Dear Editor:
It's enough to make you wonder why we pay taxes. Recently, the B.C. Liberals spent $15 million of taxpayer money to promote themselves and their economic action plan, which according to recent statistics has not succeeded in producing jobs at anywhere near the rate promised.
And we have the newest outrage from Ottawa - a partisan attack against the NDP by Julian Fantino, minister of international cooperation, was posted on the Canadian International Development Agency website.
This is nothing new, but it's startling to see the extent to which our right-wing governments spend taxpayer money and violate the impartiality of government agencies simply to deliver partisan attacks.
Even if we're generous and say that work time was not used to produce the B.C. Liberal ads or that staff time wasn't used to post the CIDA rant, that still doesn't explain why they're being posted on sites meant for government information. A reminder, I think, is needed for our provincial and federal governments; Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was not meant to be an instruction manual, and we have no need for the endless propagandizing, particularly when the government is using our tax dollars to finance the propaganda.
We do not need a Ministry of Brainwashing; use our tax dollars for programs and services, not banal attempts to talk down ideological opponents.
Trevor Ritchie, Burnaby
