Political decisions and corruption

Posted Feb 16, 2012 By Paul Whittaker

Dear Editor,

An article in the February CCPA Monitor deals with the corruption involved with many arms contracts. In one case the South African government bought fighter planes from BAE in Britain, which were not even on the short list, and cost two and a half times more than those on the short list. The waiving of price controls is being greased by $180 million in bribes. Apparently only 11 of the 24 planes have ever been operational. Like the Canadian submarines, it's not important that these weapons work.

The smart meters being foisted on the public across North America are not needed for conservation, but do make the manufacturers of them rich. We are talking billions here.

BC hydro awarded the contract for its smart meters to Corix Utilities. The senior adviser to Corix is David Emerson, who just happens to be the executive chair of BC Transmissions Corp, chair of the BC premier's advisory council, co-chair of theAlberta premier's council, co-chair of the prime minister's advisory committee and on and on.

The old boys network reigns supreme. What chance is there for democracy when the cards are stacked and the pie divided before the game even starts?

Joyce Nelson in another Monitor article, suggests convincingly that there are two reasons for smart meters, the first already mentioned, it makes lots of money for those in the business who just happen to have the king's ear on such matters, and second that we are all to have smart appliances soon in our homes. If you worry as I do that being zapped by electro magnetic energy from smart meters imagine having five or six appliances inside the house zipping and zapping away day and night.

Testing you say, have they been tested? Does it matter? Canada is apparently part of a private entity called the North American Electrical Reliability Corporation, NERC for short, which overseas and "regulates" the entire electrical power system in Canada, the USA and even part of Mexico.

Elected politicians are minor players, if at all in the process. We have given control of the hen house to the foxes. Like most of the life-changing decisions today, these will be made behind closed doors by the industries that profit from them. We will be told later when the high voltage direct current transmission lines are being installed (north to south) that we need them.

Ontario, like BC, sells surplus electricity to the U.S. Fair enough if it is surplus and paid for in full by the purchaser. The cost over-runs at Bruce Power for refurbishing the nuclear generators there was, toward the end of 2011, approximately two and a half billion dollars, picked up by, of course, the taxpayer, along with the added guaranteed profit on the cost over-run to the industry. Ontario spends billions of tax dollars subsidizing exports of electricity to the USA, some of it from coal-fired power stations. When did we hear this stuff debated in the Legislature or for that matter on the larger picture in Parliament?

Paul Whittaker, Gilmour