• The Liberal government held a divisive and pointless public referendum on the First Nations treaty process – interpreted widely by BC natives as an expression of racial prejudice.

• Health care was targeted early as part of a relentless drive for privatization of public services. Workers’ wages were cut and union contracts were illegally terminated. This was overturned by courts at great taxpayer cost.

• Crown corporation BC Ferries was subjected to a radical privatisation makeover without public consultation while Liberals waged a distracting vendetta against the ‘fast ferry fiasco’ with the NDP as scapegoat. The result is a private monopoly with extreme fare hikes legislated to focus punishment on the ferry dependent (minor-route) communities.

• The Government introduced a plan to privatise the Coquihalla Highway. The attempt failed in the face of public rage and rejection.

• The Child Advocacy Officer was removed, despite public outcry, and a child-protection scandal ensued, following the disclosure that hundreds of un-investigated child-death records were lost or left in an unsecured warehouse.

• The Liberal government has continued support for open-pen fish farms despite recommendations to change methods and practices in a report from a BC Government commission under John Fraser, appointed by the Premier.

• Liberal government performed a makeover and downgrade of the environmental protections for commercial logging on public land with the termination of the Forest Practices Code replaced by ‘results based’ model.

• Private forest lands deleted from the land use regulations of Tree Farm Licenses to the benefit of big corporations of hundreds of millions of dollars - proven not to be in the public interest by damning report from BC Auditor General John Doyle in July 2008.

• The government initiated a transformation and down-sizing of crown corporation BC Hydro to the benefit of private investors. The vast network of transmission lines was spun off into the BC Transmission Corp. A freeze was put on new energy projects by the Crown. This triggered a proliferation of Independent Power Projects (IPPs) such as run-of-river mega-projects with no master plan or comprehensive analysis by the government.

• Cost overruns skyrocketed on the new government financed Convention Centre to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars—far exceeding the amount of the fast-ferry costs the Liberals keep beating up the NDP over to this day.

• Liberals introduced Bill 30, which took away the right of local governments (municipalities or regional districts) to regulate land-use planning when considering the size and placement of IPPs and the transmission-line corridors, and their environmental impacts.
—David Moore