An update in this government rip-off scandal-in-the-making. Read this, and this, to catch up.
Even though a vast majority think it’s totally stupid, the governments carry on as if they know better, and as if everyone is on board and supporting their crazy ideas, and them. They could be half right. To wit:
More than half of Metro Vancouver residents think the ballooning cost to host World Cup soccer in 2026 is not worth it, a new poll suggests.
The Angus Reid Institute survey found 61 per cent of Metro Vancouver residents say the cost to host a portion of the tournament is not worth the price after the initial price to the province of around $250 million reportedly doubled.
— 61% of Vancouver residents say cost of World Cup not worth it: poll | Vancouver Sun
And yet this has been years in the making and people have been reelected. Nobody has been fired.
This goes on every week in every level of government. The people are sometimes polled, and they report that they’re not for it, or they’re outraged at the already whacko costs doubling or worse, as in this case. But governments keep doing their thing anyway. Rinse and repeat on issue after issue, project after project. (Then, for a conditioner, apply a liberal dose of Voters Keep Voting For These Asses, lather it up, repeating until you and your country go flat broke.)
The original cost estimate of a quarter-billion was a scandal in and of itself as I see it. If I were in charge and that were the estimate presented to me to host freaking soccer games rather than to fix potholes, mow the boulevards, and rebuild aging and increasingly crappy basic infrastructure and lower our grotesquely high taxes, I’d fire whoever even brought up the idea in the first place, then I’d fire some others around them just to make a solid point.
The cost estimate is now “around” a half a billion dollars. Double the original estimate. Again, in real life, nobody has been fired. People have been reelected. Nobody resigned in disgrace. No charges have been laid.
A half-billion dollars — for what? For nothing. Nothing. Almost literally nothing.
It is ostensibly for soccer games as I said. Newsflash: It’s not. It is also not for “nothing,” as I said just now in a moment of outrage lying: It is a half-billion taxpayer dollars for a personal and political vanity play, meant to bolster the images or the perceived importance of those who are in power, to bring attention to themselves, and, hold onto your hats, it is also designed to enrich certain people — people who aren’t you.
In a word, it is corruption. That is my contention.
As if I had to tell you, this isn’t the only such money-making-for-certain-people project whose cost estimates have doubled. Or tripled. Or quadrupled. Or quintupled. Or worse.
For example this one is more than quintuple — FIVE TIMES — the original estimate:
The project was budgeted at $700 million at the start of construction in 2018. Lately, it is projected to cost at least $3.86 billion, if what Metro describes as a “realistic total estimate” holds until the revised completion date of 2030.
— BC Premier calls for audit of sewage plant after NDP fired the auditor | Vancouver Sun
The idea, as the headline suggests, that the NDP premier of BC, David Eby, is calling for an audit, is hilarious. Well hilarious in a deadly, scandalous, sickening kind of way. If you ask me, Eby and the NDP are in need of an audit and possibly an independent auditor, if not an inquiry by police, for all their own suspicious doubling and quintupling of costs on many projects — almost all of their projects — which are way over budget and way behind schedule. For no apparent reason.
Those two projects I just mentioned above are both in BC and are being funded by BC taxpayers, but also in BC (this is relevant because provincial elections are set for the fall of this year, and wherever you live, you need to avoid this sort of shafting of your tax dollars), there’s the Richmond Hospital fiasco. The new hospital, once estimated to cost a whopping $850 million (crazy on its face as a hospital already exists there, and this was just supposed to be an expansion), will now be one of the most expensive buildings ever built in the whole world. Re-read that if you have to. Latest estimate is over TWO BILLION DOLLARS. Does this building look like one of the most expensive buildings in the history of the world?
So yeah, I have questions.
- How does a cost estimate double? How is that even possible? How does it triple? Quadruple? Quintuple? Or worse?
- Could I please see an audit of where every tax dollar landed? Into whose chequing account did tax dollars land?
- Has anybody besides me demanded a criminal bribery and fraud inquiry into every politician and civil servant and contractor involved in this BS?
- Is this not a criminal/police matter?
- How do these people get elected and reelected? Who are the people who vote for these people?
- How do those people — the politicians, civil servants, and contractors — sleep at night? How are they not full of shame, remorse, and filled with the need to resign and apologize for the, well, whatever this is?
- How do the people who voted for this sleep at night? Are they trying to wreck the place?
- And finally, what disease is it that causes this insane behavior by all concerned? Is it the dreaded ideological morass of political progressivism?
In answer to the last one, I think it is. And we can see some of the costs of that, but the actual price is actually inestimable.
P.S.
Today I found an article at Globe and Mail hinting at the dearth of funding for those things that art actually supposed to be basic city expenditures. I wouldn’t consider a swimming pool to be among the most basic infrastructure needs, but they could easily have done a story about roads, bridges, police funding, and other such basic city expenditures. 
I suspect Vancouverites would strongly favor spending a few tax dollars to finally fix this beloved pool and many others — enjoyed by tens of thousands of families every summer for generations — rather than spend a half-billion tax dollars on a soccer match to be enjoyed by 32 people, mostly foreigners, one summer.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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