The B.C. Debt Clock hit the road today and visited Chilliwack and Abbotsford. In Chilliwack, I gave a speech to a crowd of 100 people at the local Rotary Club, as the Clock churned numbers on a side wall. I had a great time and am grateful to the club for having me. Here is a copy of my speech.

Speech By Jordan Bateman, CTF – B.C. Director
June 21st – 12:00PM
Chilliwack Rotary Club

Good afternoon.

Thank you for that introduction and thanks for inviting me to be here this afternoon.

Let me tell an old story – forgive me if you’ve heard it before.

While walking down the street one day, a Premier of British Columbia is tragically hit by a truck and dies. His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the pearly gates.

"Welcome to Heaven," says St. Peter. "Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we're not sure what to do with you."

"No problem, just let me in," says the Premier.

"Well, I'd like to but I have orders from higher up.   What we'll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity."

"Really, I've made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven," says the Premier.

"I'm sorry but we have our rules." And with that, St. Peter escorts the Premier to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell. The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course.   In the distance is a club and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him, everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the good times they had. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar. Also present is the Devil, who really is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes.

They are having such a good time that, before the Premier realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves while the elevator rises. The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens in Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him.

"Now it's time to visit Heaven." So 24 hours pass with the Premier joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns.

"Well then, you've spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now choose your eternity."

He reflects for a minute, then the Premier answers: "Well, I would never have thought it, I mean Heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in Hell."

So Saint Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell. Now the doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. The Devil comes over to the Premier and lays an arm on his neck.

"I don't understand," stammers the Premier. “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and club and we ate lobster and caviar and danced and had a great time. Now all there is a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable.”

The Devil looks at him, smiles and says, "Yesterday we were campaigning.  Today you voted for us!"

Or as former Prime Minister Kim Campbell put it: an election is no time to talk about serious issues…

It seems like only yesterday, Premier Christy Clark was campaigning. She was touring the province in a bus with big slogans slapped on the side: “Strong economy, secure tomorrow.” And my favorite: “Debt-Free B.C.” But that was the campaign – today is about the governing.

B.C.’s debt is growing, as you can plainly see. Over the next three years, despite campaign rhetoric of a “debt-free B.C.,” the debt will grow by a billion dollars every single quarter. It’s spinning up at $209 a second. $12,515 a minute. During the 80 minutes we’ll be together, it will grow by more than a million dollars.

Before I go too much further, I want to remind you a bit about who we are.

Back in the late 1980s a lot was happening on the political front in Canada.  Government deficits were spiraling out of control, and the GST was sprung on Canadians.

Coincidentally, at the same time, two groups, one in Saskatchewan and one in Alberta, both with similar goals, had been formed to mobilize the fight against growing deficits, political corruption, and to push the federal government to enact a balanced budget law.

While many of the same people had reacted to the introduction of the GST with anger and protest, the damage had already been done.  They couldn't stop the GST from being introduced.

Realizing that Canada needed a national taxpayer advocacy group to be ready to act before new taxes were introduced instead of after, in 1990, these two organizations merged to form the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

We're a non-profit, non-partisan, advocacy organization.

Our mission statement is simple; we want lower taxes, less government waste and more accountability.

Over the past 23 years we have grown to have offices that cover every region of the country, as well as a federal office in Ottawa. Each regional office acts as a watchdog over their local and provincial governments, and helps out our Ottawa office when federal issues crop up.

We're supported by approximately 85,000 people nation-wide, and we don't receive a cent from the government.  Never have, never will.  We are completely independent from any government or political party.  We have a dedicated team of field agents who go out and find people wanting to join the fight.

Each donor gets a subscription to our quarterly magazine, The Taxpayer.  We also send out e-mail alerts when issues of importance come up.  Those we send out to anyone for free with an e-mail address.  You can go to our website at www.taxpayer.com to sign-up.

With me today are a couple of our field agents, Dave Mycroft and Kevin Granger-Brown, if you are interested in signing up and helping the cause for lower taxes, less government waste and more government accountability, talk to Dave or KGB or at least flip them a business card.

The debt clock, as a symbol, has become synonymous with our work at the CTF.

The reason why? It works.

We commissioned our first Debt Clock in 1993 – it weighed in at a hefty 800 pounds, and had its own horse trailer to haul it.  The CTF took that clock back and forth across the country. It attended rallies. It won “Best Float” in county parades. It sat outside MP offices. It zoomed along a racetrack. It made headlines wherever it went.

The great thing about the debt clock is that it is incapable of lying. It can’t spin, or blame some vague global economic situation or previous government. It can’t give out a lengthy and nonsensical treatise on the value of public services or the importance of stimulus packages in sagging economies. It just sits there, relentless, churning numbers.

Along the way, the CTF organized rallies and petition campaigns aimed at balanced budget legislation. And it worked. In a tremendous shift, under the leadership of unlikely allies like Paul Martin and Ralph Klein, the country gradually moved from red ink to black. Alberta eventually became debt-free.

The taxpayers had won. Or so we thought. But as we have learned at the CTF—one of the undeniable truths about democracy is that no victory is ever final. We have to remain ever vigilant.

At the time, the trailer and debt clock were put into retirement, where they stayed, forgotten, for 11 years. When the Conservatives allowed Canada to slip back into deficit and the debt started creeping up again, we brought the clock out of retirement. Today, if you log on to www.debtclock.ca, you can see where Canada is at: $612.8 billion in debt, and growing by about $1,000 per second. That means every Canadian man, woman and child owes $17,481.

Our 2011 national tour started at Mile 0 in Victoria. It wasn’t there three minutes when a guy walked up to our team, took his wallet out of his pocket, and opened it, and held it up to the debt clock. He made a donation right there on the spot, because he knew this message was important. We knew we had a hit on our hands.

From Victoria, that clock went all across Canada. Vancouver, Kelowna, Canmore, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Brandon, Kingston, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Fredericton, Charlottetown, Halifax, and a hundred smaller towns in between. It was like travelling with a rock star—the police chased it off Parliament Hill. A young Sea Cadet in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, looked at the number, nudged his buddy, and said, “Man, we’re screwed!”

At the end of our national debt clock tour in 2011, Prime Minister Harper promised to move up his schedule and balance the budget in 2014 – we are fighting hard every day to hold him to that promise. To stop the federal clock.

But I want to talk specifically today about British Columbia, our provincial government’s debt, and the promises they made in the campaign.

The May election was fought on economic issues, and the party with the plan for balanced budgets, economic growth, less regulation and controlled spending won. I’m greatly heartened by that fact, as pre-election, I sat at a desk next to one of the NDP’s big think-tank people and listened to him gloat that tax increases were now going to be readily accepted by the masses. That the debate had changed. That the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s view was obsolete. That people didn’t care so much about leaving massive debt to future generations. They didn’t mind paying more in taxes. And Adrian Dix’s victory was going to prove it.

Well, he was wrong. The voters rejected such nonsense.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to magically balance the budget in this province. Even with balanced provincial budgets over the next four years – as promised by Premier Clark – our province’s debt will grow to more that $69.4 billion by 2016. (Take a picture with the clock today – it may be a long time before the debt is this low again.)

But now is the time to push Premier Clark for deliverables. It is one thing to campaign, another to govern. She can talk the talk, now we want to see her walk the walk.

We need to educate the public on B.C.’s debt load and that it will take fiscal prudence, a government willing to say no to special interest groups with their hands out, and, yes, even some sacrifice to stop this clock. We want to make the necessary space available for the Premier and her team to accomplish this. I take Christy Clark at her word: that a debt-free B.C. is her long-term goal, her dream political legacy. But we have got to stop this clock before we can even talk about rolling to back to zero.

Debt is a killer for future generations. It’s like putting them a mile behind a marathon’s starting line and expecting them to compete. Premier Gordon Campbell once famously said, “I hate deficit budgets, I think they take away from future generations.” I think he truly believed that. In fact, I think his dislike of debt was so intense that he rushed into the HST, and the $1.6 billion transition allowance, without his usual due diligence. The rest is history—although I hate that I even had to mention the HST today, as I feel like it’s a bit of an old girlfriend this province just can’t seem to get over.

When a government is in debt, it is unable to respond quickly or effectively to challenges. One bad decision begets another.

Debt is selfish. It’s about a generation of people saying to our children and grandchildren: our needs today are more important than whatever you could use the money for tomorrow. We wanted, we spent, but you pick up the tab—and the interest too.

In Campbell’s first term, he held spending increases to about 3% a year. In term 2, leading up to the Olympics, a big surplus sent spending out of control. Instead of saving money for a rainy day or paying down debt, he increased spending by 6% a year. When the economic downturn hit in term 3, he was in trouble. B.C. fell into the red and we have yet to emerge. He ratcheted down the spending increases to 3% a year, but by then the damage was done.

To her credit, Premier Clark wants to be more aggressive with spending: she is aiming for 1.5% increases over the next three years. Just as importantly, she has committed to passing laws to use future surpluses to pay down the debt and apply royalties from natural gas toward the debt – following a plan used by Alberta in the 1990s that has proven to work.

Even with that flattening spending curve, B.C. will pay more than $2.5 billion just in debt servicing this year. Our debt is causing us to go further into debt. If we didn’t have debt, thee would be no doubt we would turn a budget surplus. That $2.5 billion payment is about 6 per cent of our total budget. And the payment keeps going up: next year, it will be $2.66 billion, the year after, $2.89 billion.

As individuals, when we are in massive, growing debt, we get anxious. As a democracy, we need to begin to have that uneasy feeling too. We need to fret over this debt. Many countries around the world ignored the warning signs and spent to their hearts’ content. Many smart people explained it away as a stimulus—completely ignoring good, old fashioned common sense. But running up debt is playing with fire, and it’s our kids and grandkids who will be burned. When someone else owns a big chunk of our Province, we are at a disadvantage.

Hardly anyone expected the Liberals to win that election last month – even most of them didn’t. Premier Clark needs to seize the second life they’ve been given and use this perfect timing to the province’s advantage.

They were returned to office because of their fiscal plan: restraining spending. Reviewing regulation. Growing the economy. The promise of four balanced budgets in four years. And getting to a Debt Free B.C. The time for this is now – and it will take steady steps forward to get there. They cannot waste their mandate on stupid things like raises for political appointees. Thank goodness she corrected that mistake.

One of the reasons the Liberals picked Clark as their leader was because of her perceived connection to the real people of B.C., honed by years as a talk show host on CKNW radio. She had a reputation of standing up for the little guy, thanks to her efforts on initiatives like Anti-Bullying Day and the CKNW Orphans’ Fund.

Now the little guy that needs protection is the taxpayer. We need Premier Clark to stand up against vocal special interest groups that just want more of our money. That believe deficit spending and big debt are okay. That believe the solution to every problem in life is another government program, another union staffer, another tax increase.

That vision for B.C. was defeated on May 14 for the fourth consecutive time. The time for lasting change and fiscal prudence is now. It’s always more fun to spend than save; to run up a debt rather than pay it down. But we are committed to creating space and support in the public dialogue for Premier Clark to make good on her campaign promise.

That’s why the debt clock is back in B.C. Over the next three weeks, starting here in Chilliwack today, I’ll be visiting 30 B.C. communities with the clock, talking to the public, speaking at meetings, hosting coffee parties, and arguing the merits of a debt-free B.C. to the media. From Squamish to Salmon Arm, Penticton to Prince George, we will take a four-word message to the people of B.C.: Let’s Stop This Clock.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Reform Party and in fact all Western Canadians sent a loud message to Ottawa in the 1990s:  Stop spending and balance the books.  They listened and we had a decade of debt repayment and a strong economy as our reward.

That message needs to be sent again, loud and clear.  I hope you all join us in sending that message.  Let’s Stop This Clock. Thank you.