Thank you, Betty!

There are times when even your least favourite politician comes through. Wednesday was one of those days, when Betty Hinton joined federal natural resources minister Gary Lunn to announce $6.6 million in funding for the expansion of Kamloops Airport.
The Conservative government deserves its due for doing what the people of Kamloops have been asking for over two years. There has been inaction, there has been stalling, there have been excuses; but it has finally happened.
Thank you, Betty. You have done something for us.

Hinton pushes stickers, faces criticism

Instead of finally extending the Veterans Independence benefits as promised, instead of finally appointing a Veterans Ombudsman as promised, instead of securing funding for the pine beetle crisis or the Kamloops Airport expansion, Betty Hinton has decided the best use of her taxpayer-funded time on the job -- according to the Kamloops Daily News -- is to persuade Kamloops City Council to place "Support the Troops" stickers on City vehicles. This comes after Toronto's government managed to raise an uproar by doing the same thing.
As Mayor Terry Lake said in response, “[T]his should be an individual choice whether people want to put a decal on their vehicle. I don’t think it should be mandated by any organization or government. It politicizes a very personal choice."
Indeed, many local residents' vehicles already have these troop-support decals on them without help from the City. Meanwhile, Kamloops is one of few Canadian cities to offer free parking to cars with veterans' license plates.
B.C. political blog The Galloping Beaver responds with excellent commentary on what this situation says about Betty. Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo Voters for Change offers you some selected quotes about our M.P. from there:

• useless as a bald snow tire on the Roger's Pass in January and dumber than a manhole cover
• watched nationally for her next gaffe
• incapable of independent thought
• a demonstration of the "big C" conservative need for authority figures and centralized control. Reduce independent thinking to a minimum. Follow the leader. That's what makes Hinton and her particular ilk comfortable. No need to think things through; somebody will do that for you.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

Cited article by Michele Young
Published July 17, 2007
© Copyright The Daily News in Kamloops

Cited post by Dave
Published July 17, 2007
thegallopingbeaver.blogspot.com

Friday the 13th: Tyee bashes Betty

The popular B.C. political blog, The Tyee, was kind enough enough to mention Betty Hinton yesterday. Unfortunately for Betty, it wasn't very positive:

. . . the other way to get headlines when you're not in cabinet is to pretend that, in fact, you are. That's the strategy Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo MP Betty Hinton tried in February.

Hinton made the claim in an interview with Kamloops This Week's Markus Ermish [sic]. But when the NDP's Jean Crowder brought it up in the House, Hinton denied everything and even demanded an apology.

Unfortunately for the veteran interior politician, Ermish had his interview taped.

The incident led columnist Dale Bass to pen a scathing editorial about Hinton's performance.

"Our local MP is rapidly becoming as valuable to the Conservative government as Hedy Fry was to the Liberals during her Ku-Klux-Klan-cross-burnings-in-Prince-George phase," he wrote.

He [sic] went on to say "[S]he goes through local constituency office staff like some losing NFL teams go through coaches," and she is "becoming a public embarrassment to her own party in Parliament."

Ouch.

After being exposed by local papers, the Globe and Mail, Macleans magazine, and The Tyee, our elected federal representative is a joke to the entire country.

Cited article by Tom Barrett and Richard Warnica
Published July 12, 2007
thetyee.ca (c) 2003-2007