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Liberal Newspeak

If I didn’t know that George Orwell died 51 years ago, I would have sworn he was writing press releases and setting policy for Gordon Campbell and the Liberal Party.

In his novel 1984, Orwell coined the phrase "Newspeak" for a language where obviously contradictory ideas and words are lumped together by the state, Big Brother, to obscure the truth – your own happiness is based on the degree to which you can accept these contradictions.

Examples of Newspeak include "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength." The Ministry of Love maintains law and order. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war.

You get the idea. You might even have read the Coles notes on the book back in high school.

While we’re still a long way from living Orwell’s 1984, the amount of Newspeak that gets handed down from the provincial government is almost disturbing.

Take the recent announcement by the Minister of Health Services Colin Hansen that the provincial government "will make changes to British Columbia’s Pharmacare and Medical Services Plan Supplementary Benefits programs to ensure British Columbians have the most vital health services while protecting access to those with lower incomes."

Those changes are all geared to provincial cost-savings, or rather to off-loading their costs onto medical insurance companies and B.C.’ers who aren’t already in poverty. It means shortening the list of essential services, delisting pharmaceuticals, higher user fees and higher deductibles.

The honest way to let the public know that they’re going to be paying more would be to say "We’ve looked at the numbers and we’re screwed. We took a hard look at the services we offer and the drugs on our formulary, and here’s what we feel we can safely cut. Sorry, but we can’t afford to do more."

You can’t blame the Liberals for wanting to spin this news, especially since they pledged in their New Era campaign to "guarantee all patients the care they need, where they live and when they need it."

The liberals also made a big deal about the fact that they increased Health Care spending by 13 per cent, yet when you factor in the savings they can expect from these cuts, you have to wonder if that 13 per cent increase is being funded by government or by other health care cuts. Or was 13 per cent inadequate to begin with?

The government also said that they would keep health care public, yet a Liberal health committee is recommending user fees and making health care a provincial taxable benefit. The Hospital Employees Union said that these were the first steps towards a two-tier health system, which would involve increased privatization of services.

Health care isn’t the only area on which the provincial government has used a kind of Newspeak to blur the lines.

A recent move to eliminate between 8,000 and 11,500 provincial government jobs in the next three years was billed as a "comprehensive workforce adjustment strategy" that is aimed at "aligning provincial government staff resources with core service needs, re-profiling the public service, and reducing long-term costs to help reduce the province’s structural deficit." In Newspeak this could be summed up as "Growth through Attrition."

A review of completed, or almost completed Land and Resource Management Plan’s for B.C. areas that will emphasize resource extraction rather than conservation or conservation values such as tourism, was introduced to the public under the heading "Review leads to streamlined land-use planning."

Although the Minister of Sustainable Resource Management (Newspeak these days for Minister of Maximized Resource Extraction) has pledged "to adopt a scientifically based, principled approach to environmental management that ensure sustainability, accountability and responsibility," most scientists will agree that resource extraction at current rates is not even remotely sustainable. As far as accountability and responsibility go, the resource companies that the government is trying to support are multinationals that are guilty of closing mills and processors across the province, instead shipping raw exports to processors around the world.

For another example of Newspeak, the New Era says the Liberals are committed to negotiating treaties with First Nations, to "offer the promise of a New Era of hope, economic opportunity and greater self-determination for all aboriginal people."

At the same time, the provincial government is attempting to hold a referendum that will ask people in the province whether aboriginal governments should be treated the same as local governments, and whether the concerns of non-natives should taken into account when reaching treaties – a referendum that aboriginals in the province are overwhelmingly against.

The Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection replaced the Ministry of the Environment, implying that its role is the protection of resources rather than ecological integrity;

The Ministry of Health Services is currently charged with looking for ways to reduce health services.

The Ministry of Competition, Science and Enterprise, working with the new Minister of State for Deregulation, is looking for ways to reduce the number of regulations and requirements for employers in the province, implying that it’s just too complicated to run a business in B.C.

I’m not saying the government is being dishonest, just that they’re not being up front. I guess that’s a thoughtcrime.

— Andrew Mitchell