It was an editorial of genuine significance. So important that I scraped it from the BURNABY NOW website, to share here. Chris Campbell won't mind. He is a reporter at the NOW, and he worked with persistence to get us this astonishing information. I am grateful, and so should you be.
"OPINION: I slogged through the Burnaby bureaucracy for 6 measly numbers" Now and Then - September 14, 2019
Campbell begins his editorial by explaining that in January of this year he read in the Tri-Cities News a breakdown of civic election costs for Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam. He brought this article to the attention of a city of Burnaby functionary, and explained that his paper would like to provide a similar breakdown for the residents of this city. That was eight months ago. After a push-pull session Chris Campbell was persuaded by municipal staff to "wait" until a formal report was submitted to council. As the months fell from the 2019 calendar, the reporter was told the report was "pending". He realized he was being stonewalled, but he waited. An email last summer revealed that in fact, "there would be no report coming on the election costs".
All of this has been conducted by Email. Then he received an official response "IN THE MAIL !" informing the BURNABY NOW that the email exchange was being taken as a formal ATIP request, and it had been forwarded to the city finance department. On September 11, 2019 Mr. Campbell received a summary of figures for the 2014 and 2018 municipal elections, "Via email". As she put it, "You can't make this stuff up." He was referring to games-playing, not the financial figures.
MUNICIPAL EXPENDITURE (BURNABY)
ON THE 2018 CIVIC ELECTION
"Software (data fix): $87,312
Hardware (tabulators): $95,947.03
Voter cost and candidate information packages (print and postage): $141,041.65
Staff costs - advance polling and day-of-polls: $190, 104.18
Other expenditures (compensation, supplies, etc) $494,693.46
TOTAL $1,009,098.32"
Of course that is the OFFICIAL taxpayer outlay. The candidates had their individual, and shared campaign expenditures. Those were immediately forthcoming, as required by, and under penalty of the law.
The 2014 civic election also cost taxpayers more than a million dollars, and Mr. Campbell adds, "that's the price to be paid for democracy".
"DEMOCRACY" IN BURNABY
All in "the Family"
Consider the following, scraped from news archives:
"Housing advocates stage three-hour
sit-in in mayor's office" BURNABY NOW, March 9, 2017
The photo (below) shows Ivan Drury, a graduate student at SFU (History), occupying Mayor Derek Corrigan's office. Drury was one of the principle organizers of the "Stop Demovictions" campaign, and their efforts definitely got the media's attention during the 2018 Burnaby municipal election. Credit for ousting Mayor Corrigan goes not to the housing activists, or to the voters. Burnaby's most powerful politician was felled by former backers, a union faction that had been loyal to him for years. (It was a bloodless coup d'etat, if you will.) That said, the spectacle of Corrigan lynched by his own "brothers and sisters" in the Burnaby Citizens Association did focus the mind on what the B.C.A. is truly capable of. The BCA - CUPE cabal has run our city for as long as anyone can remember, and I expect it will always rule Burnaby. There is no way to oust a political machine that is in bed with its employees. The BCA and CUPE combine to protect each other against all potential opposition - editorial or electoral. You cannot oust one, without ousting the other.
Ivan Drury is an interesting fellow, and Burnaby politicians are not the only crew he has been screwing with. If you Google Mr. Drury you will harvest a bushel basket of news coverage, and some of his own political articles. He is a tireless organizer and has staged several effective protests. I think he has an acquired taste for unarmed political confrontation. Drury has even been arrested by the lads in Kevlar, and prudently surrendered himself to "lawful force". In his essays he professes to hate "neo-liberal" politicians, those whose pro-diversity posture he considers phony. He labels them "philanthrocapitalists," or worse. As he is an advocate for the truly powerless in B.C., he has my respect. But when he visits Burnaby City Hall he must understand that he is confronting the truly powerful, and they are just as smart as he is. They are not Drury's enemy at all. They just need more time to free up tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and quietly deal with "affordable housing", without triggering a ratepayer backlash that might cost them a few seats on council. They don't want any pesky freethinkers raising objections at Council meetings. The BCA concept of "Democracy" is essentially Maoist, as Mr. Corrigan recently found out.
What Housing Advocates like Ivan Drury will not acknowledge, while ranting and chanting about civic politicians being in the pockets of developers, is that the City of Burnaby (our example at hand) is itself the primary developer. The city makes the rules, skims heavily at the table, and decides who gets to play the game. The city profits on every project it allows to go forward, and never concerns itself with the fate of those "believers" who buy a ticket to ride the condo elevator. As we know, that elevator often stalls between floors, trapping more than a few. The Burnaby politicians, and their enablers, have demonstrated time-after-time that they shared lust for permanent control over this wealthy civic hive. Their concept of "Democracy" is dollar driven and utterly ruthless. Derek Corrigan was certainly the Robert Mugabe of B.C. politics, and nobody''s teddy-bear, but it wasn't "the voters" who decided his fate. We were told that retired fireman Mike Hurley was an "Independent" candidate for mayor, nudge nudge, wink wink. It just happens that his union is one of the puzzle pieces that combine to complete that happy portrait of the prosperous B.C.A. "family". Has any eavesdropper detected disharmony at City Hall? Has a family councillor been called in to mediate between "Papa" Hurley and a united squad of NDP siblings? Of course not.
EATING THE WEALTHY CHINESE
After years of our burial in mind-numbing political rhetoric and baffle-gab, there seems no basis for a frank an open discussion of where Greater Vancouver thinks it is going. Individual sovereignty died here decades ago. Owning property is no longer a security for your old age. It is a responsibility to feed the beast. One question never asked is "Why... why do so many newcomers from Asia, allow white municipal governments to kick their teeth in, with those unbelievably extortionate levels of taxation and punitive penalties?" Such passivity boggles the mind. The Chinese now exist in sufficient numbers here, that with just a little organization they could win elections and turf out the racist feather-beders who have us all by the throat. Yet they take the abuse. Astonishing. (Yes I know, every municipal regime in the GVRD has its temple dogs, (the BCA has a few) but that should not distract our attention from the faces of priestly class who runs these rigged civic elections.)
While I am in sympathy with some of Mr. Drury's "eat the wealthy" credo, he will ultimately realize that activism may gain him celebrity, but it won't kick start a revolution. The primary weakness of all young firebrands is that they profess a deep a cynicism, and yet all of their solutions evidence a persistent belief in "the system". Here in Burnaby the NDP control all three levels of "democratic" government. The city council and mayor of Burnaby are all NDP loyalists, living in symbiosis with their funding unions. There is no dissenting voice in the council chamber. Not a one. What is "democratic" in all of THAT? The true cynics in Canada no longer vote, and we should all in fact continue to boycott a rigged game. (Approximately 1/3 of registered voters bothered to vote in the 2018 Burnaby civic election.) Mr. Drury is an historian, and he knows that despotic dynasties can only be toppled by revolution. Since that proposition is definitely off the table, all that is left to him, and to us, is pay our taxes like obedient serfs, and hide the cow and the chickens.
"Burnaby approves Metrotown downtown plan
after raucous council meetiing" CBC News July 25, 1917
In this photo (above) we see Ivan Drury and protesters disrupting a meeting of City Council.
Three RCMP officers stand alert, ready to defend a chamber of democracy. Elected office holders had discreetly absented themselves.
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