LIZ ON TRANSIT & THINGS...
21 April 2008
Hi, David:
Before you leave for some of my old stamping grounds --
Malcolm Johnston raised an issue I don't think I've 'discussed' with you - the matter of the $1.2 Billion-plus budget overrun on the Canada Line. (Sometimes I get fed up with 'playing the same old vinyl' over and over again.)
During the NDP decade, particularly the Glen-Clark-as-premier days, the media quite rightly made a daily-nightly feast out of the fast-ferry project. As you know, the project ended up as a $456-million project for three ships we could not use in BC waters - albeit the union-built ships were extremely well-built.
So - can you tell me why it is that not one journalist in the mainstream media has raised the subject of today's $1.2-billion+ budget overrun on the Canada Line - an overrun 2.75 times the size of the fast-ferries budget? The Convention Centre mess and the mouldy skating oval roof takes the total to over $2 billion - and that's just the things we actually know about.
Plus - The Canada Line overrun that does not include a single penny to reimburse the small-business owners that CLCo has bankrupted on Cambie Street?
Plus - The Canada Line overrun was required, despite the fact that the 'scope' of the main project has been reduced, because City of Vancouver taxpayers are on the hook for one of the stations, on top of the original budget.
Plus - We still do not know what will be the costs for Ken Dobell's "smart" but not yet working turnstiles.
Great we can "offload all the risk to the Private Partners" isn't it? Oh, and that reminds me - why is the media not curious enough to ask whether Partnerships BC director, Colin Dobell is related to Ken Dobell?
Auditor-General John Doyle sure has enough to keep his office going full-tilt for a decade!
But, in the meantime, I repeat - where is Canwest? Where is Corus?
I'll give you a hint - at least part of the answer can be found in Issue #73 of Adbuster's magazine, The Death of Canadian Journalism, http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/73/The_Death_of_Canadian_Journalism.html
4 comments:
Imho, because the RAV line has been portrayed as vital to the oh-so-vital-to-BC 2010 Olympics, it gets the same pass as the games themselves, the convention center and the rest, from the MSM who are in love/financially benefiting from the whole boondoggle.
"(CanWest) now owns both of Vancouver’s daily newspapers (the Sun and the tabloid Province), the city’s top-rated television station (GlobalTV), ...CanWest has turned Vancouver into the single-most media concentrated city in the western world."
This is the core of the problem right there. Such a lack of competition has produced exactly what it always does, self-serving bureaucracy and "most of what gets printed (dnb: and broadcast) is so tepid and banal that it’s almost entirely useless..."
To say nothing of lacking diversity of pov.
It is rumored that CanWest may be heading the way of other such family owned conglomerates (i.e. to the dustbin of history), but that's as may be, for now, its an extremely unhealthy situation.
Perhaps "Liz" should be sending all her messages to the Georgia Straight and www.thetyee.com Both have high readerships.
want your mind blown---canwest global controls the polls(more propogands) if you don`t believe me just google up ( canwest global and ipsos reid partnership) just google that whole sentence
Post a Comment