Last week, the Legislative Assembly Management Committee, chaired by Barisoff and made up of both Liberal and NDP MLAs, agreed to post quarterly expense reports online -- but continue to withhold actual receipts, ensuring the public is kept in the dark on where public money is actually going. For two parties who are at each other's throats on nearly every issue facing this province, it is astounding that the Liberals and NDP continue to walk in lockstep when it comes to hiding these receipts.

It's easy for Lower Mainlanders, blessed with multiple transit lines and mild weather, to suggest ratcheting up the carbon tax. But the tax is receiving a rough ride elsewhere. It seems the further you get away from Vancouver, the more hated the carbon tax becomes.

It's impossible to keep a good idea down for long -- and a looming NDP landslide may put electoral reform back on British Columbia's political radar. Many casual observers would say such disconnect between the number of votes and seats is unfair. But this is becoming a recurring phenomenon in B.C. The way British Columbians elect MLAs was a hot topic of debate after the 2001 B.C. Liberal landslide, which saw a 58 per cent vote count turn into 97 per cent of the seats in the legislature.

If the business across the street from yours, with fewer resources and higher prices, had increased its share of customers every year for 35 years, wouldn't you be curious why? Wouldn't that interest intensify if your own customer base had shrunk in 24 of those 35 years? This is the situation B.C.'s schools find themselves in.

Kevin Falcon may be leaving provincial politics, but according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the just-retired B.C. Finance Minister will event...

They say dead men tell no lies. That may never be truer than in the cutthroat blood-sport of B.C. politics. Consider Martyn Brown, the former chief of staff for Gordon Campbell and chief architect of the B.C. Liberals' decade in power. He's no longer in politics and suddenly feels very free to tell the truth about the B.C. government.

Former B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett once had a cabinet minister tell him he would treat taxpayers' money as if it were his own. "Oh, no, you won't," Bennett said, "not as long as I'm premier. That money is tax money, it's trust money, and I want 110 cents worth of value out of every dollar." That's a philosophy the overpaid executives at the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) have clearly failed to embrace. That shouldn't be a surprise -- government monopolies are notoriously inefficient and expensive.