by Linda Solomon
In the old days, reassuring white men used to sit in front of cameras every night to explain and interpret the events of the day. They highlighted legislation and pointed out to people what to pay attention to, and why.

This was called “news.” News functioned at least somewhat as a benevolent presence that attempted to protect society from the excesses of self-interested politicians, crooked operators, and corporations. Walter Cronkite did it best. He embodied the "Fourth Estate," a term which referred to the press, as guardian of the public interest and framer of events. He was so paternal and seemed so benevolent that he could easily have been mistaken for God.

Jeffrey Archer wrote this passage in his novel, The Fourth Estate:

"In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estate General'. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred nobles, The Third Estate, six hundred commoners. Some years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, 'Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.”

In 2008, democracy struggles with only the remnants of a Fourth Estate. The nobles sit in the seats of the Press Gallery and it is frequently not in their interest to inform the commoners when the House of Commons overrides the common good. Take last week in the BC legislature, for instance.

In the course of a few hours legislators pushed eight new bills through and with none of the usual annoyance of formal debate. Normal procedure would have allowed commentary and a public record of the opposing point of view. This record would have provided courts, that will almost certainly be asked to review some of the legislation, with a cogent argument against allowing these particular policy changes to occur. Future generations curious about what went down may turn to Hansard, the recorder of legislative goings ons since 1970, but it will seem to them as if the opposition sat on their hands in silence, or perhaps lost their tongues. They will only be able to guess what the opposition members thought, as they witnessed in silence public interest decomposing.


After reading through the dry, off-putting text of the bills as published on the Hansard Report, I have gathered that three pieces of legislation passed that will have a significant impact on the future of BC.

One: An oil and gas bill went through that will apparently make it easier for oil and gas companies to build pipelines across British Columbia to transport natural resources from the tar sands to Prince Rupert. This means more invasion of private property. It means possible environmental degradation. It puts the commons at risk.

Two: The provincial health care act apparently got a new principle called “sustainability.” Hmmm. Haven’t I heard that word before to describe smart systematic practices that serve the long-term interests of the common good? “Sustainability” in this case seems to be about catering to American lobbyists who want to colonize Canada’s health care system, making it as bad as their own. (I’ve experienced both, and, even with its problems, the Canadian system is wonderful and the American system is barbaric and unbelievably expensive.) Opening the door to privatization was one of the things that happened during this legislative quickie.

Three: The Just-Shut-Up clause. This has also been referred to as “The Gag Clause.” Do they mean gag, as in retch, or as in “Just Shut Up.” I think both apply. A bill apparently passed that prohibits special interest groups and people running for office from talking about these bills in their campaign advertising up through the November elections. Even an American can see this is undemocratic.

For those of you who just go to work and don't find time to pore over the Hansard Report to see what happens in the legislature, I am publishing a list of the bills that passed in the 3rd session, so you know that your elected officials work, too. In the old days, there would have been many televisions stations and newspapers, competing for the top stories, vying to make analysis that we could all understand, paying researchers and reporters to make sense of it all for us. They would tell us how it was.

In fact, for anyone who missed the point, Walter Cronkite used to end his news segments with: “And that’s the way it is.”

“For almost two decades, after all we’ve been meeting like this in the evenings,” Walter Cronkite said in his last broadcast for the CBS Evening News in 1981. “… and I’ll miss this…And anyway the person who sits here is but the most conspicuous member of a superb team of journalists: writers reporters, editors, producers and none of that will change...Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away, they just keep coming back for more.

What Cronkite couldn’t have known was that journalism would morph into something new and unrecognizable in the coming years and that old anchormen like himself would have no role in a new order that would seek to obfuscate news into a blur of seemingly equivalent information and that this would obscure the public’s ability to understand events and judge politicians. That no one would be accountable, because the public would have no way of understanding what was going on. Because information would come at the citizenry from every direction, but few would have the time to figure out what any of it might mean.

And that’s the way it is.

List of 2008 3rd session legislation from Hansard:

* Budget Measures Implementation Act, 2008 (Bill 2)
* Carbon Tax Act (Bill 37)
* E-Health (Personal Health Information Access and Protection of Privacy) Act (Bill 24)
* Election Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 42)
* Electoral Districts Act (Bill 19)
* Electoral Reform Referendum 2009 Act (Bill 6)
* Environmental (Species and Public Protection) Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 29)
* Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 8)
* Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Cap and Trade) Act (Bill 18)
* Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Emissions Standards) Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 31)
* Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Renewable and Low Carbon Fuel Requirements) Act (Bill 16)
* Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Vehicle Emissions Standards) Act (Bill 39)
* Health Care Costs Recovery Act (Bill 22)
* Health Professions (Regulatory Reform) Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 25)
* Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 26)
* Housing Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 10)
* Labour and Citizens' Services Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 13)
* Local Government (Green Communities) Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 27)
* Local Government Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 7)
* Medicare Protection Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 21)
* Ministerial Accountability Bases Act, 2007-2008 (Bill 5)
* Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 33)
* Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act (No. 2), 2008 (Bill 43)
* Motor Vehicle (Banning Smoking when Children Present) Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 36)
* Musqueam Reconciliation, Settlement and Benefits Agreement Implementation Act (Bill 12)
* Oil and Gas Activities Act (Bill 20)
* Patient Care Quality Review Board Act (Bill 41)
* Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 9)
* Protected Areas of British Columbia (Conservancies and Parks) Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 38)
* Public Health Act (Bill 23)
* Public Safety and Solicitor General (Gift Card Certainty) Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 17)
* Small Business and Revenue Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 11)
* Social Workers Act (Bill 35)
* Supply Act (No. 1), 2008 (Bill 3)
* Supply Act, 2007-2008 (Supplementary Estimates) (Bill 4)
* Supply Act, 2008-2009 (Bill 44)
* Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement Implementation Act (Bill 32)
* Transportation Investment (Port Mann Twinning) Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 14)
* University Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 34)
* Utilities Commission Amendment Act, 2008 (Bill 15)