Editor, The News:
Re: Campaign spending a prelude to B.C. election (The News, Jan. 25).
Your article on campaign spending, recording the positions of provincial Liberal and NDP candidates, shows that neither would support or even understand what is in the broader public good of British Columbians.
The Liberal MLA for Mission-Maple Ridge seems to be proud of the fact that, as a teacher, he opposed his union donating to the main alternative party to the Liberal government, which was making devastating, and illegal, cuts to B.C.’s education system.
These cuts hurt a whole generation of elementary and secondary students.
His failure to support his union in opposing these cuts may have been motivated by personal or ideological goals, but it is difficult to see how he was supporting the public good.
The NDP’s apparent challenger in the upcoming provincial election promises that an NDP government would outlaw both corporate and union donations, claiming that ‘nobody wants a government that’s beholden to special interests or corporate agendas.’
By classifying unions as ‘special interests,’ he is supporting the vicious Reaganite and Thatcherite tradition of denigrating institutions in our society that work to ensure economic fairness and equality.
It has becoming painfully clear that increasing inequality is bad for society, and is fatal to democracy.
Public education and unions need to be supported as the most powerful ways our society has to counter tendencies towards unhealthy accumulation of wealth and power at the top.
It’s too bad that neither of the two major provincial parties’ candidates in Mission-Maple Ridge seem to understand this.
Steve Ranta
Maple Ridge
Editor’s note: Steve Ranta is a retired high school teacher who ran as an independent candiate in the Pitt
Meadows-Maple Ridge riding during the 2015 federal election.