Begging For Cash
As the old adage says; “When beggars knock at the door, rush out the back door and check the chickens”; Premier Clark is off to Ottawa begging for some cash for her two ill-found vanity transit projects, the $3 billion Broadway subway and the $2.3 billion Surrey LRT, that local voters rejected in the past plebiscite.
The problem for the Premier and of course the taxpayer is that both vanity transit projects, especially the Broadway subway and will do little if anything to ease traffic congestion in the region.
The real story is, BC is bankrupt after a decade of ill found government and cannot afford its usual gold plated transit projects that are rolled out at election time.
If the Federal Liberals in Ottawa have any backbone at all, they will say no and tell the premier plan for what she can afford.
Ai??Premier hoping feds come through with a whole lot of transit funding
Vancouver, BC, Canada / News Talk 980 CKNW | Vancouver’s News. Vancouver’s Talk
December 10, 2015
While the mayors remain stuck on how to fund this regionai??i??s share of transit and transportation costs, the Premier says there may be another way.
Premier Christy Clark says they are in early discussions with the Justin Trudeau government to come in and pick all or some of the regionai??i??s tab.
ai???What weai??i??re doing now, though, is weai??i??re working with the federal government to see if there are ways that the federal government can help municipalities pay for their share of this. I think that there might be a path there where local government might have some of their burden picked up by the federal government.ai???
As for detailsai??i??
ai???You know I would if I could if I knew the answers but I donai??i??t yet. We are still in very early discission stage with them. The mayor of Vancouver has gone to Ottawa to lobby them as well. We have really been leading that conversation but I donai??i??t know what it will look like yet. This is something they are focused on though so I think we will have a better answer for you pretty quickly.ai???
Clark says her hope is the federal government would help shoulder the bill for the Broadway SkyTrain line, light rail in Surrey, and for the George Massey tunnel replacement.
She says more details will be coming, quote ai???pretty quickly.ai???
However Clark is sticking to her guns on the legislated requirement for a referendum on any new funding model for transit and transportation costs in the region.
On Translink governance she adds the province is not at the moment ai???contemplatingai??? any changes to how the transit utility is run.
Please replace my last post with this one:
I’d say siphoning off federal money needed for healthcare and national defense for the overpaid dummies at TransLink to keep spending on overpriced transit by the dummies at TransLink isn’t in our best national interest. It has become obvious that TransLink is merely the pawn being used by the ones pulling the strings to spend our money on concrete infrastructure which saps money from rolling stock for transit to move people. Firms are making money from this and road congestion isn’t dropping. It is a waste of our money for shysters at TransLink to have jobs and for their cronies building their ineffective transit to fill their pockets with our money.
On a per capita basis, Vancouver with only about 600,000 people out of the almost 36 million people living in Canada only deserves about 1.7% ($338 million) of the added $20 billion allocated for public transit by the federal government over the next 10 years. Slimy Minister of TransLink, Peter Fassbender can forget about any more than this.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Vaughn+Palmer+goes+Ottawa+intent+infrastructure+funding/11575048/story.html
TransLink has built the white elephant (s-train) that Vancouver and BC can’t afford. Slime ball Fassbender feels that passing on the cost of the TransLink boondoggle to Canadian taxpayers is the answer. No, it isn’t. Our debt and taxes keep going up, and the dummies at TransLink feel that people who have their act together owe them something. Other Canadians don’t.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/statistics-canada-debt-income-net-worth-1.3363704
What TransLink is trying to pull with the aid of Fassbender (make that, what Peter Fassbender is trying to pull) is disgusting. He can shutter TransLink and start building LRT and tram lines which we can afford on our own so that we do not have to ask for handouts from other Canadians who have financial worries of their own and don’t need TransLink’s, too.