The B.C. government has now admitted that its budget is way off-target, and has blamed a significant part of the problem on falling natural gas revenues.

At a dinner-party a while ago, I drew some sharp disagreement by commenting that one-member-one-vote is a poor way to select a party leader. While it has the outward form of more intense democracy, it sterilizes the democratic process.

Selecting an internal party leader is a fundamentally different kind of process from fighting an external election for government. One-member-one-vote leadership selection eliminates most of the real politics (in the sense of space for strategy to be played out) and turns it into a kind of mass wager. It reduces the membership to a vast scatter of individuals, and makes it difficult or impossible for the various perspectives and lines of thought to work themselves through in the decision-making process.

While controversy and First Nations resistance have held up Enbridge's plans for an oil pipeline across northern B.C. for export via tanker through Kitimat, there is another massive pipeline-for-export project following much the same track which is forging ahead, with relatively little notice or notoriety.

Encana, Apache Canada and EOG Resources are partners in a project to construct a natural gas pipeline to feed a huge liquefaction plant near Kitimat, to load liquefied natural gas (LNG) onto tankers for export. It is slated for opening in 2015.

On one level, the B.C. government's new Review of BC Hydro marks an about-face by the Liberals under Christy Clark, calling quits to Gordon Campbell's projection of a "green energy powerhouse." On a deeper level, however, it represents a deepening of the Campbell agenda. Campbell's notion was that we'd become massive exporters of clean electricity mined from our rivers and wind, sold at a premium into the power-hungry California market. This represented a major shift in the mandate of BC Hydro.

From its inception, BC Hydro's mission was to provide safe, reliable, low-cost electricity to British Columbians. Campbell changed this: Hydro was to become a booster and sales agent for private sector electrical generation corporations.