FLETCHER: Control the language, control the political direction

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.VICTORIA – In his government’s spring 2026 budget, which projected a record 11-digit deficit, BC Premier David Eby introduced taxpayers to a new euphemism: re-pacing. With budget projections showing an urgent need for spending cuts, major capital projects had their completion dates erased and replaced, er, re-paced with “TBC,” which apparently stands for “to be confirmed.” Taken out of the four-year budget cycle were projects that had been scheduled for completion as early as next year.Those infrastructure tasks chosen for re-pacing are mostly in health and seniors care, coming at a time when my generation, the back-end bulge of the baby boom, heads into its 70s. Delays affect long-term care facilities in Kelowna, Squamish, Abbotsford, Campbell River, Chilliwack, Delta, and Fort St. John, as well as a redevelopment of Burnaby Hospital.One cynic at a local pub suggested that re-pacing really means “phased cancellation.” Those back-end boomers will tip over eventually, and we wouldn’t want to be caught with excess senior care capacity down the road. There are some great drugs now to keep them from wandering around too much.The Burnaby Hospital upgrade is estimated at $1.8 billion, which is almost the same amount as an accounting error the province found in its calculation of natural gas royalties. In a province where it’s okay to export methane but not to run your furnace with it, a spreadsheet error is blamed for overestimating the only bright spot in an otherwise bleak industrial landscape..BC’s gas pain brings us to today’s biggest trick of terminology: climate change. Global warming, heating, and boiling have waxed and waned, but climate change endures. It contains the built-in assumption that there was a time when the climate didn’t change, before that Scottish guy invented the steam engine.This is obviously not true, of course. Geologically speaking, the Holocene warm period is due to end, and the next glacial era would typically last 100,000 years. Yet government policy has led us to “fight climate change” by setting impossible targets for conversion to electric vehicles, invariably by years ending in zero or five.The fairy godmother of these deadlines has just fallen: the UN’s 2015 Paris target to limit Earth’s average surface temperature increase to 1.5 degrees. UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced this week that humans are “speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe” by the continued rapid increase in use of coal and petroleum. China, India, and other “developing countries” are not mentioned, and neither is the arbitrary, political origin of the 1.5-degree target.Perhaps today’s second-most influential trick of terminology is “homelessness.” This bakes in the assumption that the problem is caused by a lack of homes, or rather “affordable” homes, a term favoured by politicians as it has no objective definition.BC has spent billions in pursuit of a “housing first” agenda, which purposely ignores that drug abuse is the driver for almost all of the street disorder. Full-time tent camp organizers pushed the province to keep throwing money at shelters and “low-barrier” housing by embarrassing them on TV each night. Time and time again, the free housing is vandalized, destroyed, or used as retail street drug outlets..Eby’s government has once again extended the fact-finding mission of former Vancouver mayor and senator Larry Campbell to fix the city’s Downtown Eastside drug ghetto, even as one unlivable rooming house is kept open for months by a single occupant who won’t leave.New euphemisms come up frequently to smooth over the bumps of public attention. “Harm reduction” had a good run on doing everything but offering addiction treatment to drug abusers. “Culture wars” is a way to avoid talking about the ethical and racial judgments of governments. As we approach the fall sitting of the BC legislature, Eby should be preparing to deliver on his spring promise to find a solution to the legal quagmire he led BC and Canada into with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.Public engagement on vast land transfers has continued with key information withheld, as we have seen previously with the Haida title settlement and other closed-door agreements. The traditional media have boiled it down to a single word, “reconciliation,” and of course, everyone should be in favour of that.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: Control the language, control the political direction

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