6.19.2007

Just hang on? Hang on to what?

Kevin Falcon's advice to Cambie Village merchants who have seen their businesses devastated by construction on the Canada Line: just hang on and things will be fine. Falcon's manipulation and condescension about The Little Train Nobody Really Wanted is getting old, and lying about the future for Cambie merchants and residents just makes it worse. The Canada Line is not going to bring a rush of business into Cambie Village, it's going to bring business rushing underneath Cambie Village because Canada Line passengers (especially tourists) won't be able to see Cambie Village.

For those of you scoring at home, this 'marketing campaign' that was supposed to support Cambie merchants during RAV construction has done sweet F.A. In fact, a quick survey of the billboard and print ads shows the retail areas most prominently featured in the "Open for Business" campaign (to encourage shoppers to visited construction-affected areas) are Granville, Yaletown, and No. 3 Road. Unlike Cambie Village, none of those areas has an NDP MLA who introduced a Private Member's bill to directly compensate the devastated small businesses in his riding.

As for the "significant benefits" of the Canada Line's completion, those are difficult to grasp, especially since what the region really needed was east-west mass transit along Vancouver's Broadway Corridor to UBC. However, the "benefits" of the line's construction to date have been the bullying of municipal governments, lying to residents and small business owners about the disruptive "cut and cover" system of tunnelling, paying near-starvation wages to immigrant workers, and the collapse of private financing for what was supposed to be a "Public-Private" partnership.

And the Fast Ferries are supposed to be the biggest transportation debacle in B.C. history why?

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