ship-building industry for boats that would have been better built in B.C.? Why do B.C. businesses support a government that wouldn't even allow B.C. shipbuilders to bid on the ferry contracts?

Similarly, every dollar the Liberals 'save' by refusing to adequately fund child care and by keeping welfare rates at punitively low levels, not only means less money is available to help keep local economies stable, but this cheese-paring policy also ends up costing us large sums down the road in lost productivity, property crimes, violence, police, courts, and prisons. For every dollar invested in children when they're young, we stand to save many more dollars when they're older, but the Liberals prefer to boast about being 'tough on crime' instead of doing something useful to prevent it.

Another example, are the vicious cuts to hospital and homecare workers' pay executed by the Liberals in 2002 to cover their $4.4 billion deficit (largest in B.C.'s history), due in great part to a previous $2 billion tax cut (most of which went to those who needed it least, while the rest of us paid for it in cuts to public services). If the Liberals had invested that $2 billion in improved training and higher wages for hospital and home-care workers, the money would have flowed through the economy from the bottom up (with nearly half of it being paid back to governments at all levels through various taxes) while tax-payers would have benefitted from improved access to better services. Furthermore, our tax dollars wouldn't be wasted in paying the profits of foreign companies, but would remain circulating throughout B.C..

Again, why do business people persist in supporting a government that costs them more money that it saves them? Do they not realize that the first people (after the recipients themselves) who would benefit if welfare rates were raised to a livable level, and if enough affordable housing were funded, would be local businesses? Not only would communities no longer have people living on the sidewalks, or camping in parks, welfare payments would immediately be spent into the economy, maintaining businesses all over the province. What use is a tax cut to a business, if its revenues are falling like a stone?

Business people love tax cuts (businesses can't function without government legislation, regulation, and spending, but they don't want to pay for it; they want citizens to pay), but tax cuts simply divide dollars into small, useless sums that together could be more constructively invested on projects that are useful in themselves, as well as creating or maintaining jobs. To take just one example, the $440 million the Liberals frittered away in 2008 on individual rebates to off-set the carbon tax, could have been much more fruitfully invested in green infrastructure such as the E&N Railway on Vancouver Island. But the Liberals preferred to try to bribe B.C. voters, and in exchange for a minor shot of cash, individuals and businesses alike now suffer from the lack of improved public transit.

Businesses prosper in Canada in large part due to the fact that we have a peaceful, orderly country with well-regulated financial institutions, and social programs such as health care and EI. The proposal that we need to lower business taxes to attract more investment into the country is nonsense. Taxes are only one, and far from the most important, of the factors considered when investing in a plant or company in Canada. To name only one business-friendly condition, single-payer public health care relieves business of much of the cost of providing health insurance for their workers.

I'm a senior who is deeply concerned about my future under a Liberal Government which intends to leave me at the mercy of private care I can't afford. The Independent Contractors of B.C. and the Coalition of B.C. Businesses, by running ads supporting the Liberals, are working directly against me and every other aging person in the province, as well as against children, the mentally-ill, and the unemployed. That's shameful.

But when they are simultaneously working against their own best interests, that's just plain stupid.