The Union of B.C. Municipalities convention is the province’s political event of the year.

Here are some highlights from last week’s session.

Fixing civic elections:

Premier Gordon Campbell’s biggest policy announcement was the formation of a task force of councillors and MLAs to overhaul the Local Government Act.

He said it will examine whether civic terms should stay at three years, move to four or go back to the old two-year cycle.

I can save the task force some time as it heads for its May 30, 2010 deadline to recommend legislation.

While Campbell rightly cites the struggles of underpaid small-town councillors, it’s not about them. Civic voter participation is now below 30 per cent and dropping.

The idea of going back to two-year terms is a non-starter with the taxpaying public, due to cost and further loss of continuity in land use planning. Any politician who supports it should have lots of free time soon.

Just look at what more frequent elections have done for federal turnout. Once routinely around 70 per cent, it dipped below 60 for the first time in Canadian history last year.

The only sensible change to contemplate is to synchronize local elections with the province’s four-year fixed election date.

If rural councillors aren’t paid enough, don’t waste money on costly fiddling. Give them a raise.

As for fat-cat urban councils, impose election spending limits ASAP.

NDP stink bomb:

In a pointless and ill-considered gesture, NDP leader Carole James announced to the convention that if she had won the 2009 election she would now be canceling the tax cuts enacted to offset the carbon tax on fossil fuels for corporations. You know, like those wealthy forest companies.

With this speech, James undermined her four years of painstaking work cultivating rural B.C. Worse, her minions leaked the story to the Vancouver Sun the day before, giving the government and forest industry time to sharpen their knives. Which they did, the better to plunge them into the guts of the NDP’s so-far successful heartlands strategy.

Globe and Mail reporter Justine Hunter, one of the wiser heads in the city media, quickly deduced what this was really about.

James is trying to hold onto her job going into the NDP convention, Nov. 27-29 at the opulent Westin Bayshore. (That location is itself the source of some internal feuding.)

For urban lefties, it’s always “the corporations, dude,” and right now they’re lining up for Michael Moore’s latest pathetic movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. Good luck to them. They’ll need it.

The really big story:

Blank stares greeted my suggestion to a couple of folks that the biggest story of UBCM 2009 was the installation of Harry Nyce as the organization’s 2009-10 president.

The fisheries and wildlife minister of the Nisga’a Lisims government, Nyce is also one of those long-suffering regional district directors who does his vital work for little pay or recognition.

He is the nephew of Joe Gosnell, architect of the modern Nisga’a nation. Again, more on this next week.

n A correction to last week’s column on Crown timber licences and the policy paralysis brought about by aboriginal land claims: I’m reminded by the Ministry of Forests and Range that minimum harvest rules for commercial timber licences on Crown land were eliminated as part of the 2003 “forestry revitalization plan” changes. 

My original point remains, however. Crown licensees are no longer required to cut trees, but they have to harvest something to stay in business, and those sturdy hemlock logs are still heading to the pulp mill chipper.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press and BCLocalnews.com.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca