“Our government will be tuned into families as never before. My top priority will be to put families first, in British Columbia we are blessed with families, as diverse in shapes and size as our great Province”

That absurd statement is courtesy of BC Premier Christy Clark (what shape is your family? What province isn’t ‘blessed’ with families? The analogy of families to the varying size of British Columbia is just awkward diction).

But behind her affecting face and charming smile is a history of public lies about secret matters that involved her, her shapely family, and her political party, the BC Liberals.

The rise and reign of Christy Clark’s premiership involves:

• A police-sanctioned drug ring connected to two unelected political aides to the BC finance and transportation minister, and her immediate family.
• The exchange of bribes between her brother and then-husband, two Liberal party fundraisers turned corporate lobbyists and the unelected aides in two important government ministries
• Having as her first order of business the squelching of a much-demanded public inquiry into the secret economy run by her family and government and the Liberals while in government. (Something forbade by Canada’s Constitution, you know)
• The courting of foreign investors by forbidding among her government the mere act of mentioning BC as a place hospitable to the gay community. A fact about BC that the Clark administration views as compromising to business.
• The overhaul of native treaty negotiations to accelerate the rate at which Asian investors can start mining native land.

The Clarkian approach to government, as a customer-business relationship, is the privatization of politics and policy-making. Clark, who launched her career as BC education minister, modified the public school system so that school boards are financed by the homes in the district. Schools in the areas of the richest patricians of BC became well funded as, you guessed it, the school boards of the underclass are subjected to teacher resource scarcity and budget shortfalls. Clark franchises policy to the highest bidders.

The BC Liberals assuaged the progressive vote by offering public money for bold new social programs but then implemented policy appearing as if it were derived from conservative and bankerly orthodoxy.

In breaking her promises for funding and franchising education policy to the highest paying ‘customers,’, Clark managed to deftly bolster her image as someone who is ‘tough’. Her desertion of those with scantly bank accounts appeared as a lamentable but ‘tough decisions’, her immediate vanquishing of union power of the teachers was ‘tough’.

Put more proximately, the essence of today’s politician is, paradoxically, their very apolitical character and their constant flip-flopping on issues only to be hailed as ‘great compromisers’, bi-partisan, or consensus politicians.

Near Victoria, by the Gordon Point Estates, two washed up kayaks stuffed to the sides with premium BC marijuana are discovered in early November 2002. The US Coast Guard and the RCMP captured one smuggler with the boat and the other was never caught.

After a 20 month joint investigation by the RCMP and the Victoria Police department, a series of raids on the government of British Columbia were executed and ultimately revealed that members of the Liberal Party of Canada at the national and provincial level were raising and laundering money in by the sale of drugs and accepting bribes for the sale of public assets to friends.

During the police investigations, a collection of evidence from wiretaps pointed towards an organized crime ring involving the sale of Marijuana to a US supplier in exchange of cocaine. The tapes captured incriminating conversations between a Victoria police officer, two highly influential aides in the Campbell government, the brother and husband of current BC premier Christy Clark, and two of the federal Liberal Party of Canada’s political strategists.

During the trial, the defence argued that their client did offer political influence but that (1) they weren’t acting in the interest of money and (2) they were just doing what they were told. To prove this, the defense requested government e-mails between the aides on trial and the government. The e-mails, which are a request by provincial statute to be held for 7 years were all erased and without the proper consent of the legislature. Translation: whomever’s business contracts the two aides were acting on behalf, those same superiors to Virk and Basi did not want their identities revealed.

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Six month after the guilty plea and the two men administered their meagrely fines, Christy Clark becomes premier of BC after Gordon Campbell resigns. In her victory speech, Clark calls the people of British Columbia her family and invites them to be ‘partners in bringing open government’.

Her first step towards ‘open government’ in March 2011 was to decline a public inquiry into the BC legislature raids and the sale of BC rail. When privatization is the most public slogan of the incoming Premier, this means the information about public figures as much as it does to the fate of government assets.

The second order of business in Clark’s new open government was an official gag order sent via memo to all of the business leaders on her huge trade caravan currently in Asia. Censored from mention is that BC is a spot that high volumes of gay people like to visit or live in.

In a brochure, entitled “How to Market your Business in China”, that the Clark government sent to business owners, these words are found

“In alignment with the [Canadian Tourism Commission], Tourism BC will also require that any partner operator agrees to…prohibit the promotion of casinos, gambling, and gay tourism”

This gay-baiting was first defended by Pat Bell, Clark’s Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation, before Bell denied knowledge of it.

The third component of Clark’s open government is the concealment of the details on a $1.3 billion dollar mining deal struck between the Clark government and Chinese mining businesses. Her government knows the details, the Chinese investors know the details, the only people deemed unfit to know exactly what is happening are the people that elected her, left behind in BC as they were, when Clark left with her trade junket.

Why the official secrecy? Clark is trying to overhaul the Treaty negotiations process between the BC government and the First Nations. Before she left for the Far East, Clark was jubiliant about her new ‘pragmatic’ treaty processes, her attempt to show Asian investors that the inconvenient fact that areas of BC is contested by the First Nations is an inconvenience only for the indigenous and not capital investments.

First Nations leaders have already spoken out against the deal and the official secrecy that shrouds it.