Broadway Subway Is Luxury Wrapped In Opulence – Designed To Sell A Mock P-3?

It did not take long for the Liberal fixers in Ottawa to hatch a scheme to keep their political friends awash in taxpayer`s dollars.

Public transit schemes are generally not money makers, in fact the vast majority of public transit operations around the globe are subsidized, many heavily subsidized.

A few light rail transit lines operate in what is called a P-3 or a Public, Private, Partnership, which has different meanings in different countries.

In the UK and Europe a P-3 ensures a well designed transit system, with complete public input and full disclosure. An integral part of a P-3 is that the operating consortium undertakes risk and by doing so also enables the operating consortium to enjoy the proceeds of an operating profit.

By undertaking risk, the P-3 consortium is entitled to make a profit from revenue generated from the transit line: including debt servicing! This type of P-3 generally results in a well designed, well run and user friendly transit system.

Because of the nuances of a P-3, expensive metros, light-metros and subways are almost never considered and instead LRT is considered a good vehicle for a P-3, with Dublin’s LUAS and Nottingham’s LRT operations being a good example.

Not so in BC and now Canada it seems as a P-3 tends to be a taxpayer subsidized payoff to friends in government. In fact it can be called a money laundering scheme!

The RAV/Canada line is a good example.

The RAV/Canada Line was supposed to be a BC Liberal showcase P-3 and with a compliant mainstream media the real story of the P-3 has never been told.

The then Premier Gordon Campbell and Minister of Transportation, Kevin Falcon were so ignorant of rapid transit they tried to make the planned RAV (Richmond, Airport, Vancouver) ALRT/ART proprietary SkyTrain Line a P-3.

To their combined shock and horror, they found out that SkyTrain was a “proprietary” transit system and incompatible in operation with other transit systems. It would be impossible to have a ALRT/ART SkyTrain P-3 because there could be only one bidder, thus the government held a mock P-3 where ART/ALRT (SkyTrain) patent holder SNC lavalin, in consortium with Bombardier pretended to bid against an SNC Lavalin/Hyundai, Siemens and Alstom. Siemens and Alstom were tossed out of the bidding process because they dared to use LRT vehicles (like Seattle) instead of a light/heavy rail metro vehicles.

The P-3 had turned into nothing more than a conspiracy to enrich SNC Lavalin at the taxpayer’s expense.

In the end the SNC/Hyundai consortium won, but the proposed RAV light-metro costs escalated from $1.3 billion to now over $2.4 billion and in order to SNC Lavalin/Hyundai consortium to build the RAV Line, they refused to except risk. Thus the RAV/Canada Line is nothing more than a taxpayer fed money laundering scheme designed to enrich SNC Lavalin lead consortium, now receiving over $110 million annually in taxpayer funded subsidies as the now named Canada Line does not have an operating profit.

Judge Pittfield, presiding over the failed Susan Heyes lawsuit and against TransLink, called the RAV/Canada line bidding process a “charade“!

And what did the taxpayer get for his/hers $2.4 billion? The only heavy rail metro in the world, build as a light metro, with less capacity than a simple streetcar costing a fraction to build.

What the BC Liberals have done in BC, has now been refined by the federal Liberals to ensure their political friends and insiders are able to slurp at the mock P-3 trough for generations to come!

The Canada Line, the model for federal Liberal corruption to come!

Liberals redirect $15B to infrastructure projects that ‘generate revenue’ for private investors

Finance Minister Bill Morneau delivered his fall fiscal updateTuesday afternoon.

The good news is Morneau announced the creation of a new “Canadian Infrastructure Development Bank” that will invest billions of dollars into infrastructure.

The bad news is Morneau is funding the new bank with $15 billion in previously announced spending earmarked for “socially useful, non-commercial projects like child care or affordable housing to cash-strapped cities.”

The other bad news is the only projects that will see a dime from the new bank are projects that have “revenue-generating potential” for the government’s private sector partnersAi??ai??i??Ai??a scheme to use public funds to subsidize and finance private infrastructure, in other words.

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According to Finance Canada, much of the infrastructure spending will be privately-financed, with federal, provincial and municipal governments making up the difference.

Details show the federal government’s contribution will be $35 billion, although since the bank will only invest in “revenue-generating” projects, Canadians will possibly pay tolls and other fees to use infrastructure their tax dollars helped finance.

At the same time, the Liberal government says it will redirect $15 billion in previously announced spending that had been specifically earmarked for infrastructure projects relating to public transit, climate change, affordable housing and indigenous communities to projects that generate revenues for private investors.

Other recent reports have suggested theAi??Liberal government is also considering auctioning off public assets, like airports, to recoup costs.

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For the full story……………..

Comments

One Response to “Broadway Subway Is Luxury Wrapped In Opulence – Designed To Sell A Mock P-3?”
  1. eric chris says:

    TransLink isn’t subject to scrutiny in British Columbia and has all the trappings of a criminally controlled organization. After the TransLink Commissioner published his report showing TransLink to have serious flaws and raising questions about the high cost of public transit and all the empty buses, his career ended and the newspapers controlled by TransLink stayed away from his report. Newspapers here allowed the king pins at TransLink to distort the truth and publish propaganda, instead:

    http://www.caw111.com/TranslinkEfficiencyReview-Mar2012.pdf

    TransLink has ruined countless lives in Vancouver and the day of reckoning will one day come for the amigos slurping at the trough and using public transit to fill their pockets with gold. Federales in Ottawa are onto TransLink.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federales

    When the s-train finally derails during a minor earthquake or due to mechanical failure from the aging s-train network, the joke will be over and public transit will be redesigned to run trams at grade. When we have the sure to happen flood in downtown Vancouver and subway passengers drown like rats in the hundreds or thousands public transit will be redesigned to run trams at grade. I’m neither a pessimist keeping my head down nor an optimist keeping my head up. I’m a realist looking straight ahead and trained to anticipate what can be to avoid unnecessary disasters which the fools at TransLink have set themselves up to suffer.

    Anyhow, here is my prediction in the US election: Trump. Either figuratively with drones policing the border to keep Mexicans in Mexico or a physical wall to keep Mexicans in Mexico, I don’t think Trump’s idea is such a bad idea. Trump might even cut off funding for the s-train disaster in Hawaii, too.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37869067

    “Ernest Y. Martin, the chairman of the Honolulu City Council, said he was stunned at how quickly the price tag exceeded projections. I was surprised we incurred a cost overrun so early in the project,” he said. “It was very disappointing. I still believe it’s the right thing to do.” [ Like in Vancouver? ]

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/21/us/hawaii-struggles-to-keep-rail-project-from-becoming-a-boondoggle.html?_r=0

    “I believe the rail project will make getting around Honolulu a lot simpler and easier for a large majority of our community,” said Gov. David Ige, a Democrat. “I do believe it’s important.” [ Like in Vancouver? ]

    “Rail is a way to help get to affordable housing,” said Bob Nakata, a housing advocate and onetime pastor with the Kahalu’u United Methodist Church. “Rail as transportation is almost secondary.” [ Like in Vancouver? ]

    Yup. Optimism.