BC taxpayers are going to be on the hook for a lot of money due to the stupid mistakes of the BCLiberal Government. As we warned them (actually Edmund Burke warned them in 1790) revolutionary change always has unintended consequences. Those who advocate for revolutionary change never contemplate how it will backfire. Often the results are problems far worse than the original situation.
Moving from Burke, and thinking about the costs of the flawed IRP scheme, the pay back for the constitutionally invalid scheme to rent out courtrooms and the costs that will flow from the ridiculous scheme to move traffic tickets and many civil disputes from the constitutionally protected venue of court to tribunals the Government can control, I can’t help but think of Krusty’s Clown College.
In the 6th season of the Simpsons, Krusty the Clown creates a clown college to help him pay his gambling debts. Homer is a student. Krusty begins a lecture:
These Krusty brand balloons are three bucks each. But get a cheap one and what happens? It goes off, takes out the eyeballs of every kid in the room! What’s that going to cost you?
[to accountant] Hey, Bill, what did that cost us?
What is that gonna cost us?
As we ponder the implications of the Vilardell v Dunham decision (which the Government will spend your money appealing for political reasons) it seems that the reasoning might fit the argument that you have a right to go to court for many matters and that the Government cannot simply remove that right by legislation. There is, after all, a constitutionally protected right to have your day in court.
So, predicting a year or so into the future, their tribunals may well find themselves turfed by the Constitution. So taxpayers will be on the hook for setting it up, and then paying everybody back after it’s gone. And any further damages incurred.
The IRP scheme is likely to cost around $80 million by our napkin calculation, not including lost tax revenue from the people who couldn’t work, welfare, EI, etc. And it may be struck down in its entirety in the future, so add another $80 million or so.
Then there are all of the people who have paid the fees that the Court found were collected in violation of the Constitution. A class action suit is certainly forthcoming. The damages will be easy to calculate. It will be a lot.
For the last few months the Government has been busily getting staff ready to deal with their new tribunals. Taxpayers get to pay for all of this. We will also pay the severance when those employees are laid off in a year or two.
Which brings me back to Krusty’s Clown College. Our Premier dropped out of college and I understand that our Attorney General/Justice Minister/Solicitor General completed a mere 2 years of cooking school (note: her biography page on the Government website is blank at this time UPDATE: the page has now been removed). As we have pointed out in the past, these qualifications would permit you to work as a receptionist in a Government office – nothing more.
In any event, the answer is hundreds of millions of dollars. It will cost us hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the damage that is being done to our justice system.
With that money all of the schools could be seismically upgraded, we could buy decent shoes for impoverished children, we could provide meals in schools around the province, we could eliminate the waiting list for hip surgeries.
I expect that we’d be better off had our Premier completed clown college.