How do we get fiscal responsibility out of our politicians

How good a job is Peter Kelly doing spending your money. The facts say
he's doing a very pood job. Read on, peruse the studies and decide
for yourself.

Another 3P3 deal It should read 3Ps cubed because the P3 is there three times.
1 Public Purse Pays
2 Private Pockets profit
3 Pork-barrel politics personified.

Here are three items I found on the new “needed” Vancouver convention center. The post building reality is a lot different than the pre construction hype. You have to wonder if these companies that go around finding the great needs for these projects aren’t simply highly paid yes men. This is just as big a pile of manure as the Commonwealth Games were and, like those games, the same question should be applied! If this is such a great deal why doesn’t private business build it? If you read nothing else on this site read, “A Consulting Group's Fairy (KPMG) Tale Spurred Construction Of $883,000,000 Vancouver Convention Center.”

Some of the more compelling and telling quotes from this article include…“Although the supply of available convention-centre space has obviously grown, the demand has clearly not kept up.” And, “ Although supply has boomed, convention and trade-show attendance for North America has fallen and remains below the levels of the late 1990s” . Followed by. “ Even as these other cities dole out discounts, their own convention business has been on the decline. Portland's Oregon Convention Center, for example, expanded in 2002, almost doubling in size. Still, its convention and trade-show attendance declined from 286,410 in 1999 to a mere 161,791 in 2006 (the latest year reported).”


Vancouver and many other cities were all lead astray by this or similar companies turning out studies based on outdated and unreliable information and statistics. Read the full account of this written by Heywood Sanders, a public-policy professor at the University of Texas–San Antonio and a leading expert in convention-centre economics at http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=2668571251704638303&postID=2795376566124335643

One article from Vancouver asks the question, "Were they on crack? Are they stupid? Or were they just lying to the public?" Full article at www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=2668571251704638303&postID=1130779936544874956. Looking at the facts I think we should be asking similar questions.