… Your first reaction to a report from your own handpicked advisers is to make excuses rather than consider and address the issues they highlight as needing action. Exactly what happened with the report released December 13, 2007.

The BC Progress Board – 18 business executives and academic leaders handpicked by Gordon Campbell – named BC the second-worst province in the country on a number of social indicators.

“The most troubling social indicator is the proportion of British Columbians living below the low-income threshold,” says the report, which calls the social condition category “one of the most compelling considerations” for judging a society.

The report says the proportion of people living on low incomes in B.C. has been greater than other provinces through much of the past decade.

The government’s response came in the form of Minister of Employment and Income Assistance Claude Richmond making excuses and offering explanations of why the board was wrong. Together with the old political standby, vague promises that the government will take the report seriously and see where improvements can be made.

It is this type of “what problem, I don’t see a problem, sorry not in my ideological world view”, non-responses that explain why this is the second year in a row for BC’s unacceptable rating and position on the list. As long as the man at the wheel sees only what his ideology allows him to perceive, excuses and denial will be the response to issues lying in the blind spots imposed by ideology.

Mr. Campbell needs to ponder the words of Robert Frost, or if preferred, George Bernard Shaw.

Mr. Frost warned that donning the blinders of purpose will, like the blinders on a horse, inevitably lead to narrowness of point of view. Mr. Shaw cautioned that the moment we WANT to believe something, one becomes blind to arguments against it.

If Mr. Campbell fails to shed his ideological blinders, stop making excuses, listen to his own hand-picked experts and address the social issues existing in our cities and province …… his hand-picked Progress Board will continue, year after year, to find increasing social problems and inequities.

If you are going to hand-pick experts to report, it would be prudent to listen to them and address the issues they bring forward as requiring attention.

Rather than blindly saying “Neigh”.