Let me start with this pithy, insouciant line in the Vancouver Sun this morning, which includes my handy notation:
The $4 million cost is expected to largely come from the federal government, he said, with the remainder from food and beverage sales
[Joel notes all alcohol in BC is bought by the provincial government, then sold to private retailers, Soviet-style, at a huge state “profit”; and each sip of booze is then taxed to the Soviet-style max.]
…
For those who don’t know Vancouver (hello CTV Newsnet anchor!), Granville Island is a small section of downtown Vancouver situated in a beautiful setting —even though it’s under a bridge, not at all unlike a filthy troll. It is all about the tourists. And the rats. But never mind the rats for now.
It is, for some un-Godly, un-free, totally inexplicable reason, wholly owned by the state. The government of Canada. Nobody knows why Granville Island is state owned. It’s much like the state-owned CBC that way, the possible difference being that the CBC is more useless, and more dirty, and more populated by state-funded “artists” and “creative” types than rats. And at Granville Island you can get some great produce and cheese from local merchants. They’re alike in other ways: much as the state-owned and state-run CBC isn’t a “corporation” in that normal free-market capitalist way, Granville Island isn’t an island at all. It’s a lie. A fake.
If you ventured onto Granny Isle, as a PTBC reader you’d impulsively look for (and even if you didn’t look, you’d bump into and fall over) the approximately 8,000 to 12,000 
logos throughout Granville Island. Tourists from Russia would be forgiven for thinking they’d gone back in time and re-entered the old Soviet Union, Canadian style, and look for the local Intourist office.
Granville Island entrance, complete with logo…
Apparently the owner of Granville Island, the benevolent state, is going to help fake out the tourists coming to Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics and help create a “French quarter” at Vancouver’s famed Granville Island —pretending as if it formed naturally through history like in Louisiana, I guess, and is if it were always there. It will pretend to have been created by French-speaking British Columbians and Canadians and Quebecers (which are vastly outnumbered in Vancouver by Chinese-speaking Chinesers and Punjabi-speaking Indianers, but those languages aren’t state-mandated “official” state languages).
This is much like how nanny-state social engineering bureaucrats in Canada, as inspired by nanny-state liberals appointed over the decades by liberals, use their myriad social programs and departments and social engineering policies in their constant, ongoing attempt to “create” a “Canadian Culture” all over Canada, instead of letting it develop naturally—or “organically” to use one of their favorite trendy terms which they strangely avoid in cases like this. This totally fake, non-organic route is favored by them in cases like this because it involves using your taxpayer 
cash ($4 MILLION in this case), which is itself ever so yummy and progressive, and is presumed to be self-explanatory and self-justified and of unquestionable “value” —yes it’s an idea which we’re instructed to think of another “Canadian Value”; plus it involves some willing liberal-thinking government agents, committees, and policy-makers who love meddling in Canadian life to get it to conform to their ideals; and of course it involves tons of often very liberal-left-thinking, government-reliant minions, who usually involve a huge cadre of far-left “artists”.
Canadians are, as we know by now, too stupid to create anything on our own without the state’s benevolent aid.
This should all be entirely preposterous to anyone who isn’t, you know, Soviet, Saudi Arabian, North Korean, or Iranian. But this is Canada, after decades of liberal-left governments. Nobody questions any of it and in fact most Canadians are now apologists, because we’ve all become so properly used to it, and reliant upon government, just as planned. (Drip… Drip…)
The article is in the Vancouver Sun, not Pravda:
…The concept, which has been submitted to the federal government’s Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation as the owner of Granville Island, was discussed at a recent Senate hearing on official languages where Josee Verner, the new minister of Canadian Heritage, also endorsed the idea without committing any money.
At the hearing Vanoc [the state-funded 2010 Olympics project] CEO John Furlong briefed senators on significant efforts the organizing committee has made to improve on its official language commitments.
The improvements come after the Senate committee severely criticized Vanoc two years ago, saying it didn’t believe the organizer would meet its promises to fully support Canada’s two official languages…
A group called La Fédération des francophones de la Colombie-Britannique (whose website is entirely in French—no English) —has this huge honkin’ logo dominating the bottom of their main page. It’s a wonder the benevolent state can keep track of all our cash and all the cross-funding and duplicate funding of all manner of things to create “Canadian Culture” and engineer our lives to be more to their way of thinking!:
Another of the proponents is the Fondation canadienne pour le dialogue des cultures, whose website is similarly only in French—no English version available. So sorry. Needs a load of taxpayer cash for that, I guess. The honorary president (or as they write, “Présidente d’honneur”) of the organization is “Son Excellence la très honorable Michaëlle Jean, C.C., C.M.M., C.O.M., C.D., Gouverneure générale du Canada”. That’s the young state-owned CBC’s former employee, who our former dear leader, the Liberal (err… “Natural Governing Party’s”) Paul Martin appointed to be the leader of all the land and our commander in chief.
I noticed that a person named Suzanne Laverdière, “directrice du fonds transculturel, SRC/CBC, Montréal et Toronto”, is on their board. Unfortunately and ironically, I couldn’t find any stories about this project on her employer’s state-owned multi-gazillion-dollar CBC.ca people’s web site. That would have been fun! So I relied solely on the private sector’s Vancouver Sun for information, and amazingly, that worked. The article does read, nonetheless, as a story one might expect to read in Russia or the old Soviet Union, covering all manner of government funding and cross-funding and multi-level supports of inter-related government-sponsored festivals and projects and events and buildings and such, and in this case on government-owned land, for a government-funded project of mammoth proportions, in order to make folks “think right”.
It’s all so progressive.
Vote liberal.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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