First the all the directors of NDIT should be removed. Then we can start talking about funding new projects.

"On Thursday, April 30, the directors of the Northern Development Initiative Trust were required by law to publish the trust's latest audited financial statements.

Those 2008 financial statements would have revealed the amount of monies lost by the trust in last year's stock-market meltdown.

The directors, however, have not met their statutory obligations.

When queried about the missing annual report, Janine North, the trust's chief executive officer, did not express concern about public accountability.

"The content for the annual report is currently being finalized," North wrote in an e-mail on May 1 -- a day after the report and the audited financial statements were required by law to have been released to the public. "I expect it will be posted on our website this month."

When then asked via e-mail if the annual report was being held until after the May 12 general election, North failed to reply."
Quoted from
http://thetyee.ca/cms/Views/2009/05/04/BCRail/

Please fix some of the worst potholes in the Hart - it's getting to be ridiculous!

I haven't seen any pothole patching crew up here for several weeks!

Are we waiting for the next snowfall and freezing temperatures and Mother Nature to fill these huge craters?

Don't contemplate any fancy spending schemes BEFORE the obvious has been taken care of!

Good grief.

They made a secret deal to lease BC Rail for 999 years even though you didn't want them to do that ...

and they threw you a bone in the form of $135 million for a Northern Initiatives Development Fund ...

only it went to private corporations ...

plus another $50 million ...

and they can't remember what they did with the money but they'll have a story put together sometime soon ...

which means you've lost direct ownership of your railway, the $135 million, and the $50 million ...

meantime, the economy isn't looking so great in the north ...

and you actually voted these bozos back into government?

.

Good points BC Mary.

$10 Million dollars to lead the Nation out of recession. Did he really say that??? He cant possibly beleive that $10 Million will have any effect what so ever on the recession. Jeez lets get real for a change>>>>>

So its was sold as a trust fund for venture capital when they needed political cover for selling BC Rail... switched to a government pet project subsidy fund after the sale of BC Rail... lost a whole bunch of money trying to maximize returns with public dollars through investments 'they-didn't-understand'... and now they want a new mandate to fund mining projects linked to the Chair of the Boards business interest... but only his business interests (mining) and not the original mandate of seed capital for small business enterprise?

Its seems the logic must fit the politics otherwise its not part of the mandate for these public dollars?

IMO 'didn't understand' their investments and its related loses... fully explored would probably lead to funny investments in politically related corporations and bad trades where the taxpayer was always on the losing side of the trades as evidenced by the massive losses....

Loan guarantees for mining? Is that for a loan of $100,000? $1,000,000? $100,000,000?

I'm sure it must be in the millions if they default.

If they do that, then they should provide loan guarantees for any high risk business venture.

I think government should be funding another kind of "mining" more than this country has been doing. Research!

Mining for ideas and exploring those ideas. Then guaranteeing loans required to industrialize the successful research projects as long as they stay in this country.

"...and you actually voted these bozos back into government?"

Yes. Better than the other super bozos choice, the fudgit budget ones.

Nope, I don't think so, diplomat.

Did you know that 22 Crown corporations were slipped out of the 2003 budget - the super bozo Campbell-Collins budget -- to make it look really, really good when it wasn't?

Sending Campbell into Opposition for a while would have given British Columbia a chance to straighten out a few things before it's too late for certain things to recover: the salmon, the BCRail lands which will go to CN for $1 on July 14, stuff like that.

That huge, expensive propaganda bureau in the basement of the Legislature needs cleaning up too. Biggest newsroom in all of Canada, dedicated to training people say "NDP bad, NDP ba-a-ad!" automatically. Check it out: Public Affairs Bureau. $31-million a year, staff of 223.

Besement? Time to add a nice modern wing onto the Legislature building to give them some daylight.

There are already many sources of financing to bring worthwhile "research" projects to commercial fruition.

Marketing the results of those projects to other countries who often have little or no way to pay us for them, or are completely unwilling to do so even if they could (because they want to do their own manufacturing, in their own country), seems to be the problem.

It's not a problem unique to Canada, other 'first-world' countries with small domestic markets often have the same trouble. The Waratah log felling- processing head originally developed and made in New Zealand, and widely used in North America (when there is any logging going on!)is apparently one case in point. A correspondent from 'down under'informs me that they're now made here. The Kiwis couldn't sell them otherwise.

Several years ago one of the tv networks here carried a story of a Vancouver Island inventor who'd developed an ultra lightweight sub-machine gun.

His design was offered to the Canadian Forces, who studied it and told him that while, so far as they could determine, it was an excellent design, to make its manufacture practical in Canada he'd first need to find a larger export market for it.

That 'unit cost is a function of volume', in other words, and it would be too expensive to make here just for our Forces alone. (Not much has changed since the Avro Arrow days, apparently. Wonder if anyone has ever 'costed' how much we really 'saved' by scrapping that, and buying all the ensuing junk we've had instead?)

But I digress. Apparently, after patenting it in the US first, his gun design was submitted to the Pentagon. To see if the US military might be the large potential customer needed.

They studied it, thoroughly, and after a considerable time, rejected it. Later, virtually the same weapon appeared as the Israeli made Uzi. Which is widely sold throughout Europe to various police forces there who seem to feel their cops need to pack such a thing to keep law and order on that 'most civilized' of continents! You can see them strapped around the French and German police with their fingers usually close to the trigger.

If "we" owned the BC Railway, why didn't "we" each get a cheque after it was sold?
No one asked us if "we" wanted to dispose of "our" asset, nor whether we wanted to do what was done with the proceeds received.

Personally, I think old WAC Bennett had it just about right when he refused to fund "hot-house" industries that required government grants, low-interest loans, or loan guarantees to get going. Later governments weren't nearly as smart.

Instead, Bennett used devices like BC Rail, BC Hydro, MoH, etc., to put in the necessary "infrastructure". And then let private enterprise make the best use of it. If one venture failed, someone else would try again, hopefully more intelligently. The power line, or road, or rail spur was all in place. It was really the best way to go.

guns????? enough gun manufacturers already + tough competition.

Harverster heads ... not enough volume and many countries have that matket sewn up.

Solar. University of Waterloo is one of the world level research labs in the world. Problem is, Canada is not supporting the commercialization nor feeding the incetives to install. They still think wood is the answer to diversification in energy while other countires are gearing up to become the world suppliers of solar, wind, and even geothermal technology.

http://www.ontario-sea.org/Storage/29/2077_Lessons_from_Germanys_Energy_Renaissance.pdf

My son is a researcher in Cell Biolog working with RNA to advance cancer research. The big bucks are in countries other than Canada. He will shortly have to move to the USA, Germany, Japan to do some serious applications research for reasonable compensation for the level of education and practical knowledge that he has to, let us say, a plain old engineer the first year after graduation.

In case you do not believe me.

http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2009/02/24/research-funding-heads-south

The big problem remains, Gus. If we "CAN'T" buy ALL our own production at the total 'costs' of its making with the total 'incomes' distributed over the course of making it, and no other industrialised country can do the same with ALL of IT'S production either, then no matter how much we, or they, put into "research", we're still not going to be able to fully commercialise it.

You recoil in the usual horror when basing an economy on "guns" is mentioned. Yet what we, and other nations have been trying to do since the dawn of the machine age is "capture" each other's markets. Is a 'trade war' that reduces the loser, the 'importing' country, to a 'monetary', and eventually an industrial impoverishment, while at the same time 'enslaving' the population of the winner, the 'exporting'one, to more and still ever more "production", really any different than what was implied in Herman Goering's famous line that Nazi Germany must make, "Guns before butter"?

What else COULD it do? The only way that "butter" could be sold, was if the would-be buyer had an "income". And to the Nazis, just as to our politicians here and elsewhere, of all stripes, that means the would-be buyer must have a "job". He must "work", whether his work is useful, or needed, or not.

Countries whose populations are on the verge of starvation, or too many of whom still live in a medieval poverty, can spend endless amounts on copious research to develop their own nuclear bomb, say, an utter waste of time and resources. But they couldn't put the same effort into something more peaceful and practical in improving their own standard of living. The SYSTEM of 'finance' won't let them.

It's bound up in a moral quandry that dates back to the days when everyone HAD to "pick up their shovel". When EVERYONE'S 'production' WAS genuinely "needed", and they either worked or starved.

We're long past that point 'physically'. We may produce many things which are wrong headed and wasteful and just outright stupid. But overall the whole problem of actual 'production', of virtually everything, was solved long ago. We can 'produce', and far more than we could ever 'consume'.

"Distribution", however, is the one thing to which a sensible solution still eludes us.