I’m no fan of the Conservatives, but news that former Conservative MP Michael Ma has now joined his former colleague Chris d’Entremont in defecting to the Liberals in Parliament is ethically wrong.

If your constituency elected you as the representative of a particular party, and you subsequently decide to change parties, you should resign and run in a byelection to give voters a chance to decide whether to elect you again.

At the very least (since byelections are expensive and disruptive), you should sit as an independent. You should definitely not be rewarded with a seat in cabinet.

In all parties (political or otherwise), leave with the one who brung ya.

Jonathan Stoppi

Saanich

So, now another proposed rail restoration, this time only as far as Langford.

This will still cost at least tens of millions of dollars – if not hundreds of millions, given the typical public sector cost-overruns – and what does it provide? Only an alternative to the bus routes for which the Trans-Canada is supposedly being rebuilt!

If the rail is built, will the dedicated bus lanes just end up as another waste of taxpayers’ money, probably compounded by an inability of the rail line to recover its operating costs, let alone repay the debt incurred to construct it?

We will already be in the hole for the “feasibility study” (how much of the $18 million fund will be used on this?)

Is it just another pie-in-the-sky dream, like the last proposal for an $800 million boondoggle?

That money could be profitably used to lease for a decade some of the extra buses that BC Transit is surely going to provide us with for the new bus lanes – or has it no plans to increase service? We haven’t heard anything!

Let’s not forget, your governments are almost broke, with mounting debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay – whether federal or provincial.

Roger Love

Saanich

The RCMP protects private business interests over the interests of Canadian prosperity in the upper Walbran Valley.

This week, we saw excessive force on behalf of dozens of RCMP officers attempting to remove forest defenders and Indigenous elders from their blockade of multiple blocks of ancient........

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