Marks. Rubes. Suckers. Chumps. Hicks. BC Liberals screw up bigtime on Mackenzie pulp mill and Port Mann P3 fiascos!

Bill Tieleman’s 24 Hours Column

Tuesday February 3, 2009

B.C. government blind to its own bad deals

By BILL TIELEMAN

"I wanted to puke in my corns flakes over this."

- Mackenzie pulp mill worker Carl Bernasky on toxic danger

Marks. Rubes. Suckers. Chumps. Hicks.

That's what the flim-flam men call people who are too slow, too dumb and too unsophisticated to figure out an obvious bad deal.

But in this province we call them the B.C. Liberal government.

Take two sterling examples.

First, the Mackenzie pulp mill holding 15 tonnes of deadly chlorine dioxide that had to be taken over by the government from a former convicted money-launderer whose company wasn't paying the few workers left there.

They kept the chemical tanks from freezing and rupturing, potentially killing 5,000 people.

The clean-up costs could be $30 to $50 million - all charged to taxpayers because the company that bought the mill, Worthington Mackenzie, isn't doing its job and has a single director living in Slovenia!

All big news to the B.C. Liberals.

Second, the Port Mann Bridge twinning project. B.C. Liberal Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon always sings the praises of public-private partnerships.

"With respect to the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge, there will be no federal or provincial dollars involved in the construction of that project," Falcon promised in April 2008.

But now B.C. is on the hook for one-third of the financing - about $750 million - because the vaunted P3 banks weren't willing to fund it.

Hello B.C. taxpayer! Can you spell "bailout?"

But Falcon is "thrilled" with the new taxpayer-financed deal because it "makes sense."

Let's see - Falcon said P3s are a good idea because the private sector takes the risk instead of taxpayers - but now taxpayers will pay for both the project, through tolls of $3 per trip, and also lend the risk-takers the money we didn't want to risk by doing it ourselves?

Talk about marks and suckers - with this kind of business acumen we can expect a lot more desperate P3 bankers to head for B.C.!

Back to the Mackenzie mill, where the B.C. government completely failed to protect the community or the jobs.

While a skeleton crew of workers have to be paid by taxpayers to keep the mill from freezing up, across the province the B.C. government has let 55 sawmills and pulp mills close in the last few years, throwing 25,000 workers out of work.

Ironically, the only time they've lifted a finger to save jobs was when forced to by a potential environmental catastrophe.

When the mill was bought, Forests Minister Pat Bell - whose riding it's located in - told the media: "So far, so good."

Not good enough for taxpayers - not by far.

These marks, rubes, suckers, chumps and hicks have a lot to answer for in throwing away our money.

UPDATE: You simply can't make things like this up - from tonight's online Vancouver Sun - I rest my case after just one day!

Port Mann price tag could hit $3 billion

The Port Mann Bridge and Highway 1 expansion project could cost as much as $3 billion, double the announced cost of $1.5 billion in 2006, Premier Gordon Campbell said Tuesday.

In a speech at the B.C. Economic Summit, Campbell said the Port Mann Bridge will be a “$2- to $3-billion project.”

When announced by Campbell in January 2006, the project was estimated to cost $1.5 billion. Accounting for general inflation, that would now be between $1.6 and $1.7 billion, although there were industry estimates as early as 2006 that construction costs would go up by 50 per cent or more by 2010.

Campbell, who was scheduled to officially unveil a design for the new bridge today in Surrey, did not elaborate Tuesday on any reasons for the change.....