This is a bit of an UPDATE to my previous article about this boondoggle, which you can read just here:
State-Funding of Sports Boondoggles Need To Be Sent To The Penalty Box
The update to my article doesn’t require much from me after you see the article in the Vancouver Sun today. It mostly speaks for itself, or at least you’d think it would. The Big Government and its NDP bros in the “news” media are still totally on board, making all manner of justifications for both the initial outlay and this latest DOUBLING of that planned outlay (if “planned” is even a cogent word to these people).
DOUBLED. In just a few months.
Lest you think the city and province will “make money” on this “investment,” vanquish that fever dream from your financially-illiterate and ideologically captured Big Government-luvin’ noggin.
The net cost — COST, not profit (kinda puts paid to the notion that it’s an “investment” when they know it will lose money, no? Nope. Apparently not. They still call it an “investment”) — to provincial taxpayers is “planned” to be between $100 million and $143 million. Or at least so they say today. Tune in again in a few months to find out the updated figure. Double that cost? Triple? More?
Note that the revenues they “plan” to “earn” (again, can we trust their “plans” at this point?) include between $16 million and $46 million in venue rental fees, but unless I’m stupid, this isn’t new money; it is really just money they would have (actually) earned from someone else renting the facilities. (I wish I could speak to all the organizations who were shoved out of hosting their events and went elsewhere, or who were asked to change their dates in order to make way for this boondoggle.) So this is mostly just money shifted from others. Not new money.
But here’s a real kicker, if you’ll pardon the pun: it also includes “revenue” that they’re “earning” from, I quote, an “initial $116 million contribution from the federal government, with additional federal contributions expected.” (Just let that word “contribution” sink in.) So they’re “earning”… taxpayer cash, which will add to the “revenue” that they’re “earning.”
This is misinformation. Full stop.
Make it all make sense to me. No just give it up. You can’t. This sort of BS cannot be explained away. This pretense of “planning” and “budgeting” is a total head-fake. And to then literally misrepresent facts — like the federal “contribution” lowers the cost and is added to revenue? — My God. This kind of ineptitude and dishonesty should be way too much for even the diehard progressive. This is reckless, an irresponsible waste of taxpayer cash, very obviously badly “planned,” clearly horribly managed, explained to the taxpayers with egregious full-frontal mendacity, and all of that is after they’ve kept most of it a secret from the public and the parts of the news media not captured by progressive ideologues since day one. It is, in fact, nonsensical.
I used “kick” as a pun earlier. I’d like to kick something in the next election in BC — but it isn’t a soccer ball.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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