In Brief:

The lockdown mentality is causing irreparable harm and human suffering

End the provincial state-of-emergency

Remove case totals as a primary policy driver

End all orders of the Public Health Officer except those relating to long term care-homes

Continue to carefully protect the elderly and vulnerable

Replace mask mandates in public services with a recommendation for mask-wearing

In summary:

The current crisis management is disproportionate to the harms of the virus and causes more damage than it helps cure. While we have been fortunate in this province to have a measured and rational public response guided by our Public Health Officer – and some of the most relaxed restrictions in the world – it is time to recognize that the emergency has passed and it is time to return the province to a state of normalcy.

The climate of fear perpetuated by current policies is causing irreparable harm. We can measure this harm in increased overdoses, suicides, social isolation, drug abuse, domestic violence, poverty. We see it in the loss of livelihoods, homes, relationships. The play of children has been disrupted, and elders have been left to die alone. British Columbia is suffering.

Of course every single one of the 230+ deaths directly caused by COVID in this province is a personal human tragedy, nobody questions that the loss of life due to the pandemic is a terrible thing. However, it’s important to note that Vancouver alone has lost over 14,000 small and medium sized businesses, and many of them are never coming back. That’s tens of thousands of jobs and so many livelihoods now laying in ruins. Dreams and hopes for the future reduced to rubble.

The continued lockdown is inconsistent with a free and just society. It’s benefits are vague and poorly supported by evidence. For instance, a study published in the Lancet in July found no relationship between full lockdowns and deaths from Covid-19. If we cannot demonstrate a direct connection, this is bad public policy. We can protect the elderly and vulnerable while the rest of us get back to work.

The harm of lockdowns, however, is very real.

Excessive government reports and daily updates of case totals contribute to a climate of fear without providing information necessary to understand the risk of the virus. There are simply too many ambiguities, uncertainties and unknowns about the Covid-19 test – the PCR test – for the public to make functional use of these case numbers.

It is impossible to give significance to the number of daily positive tests without knowing how many infections there have been in the population. It is further not understood how long virus particles remain detectable. In other words, we do not know if we are discovering a person with an active infection, or a person who previously was infected. Without these data the number of cases in any given day is virtually meaningless. What daily reports about death and sickness do accomplish, however, is a great deal of public fear.

Data reports and analysis should be focused on hospitalizations and deaths, more reliable indicators of the threat the virus poses. Looking at this data paints an entirely different picture of the impact of the virus. For instance, according to records maintained by the BCCDC, excess mortality only surpassed expected amounts for about 40 days in 2020 from the middle of March until the end of April.

There is good reason to believe that British Columbia, and other jurisdictions at our latitude, have reached a kind of herd-immunity. While the first confirmed case in Canada occurred in January 2020 the virus has been confirmed as early as November in Wuhan, China and Brazil. Given that this virus is accepted as highly contagious and that international travel was unrestricted for four months – including Christmas, New Years, and Chinese New Year – it is most likely that the virus was wide-spread in our population well before we entered a state of emergency.

The original rationale for social distancing – maintaining hospital capacity – was sensible, but the data, both locally and internationally can no longer support this concern.

The majority of people will have a course of Covid-19 comparable to a typical cold or flu. This appears to be poorly understood. While we should rightfully protect those elderly with multiple underlying conditions and those known to be vulnerable, we should also avoid the other extreme of treating these individuals as invalids, or infants, incapable of directing the course and conduct of their own lives.

We should remain ever mindful of the tendency for governments to find emergency powers incredibly useful in achieving their unrelated goals – goals that could not be achieved through the regular functioning of democratic participation. Tolerating emergency powers for long periods of time raises the prospect that such powers become permanent, as with Bill 19, with an irrecoverable loss for civil liberties.

In BRIEF

Put the needs of patients and their families first and protect charter rights in all legislative decisions

Maintain existing multiple payer system for total health care costs

Liberate Healthcare – Legalise Private Delivery Options

Promote preventative, primary and long term care

BC already has a multiple-payer healthcare system in which workers injured on the job (WCB), those injured in accidents (ICBC), the RCMP, Armed Forces, federal employees, politicians, and even federal prisoners can access care from outside the public system and obtain procedures and surgeries very quickly. 65,000 surgeries are done annually in BC at the dozens of private surgery centres that have been operating for decades. Additionally, many medically necessary services like prescription medications, ambulance rides, dental care, and mental health counselling are excluded from our public system, despite their importance in health outcomes. Users pay for these services, or they purchase private insurance to pay for part or all of the costs. Our policy would not change this model, as the remaining 70% of the healthcare system is dictated by the Canada Health Act to be paid for directly by the provincial government.

Numerous consecutive provincial governments have attempted to tackle the increasing portion of their budgets going toward healthcare. Attempts have been made at increasing efficiencies in our current system, improving the overall health education of people, reducing wait times and many other well-intentioned reforms. What were repeatedly hyped as fix-alls have barely moved the needle. Health Care consumes 40% of the provincial budget. With aging demographics, rising populations, and increasing availability of new lifesaving treatments, health expenditures are expected to rise by 6% annually, outstripping economic growth, and increasing the portion of the budget directed toward healthcare (to 50% or higher, without significant new taxes). This will result in a budgetary crisis, necessitating more rationing of care.

Another approach is urgently required. It is our belief that the hidden efficiencies remaining to be found can only be uncovered by competitive forces in the delivery of health care services.

Patients are costing hospitals $1200/day taking up hospital beds, when they could be getting care better suited to them in a long-term facility that bills the government $300/day instead. Hospital admissions are costly, and serve as a bottleneck in the system which impacts the delivery of care in unanticipated ways, such as emergency rooms which are over capacity. This increases wait times, and results in patients even being seen in hallways as physicians struggle to cope with fewer available beds. An institutional diversity in delivery of care would allow for entrepreneurial doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners to group together and open their own specialty facilities that specifically target the needs of underserved hospital patients. Diverting these patients to more appropriate care facilities will free up hospital resources to improve outcomes in the areas they are best suited for.

Promises to improve outcomes in our current medical system without significant reform are not credible. We want to reform how public funds are allocated and how individuals are able to access medical care in British Columbia. Reforms should follow examples found outside North America. They are urgently needed to avoid a crisis with a majority of medical doctors in BC on the verge of retirement.

In Brief:

The BC Libertarian Party will:

Foster an environment and culture within all government institutions respectful of diverse viewpoints and free expression;

Ensure universities have robust free-speech policies with tangible enforcement mechanisms, using financial pressure as necessary;

Identify and eliminate any recruitment or hiring policies within government based on race, gender, or sexuality, “Critical Race Theory”, and so forth;

Freedom of expression is the foundation of all freedoms.

Freedom of expression is the foundation of all freedoms. It has inherent value; every individual experiences life in a unique way and should be free to share that experience with others. Moreover, our society has long seen the value in Free Speech. History is replete with examples of controversial, unpopular, or even illegal ideas eventually coming to redefine the course of history, uplifting humanity in the process. The free exchange of ideas is necessary for individuals and societies to test out good and bad ideas alike, to advance in knowledge, and to challenge the received wisdom of an era, for the benefit of all. Robust debate breathes life into the intellectual struggle.

In the absence of free speech, historically, societies have turned to violent confrontation over competing ideas, values and beliefs. The protection of freedom of expression must extend even to the protection of offensive or hurtful ideas, so that these hurtful thoughts stay in the realm of words and discussion, and that we as a society can unpack them, assess them, and discard them. Our culture is increasingly losing its value for freedom of expression and there is a growing intolerance toward free speech, manifesting as counter-protests and even violence. As intersectionality and “cancel culture” become a dominant cultural force, we risk losing the ability to discuss and engage critically with some of the most crucial issues of our time.

The BC Libertarian Party believes that all individuals are entitled to equal treatment under the law, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, or religious belief. This is a long-standing classical-liberal principle that libertarians hold dear. We have long been champions of fairness and equality under the law, or by society at large. The foundations of our society – the rule of law, protection of private property and the person – can and must be applied to every person regardless of aforementioned characteristics.

As such, we also reject laws or cultural norms that seek to raise one identity group above another. This leads us inevitably to a rejection of institutional intersectionality; people must be considered as individuals first and foremost.

Intersectionality refers to an ideology which seeks to redistribute social, political, and economic power along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. It does away with meritocracy. In fact, individuals are organized according to an entire spectrum of oppression. The more oppressed an individual’s race, gender, or sexuality is said to be, the higher they rise in the hierarchy of intersectionality. If an individual can be identified as having several “intersecting” marginalized traits, they may verily walk as royalty among the adherents to this peculiar philosophy.

Justice, then, must consist of taking social, economic and political power away from the privileged (by force if necessary) and giving it to the marginalized, not taking into account the agency, decisions, or capabilities of individuals in either group.

Ultimately this kind of redistributionist and heavy-handed ideology must be rejected because its sustenance requires violence. Marxism must be rejected because it says the most important characteristic about a person are those immutable traits which they have no will or control over. Cancel culture, violence-against-speech, and the whole basket of hardcore authoritarian ideals must be rejected because it elevates the perceived wants of the so-called community over the needs of the individual. It reduces individuals to faceless representatives of a “group.”

All of these things stand in contrast to the libertarian’s commitment to the defense of individual liberty, and the British Columbia Libertarian Party is proud to reject collectivism and defend freedom of speech.

In BRIEF

Shift authority down to regional school boards where possible;

Empower parent choice in education;

Have funding follow the student;

In summary:

K-12 education has consistently underperformed its objectives for longer than we can remember*. This has been met with a chorus of groups demanding more funding, and this funding issue has consumed virtually all discourse on public education for decades. Depending on how it’s measured, funding has both been increased and decreased for varying periods of time.

But is the dollar amount of funding really the most important factor in whether our children will receive a quality education? There’s little evidence to prove that it makes much of a difference either way.

BC Libertarians believe that to ensure access to a quality education for every child, parents should have more choice in determining the way it is delivered. It’s already well-recognized that a one-size-fits-all approach results in far too many students being left behind. The logical extension of that view is that the availability of more approaches will leave fewer students behind.

COVID-19 and the closure of schools offered an opportunity to test out a number of alternative approaches like online learning, student pods, homeschooling and private tutoring – to wildly varying degrees of success. We believe education should be an innovative process in normal times as well, where the exploration of new methods can lead to discovery of better matches for individual children.

BC Libertarians will act to move as much decision-making as possible away from the Ministry of Education and toward local school districts, where parents can have more of a say in policies and procedures. We will consult with educational providers about how we can best introduce a system whereby public education funding can follow the student, on an opt-in basis, and be used at parents’ discretion within an expanded menu of educational options.

A quality education should not depend on the geographical location or the financial means of their family. Educational choice is how the playing field can be leveled between the underprivileged and those lucky enough to live in close proximity to the best schools. Indeed, the present system has failed to achieve this for long enough.