I don't believe for one minute the manufactured stats... trying to justify their jobs is all. I fail to understand however why a home owner in PG pays property taxes for an economic development office that is talking as though its mandate is Northern BC or even regionally....

I think IPG should be shut down and the city should be doing the work of facilitating new business in PG. The money saved would go a long way to a lot of far more productive uses of precious tax resources. Let the province pay for the 'regional economic development office' out of their windfall profits from gas sale leases in the north.

I think we are all being had here in PG with the cost of IPG, their results as an organization, and the whole concept. Home owners can't continue to subsidize the well connected anymore IMO.

You are paying for the Cristal Ball they own, come out here and all you get for your Taxes the Road gets plowed and we can bring our Garbage to the Dump, no Fire Protection no Service of any Kind, some Years if we lucky we may see a Police Car getting lost.
The whole Taxation should be based on Services available not what they claim your Shack is worth.

Eaagleone, how about a different insight to the situation.

Prince George is the service center for Northern BC. If there is a problem in Mackenzie or Burns Lake, the industry looks for solutions in Prince George first.
The kids from the northern communities look at PG as an affordable option for post secondary education. Northern Health is centered in Prince George.

Thus when Mt Milligan spends 900 million dollars to build this plant. We are going to benefit. When Alcan eventually spends 2 billion dollars, we are going to benefit.
We are a service center.

What is good for the north, is good for Prince George. If you are a home owner, we want it to be good for Prince George, the value of your home gets better, thus, when your ready to retire, it is worth sufficient enought to live off of.

"when your ready to retire, it is worth sufficient enought to live off of."

Huh??? .... it would be if can sell it for enough to move elsewhere where you can buy a place for half or less the price .... or move into a smaller place.

Sell and move to Bolivia and hope you stay healthy ... :-)

I think IPG should be shut down and the city should be doing the work of facilitating new business in PG.

I have to agree with Eagle on that one. What bunch of free loaders.
Cheers

I'm sure IPG had a major role to play in the three projects listed in the article. The City should bring economic development or whatever it is that IPG does in house. Might help pay for the new cop shop or downtown revitalization.

I agree with Eagleone. While the percentage employment rate might have increased, has it really related to an overall increase in wages paid. 1000 people lost good paying jobs at Rustads, NCP, Winton Global, and most recently Clear Lake. I don't recall seeing any announcement of good paying jobs to replace the jobs lost, only call center position, or low paying entry positions in the service sector.
I do not know how IPG can continue to pat themselves on the back for government money spent in the PG area such as the cancer center. If any credit is due for the cancer center it belongs to the MLA"s and the doctors working behind the scene.

The increase in populatin is more likely attribitable to births, as much as anything.

IPG had nothing to do with the Cancer Clinic, Alcan Kitimat, or Terrane Metal. Nor did they have anything to do with the huge expansion of Endako Mines, which they failed to mention. Nor will they have anything to do with the Transmission Lines up Highway 97, or any of the mines that go into that area.

he spoke:-"What is good for the north, is good for Prince George. If you are a home owner, we want it to be good for Prince George, the value of your home gets better, thus, when your ready to retire, it is worth sufficient enough to live off of."
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How do you "live off" this rise in value unless you sell the home and can purchase another one cheaper?

Or are you thinking of taking out one of those 'reverse mortgages', where you bet the lender how long you're going to live? You know, where he lends you most of what your home's worth now, in return for title to it when you croak.

If you make it to 110 the laughs on him. Even though if you do, you'll probably be long out money from trying to keep yourself in the interim, due to a continuance of the very inflation you thought you could profit from.

That's the rub, he spoke, 'inflation'. We have a whole Party in office down in Victoria at the moment who mistakes it for 'prosperity'. It's counterpart in Opposition makes the same mistake.

If your home has risen in value since you bought it, the 'cheaper' one has, too. All you're really doing is working with bigger figures when you sell it ~ there's no real gain to you. And chances are if the cost of housing has risen, the cost of everything else has too.

If you're using the sale proceeds to park yourself in some old folks assisted living place, you'd better not plan on living too long. The monthly rent there will absorb your winnings in very few years.

You know, he spoke, your comments remind me of that old line, "What's good for General Motors, is good for America."

That was uttered by a GM CEO around the same time that GM was buying up lots of major city's electric powered urban and inter-urban streetcar lines. So it could rip them up and replace them with the diesel powered buses it made, or encourage those outside the city cores to buy new cars to commute to work in. In places like Los Angeles.

"Smog" was "good for America". It not only made 'jobs' making the things that created it, not to mention getting rid of the streetcars that didn't, but it made even more 'jobs' monitoring it, studying it, caring for those who got sick from breathing it, burying them when they succumbed early to its effects, and finally, trying to find a solution to cure it.

By going back to the same kind of electric powered rail transit systems they previously ripped out! In places like Los Angeles.

With things like that being "good" for America, one has to wonder whether the alternative was really so "bad" for America? But then maybe so, after all there wouldn't have been all those 'jobs' then, would there?