What's the difference between a Vancouver Olympic Village condo and syphillis? You can get rid of syphillis.
The City of Vancouver is asking the provincial government for a special amendment to the city charter to authorize it to borrow a half-billion dollars to bail out the troubled Olympic Village.
At the end of the day, the total tab for the 1,100-unit development could run as high as $875-million, about $125-million over budget.
When the previous city council gave a total loan guarantee it seemed like a safe risk. The units would be sold after the games to recoup the costs. However the prospect of getting $760,000 per condo in today's plummeting market makes that look like a terrible bet.
Vancouver being Vancouver we can probably expect the provincial government to step in at the end of the day and make the rest of us shoulder the losses just as we're all having to eat the costs of that damned highway to Whistler. And yet they're still closing hospital beds.
2 comments:
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme. I remember the Montreal olympics. The mayor said there was as much chance of running a deficit as him getting pregnant. Needless to say, within a short while editorial cartoons were showing him knitting booties.
When the dust settles, our anything-but-liberal Liberal premier, Gordo Campbell, will simply dump the losses and spread them around the province. He'll let us all pay for Vancouver's obsessive quest to prove itself a "World Class City."
And the multimillionaires who've become the "common folk" of Whistler will have that lavish $600-million super highway to their weekend getaways - also paid for, in full, by those of us who'll never get the slightest benefit from it.
When British Columbia built the Coquahalla connector highway to properly link the interior to the lower mainland they turned it into a toll road even though it was a boon to commerce in BC. If any stretch of tarmac ever deserved to be a toll road it's the "Sea to Sky" highway but that might cause an inconvenience to Campbell's friends so we don't hold our breath waiting for that to happen.
Meanwhile we can't get even the old, decommissioned hospital beds re-opened despite our growing population. The mind reels.
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