What He Said

Paul says everything that has been in my head for the last few months regarding the wayyy over budget convention centre being built on Burrard Inlet.

"You could make a case that the Vancouver Convention Centre expansion is a bigger scandal than the fast ferry fiasco.

Both are examples of incompetence and overspending, revealed by the auditor general. There are depressing similarities in the way both Liberal and NDP governments mismanaged their megaprojects.

And both Liberals and NDP kept the problems and soaring costs from the public until they were forced to come clean.

The convention centre has run much farther over budget. The initial plan set a $495-million cost; that has now climbed to $883 million. The fast ferries went from $210 million to $454 million.

But there will be a convention centre at the end of it all. The fast ferries were never used and sold for about $20 million to the highest bidder.

Three things give the convention centre the edge as the worse offensive scandal. ..."

I'm sure the Convention Centre will be nice and all, but you can typically do a lot with a billion dollars. I'm planning to live my whole life on about 0.2% of that, for instance. More to the point, if you were really serious about fighting climate change you could spend it on transit, or the Site C dam on the Peace River, rather than constructing a building whose sole purpose is to convince people to fly here from all over the world....