Letter to the Editor

The word slogan comes from the Scots Gaelic sluaghghairm meaning a ‘war-cry’. Every clan had one: Clan Grant had ‘ Stand fast, Craigellachie!’, the McFarlanes ‘ Loch Sloy!’ the McGregors ‘ Gregorach’, all intended to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies and help drive them from the field of battle.

Politicians have also adopted slogans, probably for the same reason, and locally the Kootenay East BC Liberal candidate’s is the latest.

Brief, but hardly fearsome: ‘Go with Bill’, it says.

Faced with this, his opposition, rather than flee the battlefield as a fear-stricken and disorderly rabble, is more liable to scratch their heads bemusedly and ask: Where are we going Bill? Where have you taken us over the last 12 years?

To a series of cuts to every government ministry: Health, Education, Forests, Environment, Children and Families, Human Resources, Agriculture, the Attorney General and Solicitor General’s offices?

(Cuts which subsidized the annual tax hand-out of $41,000 to the 10 Percenters – when 38 per cent of British Columbians don’t even earn that much in a year.)

Cuts to diagnostic and rehab services, to funding for programs against domestic violence, to senior beds in residential care, to programs for special needs school kids?

Cuts to education, to such an extent that BC needs nearly 7,000 more teachers to bring the provincial pupil-teacher ratio up to the Canadian average?

And in Kootenay East the downgrading of medical services and hospitals in the Elk Valley, the organizational shambles of the Coal Discovery Centre in Sparwood, the closing of the Industry, Trade and Apprenticeship Centre in Cranbrook and the millions of dollars siphoned out of this very constituency by a carbon tax which was promised for the greening of B.C. but somehow found its way into general revenue instead?

Go with Bill? Perhaps not.

JC Vallance,

Fernie

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