B.C. premier unleashes on feds over silent treatment
After four trips to Ottawa, four meetings in B.C. and eight increasingly fruitless phone calls spread out over 19 months in office, Premier David Eby has made up his mind about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: The guy is neither a friend, nor an ally, when it comes to the BC NDP government in British Columbia.
The result has been to watch Ontario and Quebec get special funding agreements with Ottawa on priority B.C. files, to have letters and phone calls go unanswered by Trudeau, to get cut out of the loop on major announcements and to languish while waiting for funding commitments on large projects like the Massey Tunnel replacement.
As if to illustrate his point, on the same day the premiers were meeting in Nova Scotia, Trudeau announced details of a $30-billion, 10-year public transit funding program that could dramatically affect the financial situation of TransLink and BC Transit. So he went public. A few days later, Trudeau did call back and asked Eby to put in writing his concerns. Eby sent a letter with six specific requests on June 20. A month later, he said he’s yet to receive any response from the prime minister or any federal ministers.
Horgan’s reward was to be hurled under the bus by the prime minister’s office during a premiers’ meeting on health care, and later to have news of his retirement leaked out to the Ottawa press corps before British Columbians even knew the premier was leaving.
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