This is supposed to benefit the economy? How can this expenditure be justified as an appropriate use of the Northern Trust Fund?
If this is how that money is to be spent, perhaps they should just divide the fund by each community in the north and cut cheques to the respective municipalities.

Exactly ! There is no vision with this fund. They are going to squander away the fund on various little projects or projects that will not actually result in any significant employment, other than by the people who work for the fund.

They sold the fund as a Northern Trust for ‘Economic Development’, but anyone that reads the fine print will see that only non-profit organizations are eligible for the funding.

Clearly the BC Rail privatization funds are being used to pay for normal government subsidization expenditures to special interest groups through this channel that avoids budget accountability. The fine print says this was the plan all along - sell public infrastructure assets with argument that it is subsidized, only to turn around and use that money to buy favour with special interest groups through a subsidization slush fund... that was sold politically as a fund to help diversify the economy through making funds available for small business enterprise risk sharing loans.

IMO it was a betrayal of trust... not only the selling of the public infrastructure essential to the northern resource industry... not just that it went against an election promise not to sell BC Rail... not just that insiders in the premiers office were illegally selling influence in the bidding process on these public assets (insidious lobbyist’s with connections to organized drug crime)... not the 999 year slap in the face lease… nor even the closing of the access to Vancouver ports so that the 2010 region can have a two-week sporting event... but clearly telling a bold faced lie to the voters on what they intended to use the theft proceeds for when in actual fact the proceeds were nothing more then a special interest slush fund run by politico's as the trade off that the citizens of Northern and Central BC really got for their economic life line to the world.

Corporate monopolist politico's everywhere must have really been proud when Gordon Campbell’s liberals pulled that one off. You can bet they have BC Hydro in their sights... but this time they might just give us each a $100 dollar rebate or something (simpler bribe to gullible voters) and then make us pay it back 15 times over in new rates to our new private utility slave masters owners of our rivers to the last drop....

Time Will Tell

This Northern Trust is Federal though. I admit I haven't read the fine print (too busy studying for midterms again, hehe), does this mean the Feds didn't stipulate specific requirements for the Prov to follow? If not, that was certainly inappropriate.