Let them eat cake!
From: Shane in Wpg.
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 10:43 AM
FYI
The Editor
Winnipeg Free Press
Dear sir,
Today, Dan Lett writes in - 'No easy path to progress in this town' - brilliantly about the confounding and confused so-called developments around Winnipeg and our embarrassingly inept city planning.
Unfortunately, he does not point at the main source of these problems: a provincial government with short-term, one election at a time, motivation. City Council and the City of Winnipeg are totally subservient to, and dependent on, the provincial government grants. Doer controls them, their taxation abilities, and thus their every move.
It is Gary Doer's NDP, the 'savoir of the people' government... or so they would have us believe.. that suggested a pork plant in the downtown, that has eviscerated Plan Winnipeg to facilitate Waverley West, and continues to coerce City Council and the Mayor into bad decision after bad decision (e.g. the BRT boondoggle).
Doer, the consummate example of political expediency, knows well that the public sees and accepts stadiums and big office towers as progress, but has little time to investigate city planning. In his DECADE of power, he has shown absolutely no vision for the capital city of our province. Winnipeg is not the jewel of the province. In the last ten years (Doer's reign), it has become Canada's backwater of city planning ignorance.
Vision? Seriously, anyone with even an passing interest in city planning and with a tiny percentage of the resources available to this government can and will find thousands of progressive and successful examples of city planning in our country, all over N. America and around the world.
Planning for Winnipeg's future is not Doer's objective.
He is all about maintaining power in his little pond, even if the pond will eventually become a swamp choked with the results of his political expediency.
Like Marie, Antoinette he suggests feeding us cake.....and we eat it up!
Shane Nestruck
Winnipeg
shanedn@mts.net