Tag Archive: accountability

Corporations are people too

Jan 31, 2010
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Advocates of democratic electoral reform are really out of step. Ideas like proportional representation and advertising spending limits are so retro, so 2004. The fashionable electoral reform idea this year is to give corporations a real say. It’s time for individual citizens to share their electoral democracy with corporations to give meaning to those old… View Article

Loukidelis did good work for government accountability. Now it’s a legislative committee’s turn.

Jan 24, 2010
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David Loukidelis, British Columbia’s Freedom of Information Commissioner has accepted the new role as the province’s deputy attorney general.  Vaughn Palmer did a good column on the switch in jobs but I thought Loukidelis deserved more credit for his ten years on the job. Personally, I think Loukidelis’s leadership was almost completely responsible for BC’s FOI legislation… View Article

The recent secretive, haphazard spending cuts should be repealed

Sep 23, 2009
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Almost daily we wake up to news of yet another important program or initiative whose funding has been cut by the BC government. Literacy initiatives, high school sports, programs that protect women and children from violence, arts and culture: hardly an area of social service provision has been spared. These cuts have been devastating to… View Article

Yet another case of our government delaying the release of important data

May 12, 2009
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Less than a week after BC’s Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) report raised serious questions about secrecy in government (see Keith’s comments here), The Tyee reporter Andrew MacLeod has uncovered another case of important statistics not being released on time. The culprit this time is the Housing and Social Development Ministry, which typically… View Article

Report finds government stonewalling on FOI requests

May 8, 2009
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BC’s Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) released a report yesterday showing secrecy in government is even a bigger problem that we thought. A February report from BC’s Information and Privacy Commissioner’s described what he called, “an unacceptable pattern of government-wide failure to respond to access requests in as timely a fashion as it… View Article

The Case Against STV

May 5, 2009
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More from our BC Commentary special on STV: The Case Against STV By David Schreck Will STV “make your vote count”? Actually, BC-STV can make your vote worth less and make your MLA less accountable. Our existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is not perfect, but it is better than BC-STV. Inequality is inherent in BC-STV. The… View Article

Government report on welfare leavers at odds with narrative

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Kudos to the Tyee’s Andrew MacLeod for extracting a long delayed report on welfare leavers from the provincial government. The report can be downloaded here. Andrew’s Tyee article about the report can be found here. The report uses tax data of BC welfare leavers between 2000 and 2005 to see how people have done. Comparing… View Article

Government compliance with legal obligations far from good

Feb 15, 2009
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BC’s Freedom of Information Commissioner released his annual report last Friday. These reports are a pretty good indication of how open and transparent our government is. The Commissioner is unhappy and he says so in tough language: The stark fact is that the government’s overall record of compliance with its legal obligations under FIPPA is… View Article