PowerVille
Mental health, education, welfare rates, transit, bus passes, carbon taxes, campaign finance reform and all that are one thing when it comes to the co-optation of all things Dipper/Green.
But this...
This, if even remotely true, would be unbelievably Clarklandian in more ways than Christy:
Shazam!
(It would appear Mr. Antrim was p'wning us all...But I would take pretty short odds on it having been in at least one draft version or three of the speech somewhere up the line)
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7 comments:
Hmmm...maybe you can get a deal...I hear 1 or more of the fast ferries at work in the Middle East. Maybe you folks can get a deal on a deck as well. Recycling, after all was part of your platform wasn't it?
link to more ways than Christy broken
Recycling, indeed...
In fact, if Karl Marx had flown into YYJ today they would have sent him a limousine anyway.
Or some such <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQp7fSX6PfI>Strummer/Jonesian thing!</a>
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word salad wonder
A BC poli smash and grab drive by?
Anon-Above--
Definitely...With blinds on all windows.
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Oh brother! We'v got three ferries here now: the nearly new cable-ferry, the Quinitsa it replaced moored on Denman, and it looks like the Tachuk moored across the way in Buckley Bay. One ferry worker told me they just happen to be "in storage" next to the cable-ferry which, as we locals know, has been fraught with glitches.
Tourist season is on and tourists flocking to Hornby Island, as usual by way of Denman Island, should be reassured, if blissfully unaware of the cable-ferry proposal's controversy, near unanimous opposition from Islanders, and the disappointments we residents have expressed about the new cable-ferry once it was imposed. The one thing tourists will be acutely aware of, though, is the steep prices that residents and service trades have to endure year-round. Supposed "savings" are not tangible, and the big, fancy new ferry building on Denman---very nice but totally unnecessary---will be eye-balled with those steep ticket prices in mind.
The cable-ferry was promised to save money by eliminating two deckhands. No ticketed sea captain is required (one of the remaining deckhands runs the cable-ferry like a subway train: stop and go, no steering), another big "savings." The Quinitsa was supposed to be used elsewhere under the mantra "savings, savings, savings," this after giving about half the old, self-propelled ferry crew a package which included a year-and-a-half of wages---that is, the former employees who the bogus, "privatized" BC FerryServices Inc (BC Ferries is actually 100% owned by the government of BC) wanted to get rid of because of their unhappiness about the dubious efficiencies sought by building the cable-ferry simply to reduce the number of workers.
The summer season gets us back two of the three daily sailings that have been taken away by the same formula of reducing service and jacking up fares. But the loss of the last ferry runs of the day from both Islands has fatally wounded many cultural events when former off-Island attendees availed those late runs. But the starkest measure of the effective dys-management of these highway links, co-relative to other economic measures such as business failures, reduced property tax assessments and conspicuously lower real estate market value than the rest of the region, is the loss of populations on each island as measured by recent census: Denman by over 6% and Hornby by over 12%. That hasn't happened since WW II. The same pattern applies to some degree to all ferry dependant communities on the Gulf Islands, the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island. That is, the BC Liberals' user pay model, not being applied fairly to other highway-link infrastructure such as bridges and freshwater ferries in the Interior upon which communities in those regions depend, has fallen heavily on users of publicly owned ferroes. An estimate of negative economic impact as a result of cut service and jacked prices is in the billions of dollars.
As when we spoke out against the cable-ferry, high-speed ferries are not what we need or want, but, just like the ill-fated FastCats, BCFS Inc's price-rigging and bankrupting infrastructure policies have been about ideologically partisan gaming that has measurably damaged the economies of ferry-dependent communities and, ultimately the entire province---including for BC Liberal supporters. The dual irony of the BC Liberals' appeasements and hollow contrition is duly noted.
The remedy is to rid the BC Liberal government and take a fair assessment of things like the true cost and efficacy of the cable-ferry, only possible if BSFS Inc is decommissioned and the "privatized" books opened. That'd be no problem for an NDP government since the ferries are still, despite claims and misconceptions to the contrary, fully owned by the people of BC.
https://twitter.com/ConnectingTrue/status/879944671383900160
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