View full article and comments: http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/03/29/GordonBCRail/
A lie, it is said, can run halfway around the world before the truth can put on its boots. And as observers of B.C. politics know all too well, some fibs not only spread quickly, but also have incredible endurance.
One such is the ongoing falsehood that BC Rail was a money-losing, debt-laden Crown corporation -- an unaffordable burden on provincial taxpayers -- before it was privatized by Gordon Campbell's B.C. Liberal government in 2004.
In Victoria last week (Thursday, March 25), transportation minister Shirley Bond stood in the Legislative Assembly and repeated the litany of nose-stretchers she and other B.C. Liberals have peddled on countless occasions over the past seven years.
"We're not going to stand on this side of the House and take advice from a group [the NDP] that actually saw a bankrupt railway that was in complete disarray when they were in government," said Bond, who in June 2009 was named as Campbell's transportation minister.
She again reiterated, "We inherited a railway that was bankrupt and in disarray."
Later, responding to NDP MLA Mike Farnworth, Bond declared: "All I can say to the member opposite is that you managed to take the train and take it right off the tracks during the 1990s. In one year alone under that member's leadership, $582 million in debt -- and in fact, the only outcome, the only measure of success that that side of the House had -- was how big the bailout was going to be every single year for B.C. Rail."
Are any of those statements correct? Was BC Rail "bankrupt" and "in complete disarray" when the Campbell Liberals won election to government in 2001? Did the Crown corporation's debt soar by $582 million in a single year under the NDP? Did provincial taxpayers have to provide a "bailout... every single year" to BC Rail?
The answers are as simple as can be: No, no, no and no.
