Soldiers and mounties defending our right to luge in freedom will bunk down on cruise ships during The Big Party.
Cost?
$56 Million.
Gordon Campbell and George Abbott have announced that the 5,000 care beds they originally announced - and never came remotely near to providing - were actually a semantic error.
It's all in the word, you see.
Mountain Equipment Co-op, where people who never leave their neighbourhoods can buy North Face jackets to keep themselves warm over lattes, will have an interesting AGM next week.
It is strongly rumored that some one or two will table a resolution to boycott Israeli products.
BC Teachers for Global Peace and Education has been cited as a possible supporter of such a resolution. (I'm still waiting for BC Teachers for Teaching English and Math Skills That'll Pass Muster in First year University.)
The Company will most likely ignore this move and continue to sell Israeli underwear. Oy vay!
Our battles are ever so civil, don't you know?
Is that the brown sugar on your table?
On April 5th, I posted an item called Triangulation. It was about the strange confluence of people who just happen to know and see each other a lot. Their names are Gordon Campbell, Patrick Kinsella, David MacLean and Martyn Brown.
CN Rail, BC Rail and a few other small considerations play somewhere in this mystery.
This morning I learn that Kinsella is threatening to sue Carole James and her posse for defamation.
Apparently the NDP have been asking difficult questions about these very same confusions.
Of course, so has every columnist and broadcaster worth his salt.
Kinsella is perfectly right, of course, to defend and protect his reputation.
But shooting the messenger is the oldest tactic in the book.
Real information from Kinsella would be much more re-assuring, but no one is holding his breath.
The Olympics are so rigid, so far up their own flewbarbs, so out-of-step that women ski jumpers have had to resort to a law suit to achieve their goal of being allowed to compete in 2010.
They accuse VANOC of violating their Charter rights.
They are exactly correct.
VANOC claims this is all on the hands of the IOC and that if it granted women the equal opportunity to participate, that the IOC would never award another games to Canada.
They are exactly wrong.
In addition to being morally bankrupt.
If they led the way and allowed women to participate as they should, the IOC would simply be embarrassed into continuing the trend world-wide.
I mean, really...sometimes you wake up and think it's 1843.
(You can sign the petition here.)
YVR Airport Services Ltd. is a local success story.
At last count, 18 airports in seven countries under its management.
But the tale of its latest setback is an indicator of just how tight money is world-wide, even for what looks like sure-fire investments.
A landmark $2.5-billion (U.S.) deal to privatize Chicago's Midway Airport has collapsed after a consortium of Citigroup Inc., C Manulife Financial Corp.'s MFC John Hancock arm and Vancouver's YVR Airport Services Ltd. couldn't find investors to fund the acquisition.
Read the whole story here.
That paragon of virtue and clarity and love for all mankind, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is scheduled to highlight the plenary address at a UN conference on Racism in Switzerland.
The Iranian President's speech is set for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The man has publicly called many, many times for the destruction of Israel.
The good folks at the UN, or at least, their schedulers, must have a very deep sense of humour.
Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, the United States and Italy are among the countries who have politely excused themselves from this dark comedy.
Orwell is alive and well.
It's Monday.
Must be time for another Kelly Ellard- Reena Virk trial.
Nice to know our prosecution teams and our juries and judges are all doing such a fine job.
Here's the really good part.
If the Supreme Court orders a new trail, guess who gets to decide if we should proceed or let Ellard, already convicted a few dozen times (I exaggerate!), plead guilty to something of a lesser charge, like crossing a bridge without a license?
That's right.
The man posing as the Attorney-General, that famed holder of all the high gold standards of justice in this province - the transparent one, Monseigneur Opaque.
Below are four paragraphs taken from Gary Mason's column on BC politics published in yesterday's Globe & Mail. I can only add please read the entire piece. Esepcially the part about Patrick Kinsella's business partner being granted a gaming license. It is simply one of the best things written recently about the tenuous state of what passes for democracy in this logging camp.
The very sight of simple-minded geeks happily spending their Saturday afternoons nailing up Gordon Campbell signs on their auto-sprinklered lawns makes me sick. What's worse is that the fools smile at us as we pass. Soon we turn to each other and say, "Those sticks will be good for peas or green beans in a few weeks."
Friends of government, friends of the Premier, people who have played pivotal behind-the-scenes roles with the governing Liberal party can do all manner of lobbyist-like work and not have to tell a soul.
Beyond that, Mr. Kinsella has done consulting work for a dizzying number of private companies, work which has put him in touch with government officials. Yet he has never registered with the provincial registrar of lobbyists because, he says, his work doesn't meet the legal definition of lobbying. Yet, he appears to be doing exactly the same type of work that most registered lobbyists are doing.
When the provincial registrar of lobbyists attempted to investigate Mr. Kinsella's activities, the Liberal insider refused to co-operate. And that was the end of that.
The Liberals have been promising over the last few years to toughen up the province's lobbyist laws but nothing has happened. It would appear they're in no hurry to upset friends making millions in the lobbying business.
For years, I would have to write that a transit project linking downtown Vancouver, Richmond and the airport would cost $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion.
I knew that the figure had been lowballed. But I didn't have a choice because TransLink repeatedly used this $1.5-billion to $1.7-billion figure in news releases concerning what was then known as the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver line. It's now called the Canada Line.
Five years ago, the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's also suggested there was "cost overrun potential" on the the $1.5-billion to $1.7-billion RAV line.
“The RAV project is a large, lengthy, and ambitious undertaking with cost overrun potential given the long-term and technologically complex nature of the construction project,” Standard & Poor’s stated.
Of course, the costs did go up. Now, the public is being quoted a $2-billion figure for a project that was expected to be built with a bored tunnel that would result in minimal intrusion on local merchants.
The $2-billion line includes 16 stations. The original $1.5-billion to $1.7-billion line was going to include 17 stations.
Of course, higher costs contributed to a decision to go instead with a cut-and-cover tunnel, which obstructed traffic and contributed to the bankruptcies of several businesses on Cambie Street.
So what does the B.C. Liberal platform say about the Canada Line?
It's "on-budget".
Gimme a break.
Francis Bula has written a first-rate piece on the front page of the local edition of this morning's Globe.
In it, she chronicles the endless escalating costs of the famous Olympic Village. Read the full story for the numbers and weep. The final total cost will easily exceed a Billion dollars. The City of Vancouver is increasingly on the hook and pegging more and more of its limited resources on this one horse.
Of course, the officials, like City Councillors Louie and Meggs, insist alles iz gut and all will work out ïn the fullness of time."
Hey, Ray and Gregg...in the fullness of time, I will be a Hollywood movie star, my next-door neighbour will win the Nobel for particle physics and and the guy at the fish store won't start a conversation with "How about those Canucks!"
The irony of this story is that it sits on the page in the print edition smack up against The Culprit.
There he is waving from the window of a helicopter on his way to his re-election - Gordo, the Great.
The man who has brought you the $Billion housing project that is bankrupting the City of Vancouver.
Oh what rich comedy if he lost the election (He won't.) and had to sit out The Big Party.
We can dream, can't we?
My passion for NFL football has waned in recent years.
My enthusiasm for CFL football evaporated shortly after BC Place opened.
Now, John Madden is retiring from the broadcast booth (NBC Sunday Night Football) and his likely replacement will be the entirely limp Chris Collingsworth.
Over and out.
Maybe if Tom Brady comes back and leads the Patriots to another Super Bowl win...
A couple want to elope.
Their loving parents don't approve.
The family "turns the couple in."
Turns them in to what?
To the villagers, who promptly have the young pair executed by firing squad.
Such is Afghanistan.
Such is the enlightenment of fundamentalism world-wide.
Savages armed with Good Books.
Canadian Trooper Karine Blais, age 21, was killed in Afghanistan on Monday. Her uncle says she died in vain. We concur.
Canadians are getting killed in a convoluted effort to...to do what?
Save the country of poppy lords and family firing squads.
Please.
Give us a better war in which to risk young Canadian lives.
Get out of Afghanistan.
Global TV and CTV want the federal government to buy many, many ads on their failing rural TV stations.
No.
These feudal empires have behaved like cretins for decades, showing little or no interest in the communities they claim to serve and treating all their employees other than the executive suite like chattels.
The answer is no.
Groupe Polygone is in negotiations with the federal government to limit the press and the public to knowledge about their crimes.
The mere fact that the government would even for a moment entertain such a conversation is chilling.
These people, with the help of the Chretien/Martin governments, stole Canadian taxpayer money.
They are criminals and the press and the public have a very solid and important right to know.
Hi David:
This article is about the United Arab Emirates (UAE) specifically Dubai. Several Vancouver planners, including former chief planner Larry Beasley, preen about bringing their sustainability credentials to the UAE. Well, it would appear some things are not being "sustained" in Dubai and the rest of the UAE. Things like human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, workers' rights. Does Larry Beasley include any of these things in his definition of sustainability?
Or what about his sycophantic friends in Vancouver's development industry? They went so far as to name a condo after him ( which isn't selling by the way). That would be like a brothel owner in Nevada naming a whorehouse after Nevada's Secretary of Health. Do the development goniffs include basic human rights in their definition of sustainability?
This article should have run in the Vancouver Sun with some hard questions for Snivelly ( sorry, Beasley) and the developers. But we don't do that sort of thing here.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
Dear Victor,
This is, of course, exactly what I have thought of Dubai since we first started looking at that obscene hotel shaped like a billowing sail. When I began to read about Tiger and Roger Federer playing their respective games in this oil-driven sewer, I was shocked and disgusted. Couldn't they see what madness they were supporting?
