'Giving secretive freebees to developers works OK, but it works better if you also undercut local media and its ability to tell the story.'
Canadians are a positive bunch. We tend to assure ourselves the gangrene-stricken beast of rotten government is nothing to worry about. Best to point out its coat of fur still looks good. Its teeth are still sound.
Take the parkade debacle, where city administration spent tens of millions of dollars to effectively subsidize a private development without city council or the public knowing about it. The city sold city-owned land at 4500 Ospika Blvd. to a Vancouver developer behind closed doors and with no notification until the sale was complete. We only found out about the below-market $500,000 sale price through a local resident’s Freedom of Information request.
In the same example, the city administration changed the contract without bringing it to city council, absolving us of the ability to buy this land back if things went wrong. Now the developer is saying they can’t build the student housing as they promised. Yet they still sit on a mud pit, formerly a sensitive bit of public forest. The difference being it is now upzoned, assessed at $3.5 million dollars, and is no longer ours.
I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this wasn’t done to protect our democratic institutions, which depends on a functional free press.
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