Corporate influence over gov’t policy

By Letter to the Editor on March 5, 2020.

Although many (including me) tell our elected officials to reject the fossil-fuel industry’s new proposed projects, the governing representatives unfortunately are not so free to deny the politically potent resource extractors their profitable goals.

While it’s politically much easier to sit in the Opposition’s chair, powerful business interests are pulling governmental strings regarding lands and accompanying natural resources to which they (mis)perceive an economic thus ethical right, the latest example being Coastal GasLink on Wet’suwet’en territory.

Not helping matters, almost all of our information is still produced and/or shared with us by concentrated corporate-owned media that seems overly preoccupied with the economy and job creation/losses. I see B.C.’s NDP-Green-coalition government even giving in to numerous overly (some would say absurdly) generous tax breaks and royalty-waiving (etcetera) demands by the liquified fractured gas company.

However refreshingly sincere the intent of a campaigning politician and party to implement progressive policies, I see Western democracy elected state heads as basically just symbolically in charge of the most power-entrenched and saturated national interests and institutions.

To me, our prime minister and premiers “lead” a virtual corpocracy, i.e. “a society dominated by politically and economically large corporations.” I view corpocratic rule as that in which the two established conservative and neo-liberal parties more or less alternate in governance while habitually kowtowing to big business’s implied or explicit crippling threats of a loss of jobs, capital investment and/or economic stability. We even have corporate representatives writing bills for our elected governing officials to vote for and have implemented, often enough word for word, all ostensibly to save the elected officials’ time.

Frank Sterle Jr.

White Rock, B.C.