Opinion: ‘We can’t keep talking about free enterprise and ‘nothing else’ while ignoring the left’s steady, patient work to shape our schools, our public service, our courts, and our society,’ says Caroline Elliott
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VICTORIA — Caroline Elliott, who finished a close second in the B.C. Conservative leadership, is challenging calls for the party to play down the culture war and focus exclusively on economic issues to defeat the NDP.
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“We can no longer pretend that the great questions facing this province can be settled entirely in dollars and cents, and that the right combination of tax cuts and deregulation is a sufficient answer to what ails our province,” says Elliott.
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“We can’t keep talking about free enterprise and ‘nothing else’ while ignoring the left’s steady, patient work to shape our schools, our public service, our courts, and our society.”
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Sunrise
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The quotes are from “Free enterprise and nothing else will not fix B.C.,” an opinion piece Elliott wrote earlier this month for Without Diminishment, an online site she co-founded.
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The policy advocate took aim at the call for an alternative centre-right party that emerged from “the Triple O summit,” a recent gathering of business and political leaders at a White Spot in downtown Vancouver.
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The group wanted a party platform confined to four issues: “Grow the economy. Control government spending. Develop our resources. Deal with affordability. … That’s it, ” according to reports from the meeting.
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“While there’s no question those are critically important, they’re not even close to enough,” wrote Elliott. “The sorry state of our economy, runaway government spending, our inability to take full advantage of our resources, an unaffordability crisis that is crippling young people and driving our talent elsewhere — are direct products of a cultural agenda driven unabashedly by the NDP throughout their near-decade in government.”
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She illustrated her point with a few examples.
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“We have an education system that undermines our natural resource sector while teaching children that the land they stand on isn’t theirs, instructing them to ‘decentre’ the very Western knowledge that built the hospitals and universities they’ll someday work in.
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“We have students, public servants and even professional associations reciting daily land acknowledgments and undergoing state-mandated training that gives licence to the very land transfers, erosion of property rights and land-base uncertainty that are sending investment, jobs and paycheques elsewhere.
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“We have a government apparatus populated on the basis of ancestry rather than merit, right down to a provincial health office that lists the authors of its own medical reports by their ethnic heritage instead of their credentials, and a public sector that openly hires on the basis of ideological adherence rather than the ability to deliver outcomes for taxpayers.
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“We’ve seen a government determinedly swap the concept of equal opportunity for the social justice concept of equity, not just in our education system but throughout government, justifying for future generations the kinds of debilitating personal income taxes and redistribution through unchecked and poorly managed government spending that we’re seeing now under the NDP.”
