WHAT TO DO WITH PUBLIC MONEY

With all this talk about museums, I'd like to review our publicly owned Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project (read: interprovincial money incinerator.)

When the project was first purchased by the federal government, back in 2018, the price tag was $4.5 billion. At the time, the public was told Kinder Morgan estimated the cost of completion would be another $7.4 billion. On these numbers, Finance Minister Bill Morneau insisted the project would not have a negative fiscal impact. However, in only four years, the scheduled completion cost jumped to $21.4 billion. Combined with this, the parliamentary budget officer just reported the project now has a net value of -$600 million (yes, minus) – or roughly $1.2 billion less than the officer's December 2020 assessment.

There have already been more than 80 oil spills on this line to date; a number merely representing those spills large enough to require reporting. Even our provincial government has said of the project that it "poses unacceptable risks to our environment, our coast and our economy." So it seems like the only thing worse than seeing the pipeline to completion would be using it to it's full capacity.

I've detailed how I feel about arts and culture funding many times in the past, so I won't spell all of that out once again. But I will say that, compared with the travesty of pipelines, I'd love to see a billion dollars of public money (or twenty billion) go to building a new museum or to enhance and sustain many of them across British Columbia and Canada.