Ummm... So now PG only has to come up with another 30 or $50,000 to pay for the development plan for the PG Golf lands.

A plan that doesn't have to make economic sense either! But just a plan that the city Development Services happens to like is all that matters.

How obvious does it have to get that we were screwed with the sale of BC Rail? They said at the time the Northern trust would be in place to help diversify the economy with seed money for development projects.

Then after BC Rail was sold we are all told the fine print says only non-profit organizations, and local governments are eligible to apply for funding. So we are told that the Northern Trust is not a fund for developing local business opportunities to replace the lost BC Rail jobs, but rather a slush fund to pay out to the talking class in diversifying our non-profit industry whom all live off of government programs and tax dollars.

The facts are Northern Trust has problems dispersing funds now because their limited mandate of funding only public sector workers and their pet projects, which for the most part are a waste of tax payer dollars if the request had come for anything in an actual budget that politicians are accountable for.

So in order to make the slush fund appear to being doing something positive they came up with this new scheme to expand the bureaucracy of the economic planners, rather then look at the flaw in their mandate where they could actually make a difference assisting real economic development through allowing funding of for-profit business ventures in Northern BC.

The BC liberals really pulled one over our eyes on this one. It was nothing more then a bribe to keep the opposition down to the dismantling of our essential infrastructure for the economy in the north with the miss leading lie that they would assist in economic projects to assist in diversification of the north. When in reality the idea was to buy off the responsibility they have as a government for the bureaucracy of funding non-profit organizations. A way of saying ‘were busy planning for our party in 2010, so lets set something up so we have no responsibility for funding what happens in Northern BC economic development, and lets not use our budget for that either when we have the power to give away their infrastructure to pay for it’.

I find it interesting that the sale of BC Rail caused the closure of the Abitibi pulp mill and 800 jobs in Mackenzie because of a lack of rail service and an oversupply of inventory that... had they been able to move it they could have sold product and stayed in operation.

Throughout the north we see lumber yards piling up with inventory for the same reasons Abitibi ran out of storage space and with the same predictable results. CN says they don't have the cars.

Reality is they don't have the engines, because they sent all BCR engines to subsidize the rest of their CN rail network and so now they have less then half the engines working the BCR line they had when BC Rail was getting the product to market.. Predictible result is 800 jobs here, 300 there, and another 188 there and it goes on and on.

I ask will the Northern Trust slush fund for non-profit government bureaucracy be able to replace the near 2000 job loses we have already experienced in the forest industry in only the past few weeks.

I think the sale of BC rail cost the North 150 jobs for every job it created and by that measure our liberal government should be held accountable. It was a pure failure and the biggest act of treason ever committed by politicians in this part of the country.

Remeber Abitibi is pulp and pulp markets are at record highs, so no they did not shut down and lay off 800 people in the mill and bush because pulp prices were down or our dollar exchange with the Americans (they already sell their product to Asia). They shut down because of the BCR sale by the Campbell government resulting in their inability to have any efficiency of throughput time to move their inventory in a just in time fashion like the rest of the industry they compete against. The troubles in their lumber mills was only a contributing factor.

I would suspect the problems in Fort St James, Mackenzie, Bear Lake, and Chetwynd are all problems related in a large part to this same issue, because it is no coincidence they are the communities downsized by CN's take over of their lifeline to the world markets.

The Premier of Vancouver is determined to make B C 'number one' again. Counting from the bottom up!