Even after a decade or so, it is awe-inspiring to witness the heights of audacity to which the B.C. Liberals soar.
Last Wednesday provided another suitably stratospheric example. According to the Canadian Press, a collection of groups and individuals wrote an open letter to Premier Christy Clark dated Sept. 28 urging her to "fix" the missing women inquiry.
The inquiry was called to examine the police's handling of the serial killer Robert Pickton, who was convicted of slaying six women and may have claimed at least another 27; it will also conduct a less formal probe into the so-called Highway of Tears, the stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert that is notorious for its own string of missing women.
But the B.C. government refuses to fund the legal expenses of many groups who have been granted standing at the inquiry but lack the money to adequately participate.
Among the first groups forced to bow out was the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council here in Prince George, whose vice chair, Terry Teegee told the Citizen: "We had some of our members' DNA found on the Pickton farm, their families are up north still. Important for our members, too, are the social issues this inquiry touches on: our youth heading out to major centres, involved in high-risk lifestyles... the relationship with RCMP and other authorities."
This funding issue is seen as key to the inquiry's legitimacy and was crucial enough for inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal to attempt the half-measure of appointing two lawyers to help groups denied funding.
It isn't enough and the group's letter, which was signed by family members of the Pickton's victims, hoped Clark, whose catchphrase after all is the saccharine "families first," would reconsider.
To no avail. The same day Prince George area MLA and Attorney General Shirley Bond said: "Given the budget considerations that the ministry is facing, we have made our priority funding legal counsel for families of the murdered and missing women."
Under normal circumstances Bond's cries of poverty in the face of social advocacy groups seeking justice would be worthy of contempt. But her comments deserve a larger than usual heap of scorn when one considers that on Friday her government will be celebrating the renovation of B.C. Place stadium at the cost to provincial coffers of $560 million.
The optics are fairly amusing until one considers that you, the taxpayer, are on one hand doling out more than half a billion dollars to a massive downtown Vancouver boondoggle while on the other making advocates for the most vulnerable women sit and beg for nickels.
It's a cheery thought that makes one wonder that, if Nero fiddled while Rome burned, B.C. politicians do one better and raise white elephants after women get skinned on meathooks.
Regardless, one hopes Premier Clark and Attorney General Bond can find the $1.5 million it is estimated the groups would need to participate and make the inquiry anything other than an elaborate whitewash.
It will be difficult, what with the glare of B.C. Place's two HD screens (the equivalent of 450, 42-inch flat-screen TVs) and 1,150 digital screens now scattered around the sporting cathedral.
That said, if they choose to do nothing, the stadium's "new, wider seats" will allow them to sit on their hands in style and the "enhanced" bathroom facilities should be sufficiently upgraded to accommodate whatever excuses they spout.
"The drab concrete building now sparkles with clear glazing," CP's Jim Morris wrote of B.C. Place Stadium.
If only the prospects of the missing women inquiry were so bright.
-- Prince George Citizen
