It is time for conservatives to do what they do best and insist that a wasteful, inefficient government program gets off the books. Small government and the death penalty don't go together.
We all say things when we are trying to get elected.
I have a broad view that we have to try and get to "yes" on projects. On economic projects anybody can say no. My child can say no. But I think the hard thing to do is to figure out how you get to "yes" and you protect the environment.
I would ask that people judge us, judge me, based on our record, based on what we actually did.
Here Hillary Clinton is probably the most qualified person based on experience to ever run for president of the United States, and then this guy gets into the race, Bernie Sanders, and suddenly everybody goes, "Look at him. He's a real contender - "
I think you're never going to get somewhere ambitious if you don't start out with great ambitions. What I would say is: we got a start. That to me is a very significant thing. Here we were, a historic meeting to talk about climate change.
I choose the most qualified people. We need to run more women in parties in ridings where they can be elected. That's what I really focused on, so that we have more women to select for cabinet, potentially.
The way I would characterize what you said about me is I do try to say what I think as clearly as I can without first thinking, "Uh-oh, which way is the wind blowing and are people going to like this?"
We have the resources the world needs. We can build a path for them to get there. That's that delicate balance that we find.
I hope that people will be held accountable, even if accountability just means naming it and letting the citizens of the country know where you're at. I think that has a huge impact on the way people think.
I think we should be worried about the fact that we have become, as a society, very focused on the way people look, the way they dress. I do think we should worry about that because we should be worried about content. We should be worried about ideas. We should not be putting form over function.
One of the things I do know about investment from around the world and job creators: they won't come to British Columbia if our attitude is well, "no," or all of our processes are just going to be a way of making sure you can't get to "yes." They'll just go somewhere else. Those jobs will be somewhere else.
I'm not a believer that you should set quotas for these things, because I think what happens is no matter how qualified the woman is who gets the job, people will say she [Hillary Clinton] shouldn't have gotten it. She only got it because she's a woman. That is the problem with quotas.
We've excused all houses up to $750,000 from our property-purchase tax. We have more to do. There are other measures we intend to take to try and address housing affordability. There are things we can do. There are limits to it and we can't do it by ourselves.
There are limits to what we can do. That's for sure. That is true. One of the downsides of a growing economy [is that] we're accommodating a lot more people. They're buying houses and the market is growing. That is part of the downside of that, but I think that all of us do have to decide to act on it.
We know taxes slow down economic growth, so if you add a carbon tax you have to also minus other taxes. You can't take more money out of people's pockets. I don't think you can build a consensus in this country about environmental policy if you're going to make people poor.
I'm conscious of competitive issues, but at the same time the recommendation they make is that we protect citizens by not adding to the overall tax burden of the province.
I just think about how many women in their workplaces have been working to get a promotion, and they look around, and then this guy comes.
How are we going to know what impact that has on the greenhouse gas emissions? How are we going to hold everybody accountable for doing their part?
To put it in context, the federal government was, at the beginning [of the Vancouver meeting], talking about a $15-per-tonne floor for carbon emissions. We're at $30 a tonne, so we're already double that. But our economy is growing at a faster rate - three per cent of GDP is our projected growth in British Columbia.
Our climate leadership team has recommended it go up and I would say there's always going to be upward pressure to raise the carbon tax. Remember, we're already double what the only other province who has a carbon tax is at right now, Quebec - they peg it at about $15 a tonne.
You can't say British Columbia's carbon tax is exactly the same as increasing hydroelectricity rates in another province. They're very different mechanisms, but we shouldn't deny that both of them can have an impact, and that's why we're talking about this broadly.
hy is it you can impose a new tax and keep your economy growing? Only if you cut other taxes by exactly the same amount. The problem with carbon taxes around the world has been you dump a new tax onto the economy and it's just adding more tax.
We do need the federal government to share information with us. We need local governments to increase supply. We need affordable places for people to live.
