Cancel contracts with Microsoft Office
British Columbia could save a lot of money, simply by switching to LibreOffice.
https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/
I donate money to the LibreOffice project. I use it and I’m super satisfied. In fact, I don’t even remember the last time I used Word or Excel.
I have LibreOffice at home. At work I am forced to use MS office 365. Its awful and breaks with every update… Wish my workplace could move off but it’s impossible.
While I think they should decouple from Microsoft / US tech giants, I don’t think there’s a realistic hope in hell of it happening. This is why they have that ‘easily or affordably’ caveat in the announcement. They say they’ll leave it to govt agencies to figure out if its easy / affordable to do.
So somewhere like BC’s Financial Services Authority (the gov agency that oversees provincial credit unions, realtors, insurance companies), which stuck all of their stuff into Microsoft’s Cloud, and retains a skeleton crew in terms of IT support staff (part of their public RFP for sticking things in the cloud, was admitting that fact)… will simply say it’s too difficult and/or costly to decouple from their perspective. And they’ll leave all that government regulatory stuff exposed to the US and the risk of services being cut off summarily as part of trade deterioration / extortion. It’s grimly entertaining to acknowledge that our own government regulators are so dependant on the USA’s services, that they can’t function without them: it lends credence to the crap Trump says, frankly. He could practically ‘turn off’ our financial regulators by forcing Microsoft to deny service.
I’m pretty confident the government isn’t “that” serious about any of this stuff. I’ve written to both my provincial and federal reps asking specifically about whether Microsoft / Tech-giant type subscriptions would be on the cutting board, and none of them want to commit to anything. They’ll openly rip up any Elon contract though, because those are in fashion / a more obvious supporter of the stuff goin on down south – and its a lot simpler to ‘not build’ something, than it is to alter existing stuff.
“Ten per cent is fine on a magazine subscription, but 10 per cent on a billion-dollar project is not,” he said.
“Taxing poor people is OK, taxing rich people isn’t.”
But this is for government funded projects so it’s everyone’s funding in general? I get the sentiment fully but Eby seems like he’d rather tax rich people over poor people (from an Ontarian perspective)
He does sound like that sometimes but other times not.
BC’s NDP is a much different creature than either the federal or provincial NDP elsewhere in Canada.