Ah Mr. Premier, you must be basking in the afterglow of the Olympic experience. Congratulations on leading such a successful enterprise and showcasing BC - well Vancouver and Whistler - to the world!

Now I’m sure we can look forward to you immediately turning your newly discovered marketing, fundraising and organizational talents to financially supporting and coordinating a variety of political Social Justice Olympics (SJO’s) like the BC Homeless Olympic Strategy, or perhaps the BC Run-of-River Slalom.

You could conceivably re-hire John Furlong to organize the games to coordinate the Olympic Reduction of Child Poverty Program or perhaps float the Take Back BC Ferries Event and save the provincial government at least one million dollars just on one salary alone! You might even encourage paid BC civil servants to volunteer to help out at these events.

And Mr. Premier, these events wouldn’t require a billion dollars for security or any special considerations for politicians and other seemingly important people. However, I would like to see free tickets provided to all Liberal MLA’s to the East Hastings Food Bank Awards where they get to practice trying to eat well on $2 a day for a month; or the MSP Biathlon where MLA’s get to pay their own MSP costs, including the increase while living below the poverty line.

The crowds would most definitely cheer on their favourite Ministers as they chatted with locals to find out which shelters might take them in on a rainy night or which store would accept their assortment of cans and bottles they collected during the Binner’s Biathlon. Think of the market possibilities if your government provided the funding for the Child Poverty Pavilion where visitors and locals could see exhibits that show how BC has worked hard to achieve gold and remain in first place in this statistical challenge and how your policies have helped BC maintain this unique position in Canada.

Then there could be the Minimum Wage Pavilion that would showcase BC’s long and arduous slide down the hill to once again be the first at the bottom of the wage scale. (Think of this as the Financial Luge.) You could also turn your attention to providing running commentary on the Student Loan Reduction Challenge or possibly the Cuts to Legal Aid Contest!

You might also consider establishing the HST Centre for the Performing Arts so that there is a cultural and harmonizing component to these “games”. This could be the venue for such performances as the recently produced “1.6 Billion Dollar Heist” or for a reading from the new phantasmagorical work co-written by yourself and the Minister of Finance entitled “The HST Didn’t Cross Our Minds Until Just After the May Election”.

You might even be able to book the Honourable Stephen Harper, fresh from his recent performance at the National Arts Centre to play piano and sing the Social Justice Olympics theme song, “I Bereave”. He might also perform his very own version of the newly composed “Prorogue Pathetique: an Opera in Two Parts”. (He might even sing your own theme song “The BC Rail Blues” for the closing ceremonies.) Be careful though, Mr. Harper may cancel all three performances without notice after a quick phone call to the Governor General.

Now Mr. Premier, you’ll most definitely want these SJO Games to be the greenest and most eco-friendly ever, so you may want to re-think the whole scheme of supporting the idea of oil tankers along the BC coast. And knowing that you’ll want to make sure there’s no doping during the games, you may want to get all those farmed salmon off drugs and help preserve the wild salmon as they are BC’s real mascot.

Mr. Premier, it used to be said of the reigning federal Liberals that they became so used to seeing themselves as the natural ruling party that they would “drink their own bathwater thinking it was the elixir of wisdom”. I suggest to you that particular bit of historical minutiae has come to exemplify your own “liberal” party. It would appear that you and your jolly band of neo-socreds have somehow come to believe that the sad version of democracy that slid you back into political legitimacy truly allows you to make decisions without consulting with the voters and the citizens of this province. The rarified atmosphere from the top of your political Mount Olympus has obviously left you with some sense of political invulnerability. Remember dear Sir, that even the gods of Olympus eventually were replaced with more realistic and less arrogant and demagogical leaders, and in due course slipped into the mist of historical mythology.