Category Archives: The Issues

Consider, Issues, Provincial

Healthcare

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Watching Adrian Dix (Health Critic), Carole James and the NDP performance on the issue of Healthcare is a clear illustration of why, despite the overwhelming baggage carried by Gordon Campbell and the Liberals, the NDP were rejected in the last election; managing to lose an election that was theirs to lose.

In scrambling to remain leader of the NDP Carole James has abandoned issue based policy that focuses on the needs of the province, its citizens and solutions, to pursue a course that is based on: Can we score political points here? Will this bump up NDP popularity and push down Liberal popularity? Will this serve my desperate need to remain leader of the NDP?

Healthcare is a serious issue with no easy answers and a leader, as opposed to a politician, would be focused on finding workable solutions to the issue – not scoring political points.

Watching Adrian Dix’s performance night after night one is left to conclude that the NDP either do not understand the realities and implications of this problem or else have no clue as to how to go about addressing this looming crisis, other than desperately throwing money at it – causing a domino effect and triggering crises across all provincial programs and their budgets.

Gordon Campbell and the Liberals deserve to be taken to task (have their asses solidly kicked – repeatedly until they act responsibly) over their response to the growing problems in healthcare. Indeed the appointment of Kevin Falcon as Minister of Health suggests Campbell and the Liberals are going to stay the course and simply manage how fast the healthcare system moves from growing problems into crisis. Campbell and his Liberals have shown no ideas, leadership or intention of acting to avoid a healthcare crisis with its serious repercussions for citizen’s access to healthcare and citizens pocketbooks.

No doubt the need for funds to feed healthcare’s voracious appetite for funds helped persuade the Liberals to agree to the HST and the billion plus dollars this agreement will put in BC’s treasury.

Faced with serious challenges to our healthcare system, faced with the serious repercussions such a crisis would have on all aspects of government and government programs neither party leader nor their party caucuses or the parties themselves demonstrate an interest or ability to find workable solutions that will reform the current healthcare system from it’s current Rube Goldberg machine status to an efficient deliverer of services. The healthcare system in BC has become a complex, convoluted bureaucracy whose hallmark is inefficiency.

Aside: Rube Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons he created depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. Indeed Goldberg is the inspiration for various international competitions, known as Rube Goldberg contests, which challenge participants to make a complex machine to perform a simple task. Government has turned the healthcare system into such a needlessly indirect, convoluted system.

The “we want healthcare, we want it now, we want it for free and we do not want to be bothered to have to think, make choices or make decisions’ current attitude of citizens has led to the current (escalating) problems that threaten to topple the unsustainable house of cards we have built or allowed to be built by government to deliver healthcare.

Citizens have to become engaged in making decisions, seeking solutions and making choices, even if hard, or risk having our currently unsustainable healthcare system collapse.

An examination of past and current budgets shows unsustainable increases in healthcare costs. If the trend continues it will not be long, even with the Liberals delaying tactics, before healthcare will need 100% of the provincial budget.

Remember that the Liberal government increased the healthcare budget by $500,000,000.00 and that this huge increase was still not sufficient to feed the voracious appetite for the increasing large sums money that the healthcare delivery system has developed.

$500,000,000.00 and the system demand hundreds of millions more dollars. What would the demands of the health care system been if the Liberal government had not imposed the $500,000,000.00 cap on increased funding?
A $1,000,000,000.00? More that a billion dollars?

The Carole James/Adrian Dix/NDP plan of throwing money at healthcare simply moves the day of reckoning for healthcare up a few years as opposed to when the day of reckoning will come under the Liberals.

With a healthcare system needing yearly increases in the neighbourhood of $1,000,000,000.00, any BC provincial government faces some combination of reducing monies to other programs and tax increases to feed the insatiable appetite healthcare has developed for funding. Even with cuts and tax increases healthcare will reach 100% of the budget in at most a decade.

Just to hold the funding for all programs other than healthcare at this years levels the province would have to raise taxes every year by the amount of the increase needed to fund healthcare. Freezing programs at current levels is the same as cutting funding to these programs every year their funding remains frozen.

Under the course of action being followed or proposed by either the Liberals or NDP the province will, in a few short years, reach the point where 100% of the budget will be spent on healthcare and all other programs will get $0 funding.

Examination of the financial and operating realities of BC’s budget and healthcare system leads to a troublesome conclusion:

Indisputably, the way we currently deliver healthcare in BC is unsustainable.

While denial may seem a more comfortable way to deal with this reality, it makes no sense to continue to ignore the ever growing monster healthcare has become until healthcare/other programs/the budget/the province collapse under the appetite for funding that healthcare currently has.

The intelligent, the rational approach, indeed the only way to avoid losing healthcare, is to address healthcare’s many issues; continuing to pretending everything is and will be fine is a path that will lead only to disaster.

A disaster it is possible to avoid if we choose to act now.

Look around; there are many healthcare systems around the world that manage to deliver healthcare effectively without wiping out all other programs or bankrupting governments and citizens.

To achieve delivery of healthcare to the citizens of BC effectively and affordably BC’s healthcare system is going to require restructuring, drastic restructuring. To accomplish this will require ‘thinking outside the box’, something politicians are loathe to do because of the risks involved.

Politicians love being able to exert control and eliminate surprises. How do you exert control and eliminate surprises in a healthcare system? You build a many layered bureaucracy as BC has done with regionalization.

Bureaucracies are about exerting control and eliminating surprises. Since these are major wants of our current politicians it is not surprising that government become a series of isolated, convoluted bureaucracies that compete, not cooperate, among the differing Ministries.

Unfortunately, while politicians and bureaucrats love bureaucracies, a bureaucracy by its very nature is inefficient, and to varying degrees ineffective.
The more complexity involved in the system to be controlled the more bureaucracy that is required to exert that control.

Bureaucracies, because of their goals of control and no surprises, resist/oppose change and innovation.

Newtonian physics tells us that inertia acts to keep an object at rest at rest. It further states that the more mass (the larger) an object has the more inertia the object has.

Consider the complexity of the task of delivering healthcare to the citizens of BC. As a result of that complexity, exerting control and preventing surprises requires a large bureaucracy that most closely resembles a labyrinth. This results in a healthcare system whose inertia is such that the system is in effect an immovable object when it comes to changes.

This large labyrinth of a bureaucracy not only resists and/or defeats the change and innovation necessary for the healthcare system to avoid ongoing rounds of service cuts and increased waiting times; it devours far to large of a portion of the healthcare budget and inflicts wasteful costs on the portion of the healthcare system that delivers actual hands-on healthcare. Thus much of the healthcare budget is spent on bureaucracy and bureaucrats rather than delivery of actual, hands-on healthcare.

This same money devouring bureaucracy prevents the innovation and change that must take place in order to avoid continuing rounds of cuts to healthcare services year after year or a budget crisis triggered by healthcare’s need for an ever increasing percentage of the BC budget – either of which will result in a healthcare crisis in BC.

The time has come where, in order to avoid a medical crisis for the system and the patients it is charged with providing healthcare to, healthcare in BC requires acute care.

What course do we need to pursue in order to save the healthcare system?

Keep in mind that the healthcare system comprises two components – the component charged with controlling the healthcare system and the component that is involved with the actual delivery of healthcare to citizens (i.e. your local hospital, clinic or doctor).

We have to deal with the bureaucracy that has grown so weighty it is crushing those components of the system that deliver the healthcare services.

How do we reform the bureaucracy?

Remember we are speaking of a large, complex bureaucracy that has evolved into a perplexing labyrinth with inertia such that the bureaucracy resists change, any change.

Part of Fraser Health recently was putting the finishing touches on a new ten year strategic plan since it had been 10 years since the last strategic plan was prepared.

And what happened with the earlier strategic plan? Nothing. Why? Because there was no funding to implement it.

What is the significance? Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. In other words it is a plan of what you are going to do and how you are going to do it.

Even in a half-assed managed system there is no need of special funding to implement the strategic plan. This is what you are going to do, this is how you are going to do it and you do it. The healthcare bureaucracy is so set on course, so resistant to change that even if it has a change it wants to make – it cannot make it unless a new portion is added to the bureaucracy to try to change behaviour.

In instances where funding was budgeted to make changes, those changes literally take years just to begin to implement. Since all the changes, including ones set in motion more than a decade ago, I am aware of are still, at least to some degree, in process I cannot judge whether they will ever be fully implemented.

Based on my business and management experience I doubt that any plan, no matter how brilliant, would be able to change the current healthcare bureaucracy into the lean, efficient, effective and adaptable management system needed.

Moreover, the government is risk adverse and a control freak and so will support the status quo until crisis forces changes – or citizens do.

Does this mean healthcare is doomed?

That depends entirely on the citizens of BC. If they continue to want and look for simple, easy and neat solutions; if they continue to prefer the platitudes and promises of the Liberals or the nonsensical braying of the NDP; we are going to have a healthcare crisis. A crisis that will trigger a budget crisis and crises in all provincial programs as the funding demands of healthcare drain money from all other programs.

If citizens recognize that we face a looming healthcare crisis, that we need to act to avoid this crisis, that the outcomes of actions that need to be taken are not going to be simple, easy and neat, can reach a consensus on the form change needs to take and demand/force the politicians to act we will need to slog our way through but can avoid the collapse of healthcare.

Caveat: There is another path to avoiding a crisis that needs to be put on the table. Taxes could be raised. Taxes would need to be raised by the amount needed to cover the increased funding needed by the healthcare system – at a minimum.

Should citizens not want to face large yearly tax increases to fund healthcare they need to get involved in the discussion of what course of action to follow, in coming up with ideas (the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. Linus Pauling) of what changes to make and how, and be involved where possible (hospital boards) in the new healthcare management system.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex.
It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. E. F. Schumacher

If we need to reduce the bureaucratic component but cannot reform the bureaucracy what needs to be done?

Surgery, the cancerous growth must be excised to save the patient, healthcare.

We want to achieve a management system that functions in the manner of a matrix system where there is one layer of management above those facets of the healthcare system that deliver, hands-on healthcare to people – and only one layer. Decision making needs to be pushed as close to the front lines as possible. Management needs to have citizens involved in the system for their input and so that citizens can understand challenges facing the healthcare system and help form the judgement of the best decision to make.

We need to encourage experimentation with best practices from other healthcare systems. If it is decided in different segments of the system to try different best practices – management should accommodate this and facilitate the evaluation and comparison or the results. If they both work then those who will have to implement and work with the best practice need to be allowed to choose the practice they feel would work best in their situation.

Bottom up decision making of what is needed and how things should run.

Flexible, adaptable, embracing of change – a team focused on accomplishing what needs to be done.

Healthcare in BC needs the type of management system the politicians will abhor because, in focusing on the needs of patients and the effective and efficient delivery of services to meet those needs, top down control, lack of change, an absence of ‘situations’ will not be a goal or likely outcome of such a system.

I concede that putting this change in place and managing the situation will not be neat and easy. It will not be as simple in implementation as it is in concept. It will be challenging and interesting.
Consider:

There is no way to play it safe given the current and future circumstances governing healthcare and the budget.

Necessity of action takes away the fear of the act, and makes bold resolution the favourite of fortune. Francis Quarles

Given the importance of healthcare, the complexity of the situation and short (a few years) timeframe we need to act boldly.

In difficult and desperate cases, the boldest counsels are the safest. Titus Livius

Given the need for bold action in cutting away the current bureaucracy, it will not be possible to anticipate and put in place all the people and systems. The people and the system will need to evolve to become the effective and efficient system required.

Sometimes you have to take the leap, and build your wings on the way down. Kobi Yamada

We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people not our current crop of politicians whose interest is in managing the problems so that they get re-elected, not in solving our problems or providing true leadership.

Caveat emptor, Consider, Municipal

Homelessness can kill you.

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The death of an ex-member of homeless community while riding his bike to work reminds us how fragile life is. He had been hit by cars while riding his bike many times and if he could not walk away from all of them, he at least survived these earlier encounters with Abbotsford drivers.

Cycling in Abbotsford you almost feel that there must be some kind of secret contest being held by drivers where they score points hitting cyclists (or pedestrians).

The tally of scrapes, bruises, torn muscles, concussions, broken arms, legs and collarbones would fill volumes. Since bicycles are the major form of transportation for the homeless, marginalized and poor this group suffers most from Abbotsford drivers.

When the immutable laws of probability catch up with the cyclists and a cyclist dies it is usually a member of the homeless, marginalized and poor who is sacrificed to chance.

People think about winter weather killing members of the homeless community but the truth is that it is the summer, especially hot summer, weather that is a greater threat to life. It was luck that some homeless I know told me about someone needing help during the last day of the oppressive hot spell. I was able to get him onto his unsteady feet and into the cool conditioned air. After keeping his water glass filled for over three hours his colour improved, his temperature cooled down and he perked up enough to eat some salted crackers, have some more water and get some sleep.

This experience is made more sobering by the news reports of Curtis Brick’s death from heat in Vancouver.

But it is health care that kills the most. Not strictly as a result of medical personnel’s attitudes (although attitude does kill some) but from the reality that being homeless makes it hard to take good care of your health. Currently someone I know lies in a coma as a result of infection.

Infection nearly killed me while homeless. If it had not been for the kindness of a fellow Alanon member giving me a bed to stay in and a good supper every day so I could make the three weeks of twice daily, 3 hour intravenous antibiotic treatments I would have been another homeless victim, dead of unnatural ‘natural causes’.

As a modern society we have forgotten the death toll infections of various types inflicted on the human race in times past.

Fire, pneumonia … the list of ways that homelessness can kill you goes on and on and ….

So the next time you hear some loudmouth talking about the easy life the homeless have and how everyone should have that wonderful an easy life, know they are only demonstrating their ignorance of the harsh reality of a life of homelessness.

Homelessness can kill you and is a curse I would wish on none … well except politicians and loudmouths who could greatly use just such a reality check.

Consider, Municipal, Snafu

Sad State of Affairs

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It is a sad state of affairs when the citizens of Abbotsford find themselves depending on the provincial government to say “NO” in order to save citizens from Abbotsford city government’s out of control and fiscally irresponsible behaviour. Find themselves dependant on the provincial government to force Abbotsford’s municipal government to exercise self control and discipline, to prepare proper operating budgets and to plan rather than scrambling from cash grab to cash grab, from problem to problem never doing anything to solve the problem, but merely haphazardly plastering over problems.

Lamentably that is the position the citizens of Abbotsford are in, dependent on the provincial government to reject city council’s latest attempt to pillage citizen’s already impoverished pocketbooks in order to satisfy city council’s every growing need for cash to pay for their spending addiction.

Like the panhandlers in parking lots around Abbotsford who approach the unwary with their tale of having run out of gasoline with their car “just a few blocks over there” and in need of gas money to get home, but who are in reality seeking money for their addiction, Abbotsford Council is telling their tale for the unwary of having run out of money and needing gas money (a gas tax) so they too can have money to feed their addiction – to spending taxpayer’s dollars.

Like any addict, Abbotsford city council’s addiction has grown worse year by year until they find themselves teetering on the brink of financial disaster.

Unfortunately, unlike the panhandlers in the parking lots whose addiction has left themselves homeless, it is the citizens of Abbotsford who will bear the financial consequences for city council’s addict mentality and behaviour.

Even, as George Peary was quoted in the local paper, “to the point where people lose their homes because they can’t pay [their] taxes.” A position some citizens have already reached and that current economic conditions have more citizens fast approaching.

Enabling an addict, or in the case of city council a group of addicts, by giving them the money needed to continue in their addiction, does nothing more than enable them to continue in their addiction.

We have to stop enabling city council and allowing it to stay in its addiction; stop permitting city council to continue to act with fiscal irresponsibility, to mismanage city operations and to spend taxpayer dollars as if taxpayers have bottomless pockets that city council can reach into to meet their endlessly increasing need for more (and more and more and …) money.

There is no need to wait to the fall and “public meetings” to begin to act. This is a provincial decision.

Citizens can, and should, begin now and often to contact our MLAs (John van Dongen, Michael de Jong) and the Premier (Gordon Campbell) telling them to “Just say NO” and not to further enable Abbotsford’s municipal government’s addict behaviour.

Indeed citizens who know just how worthless an addicts promises and assurances are, may well want to request the provincial government send in the provincial Auditor General to determine the true state of Abbotsford’s financial affairs and operational status.

We must say NO to enabling Abbotsford city council’s bad behaviours and urge the provincial government to say No as well or accept the consequences of our enabling behaviour and pay the ever escalating costs of enabling city council’s spending addiction.

Municipal, Snafu

Just say No.

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I distinctly remember attending and speaking at a council session in the spring of 2009 concerning Abbotsford’s 2009/10 budget. I also distinctly remember Abbotsford’s city council proclaiming the 2009/10 budget to Abbotsford’s citizens and that they had struggled mightily on behalf of the citizens and held the tax rise to “an overall increase of 5.5% to address key areas; a 2009 budget that protects key City services and provides support to the areas that need it most; Budget reflects the role of City government and responds to economic outlook” (to quote from the city’s press release).

So why is Abbotsford city council scrambling madly to separate taxpayers from millions more of their dollars this year and for year’s into the foreseeable future?

A budget is a financial plan. A household budget itemizes the family’s sources of income and describes how this income will be spent (housing, insurance, transportation, food and so on). Similarly a municipal budget indicates the municipal government’s income sources and allocates funds to police, roads, parks and recreation, wages, fire and the like.

Budgeting is, thus, a management tool used for both planning and control.

Fundamentally, the budgeting process is a method to improve operations; it is a continuous effort to specify what should be done to get the job completed in the best possible way. The budgeting process is a tool for obtaining the most productive and cost effective use of the city’s resources. Budgets also represent planning and control devices that enable city management and council to anticipate change and adapt to it.

Operations in today’s economic environment are complex. The budget (and control) process provides a better basis for understanding the city’s operations and for planning ahead. This increased understanding leads to faster reactions to developing events, increasing the city’s ability to perform effectively.

Clearly budgeting is a most important financial tool – if done properly.

I recently was dealing with getting an automobile on the road. I drew up a budget for the costs involved. I then drew up a budget for how the funds to meet these costs would be raised. Only after I was satisfied with the budget being realistic did I begin operations to get the car on the road.

It developed that there were a few unanticipated complications that had to be dealt with and that required extra cash outlays. My original budget had been realistic and so had covered the anticipated (major) expenses. The additional expenses were dealt with within my overall normal monthly operating budget. It required a shift of cash from budgeted expenditures to cover the additional expenses; decisions made based upon priority of the expenditures involved.

That is the way a budget works. You (should) know your income with a fair degree of certainty. You allocate how that money is to be spent. If there is an income shortfall for a undertaking such as getting an automobile on the road you need to increase the funds available to cover those new expenses (in the case of the city determine the tax increase to be imposed). Additional expenses (which, in a proper budget environment, should be minor) are handled, if considered a priority, through the reallocation of expenditures within the overall operating budget.

I apologize to the reader if the preceding paragraphs seemed a little dry. However, it is necessary to set out an understanding of budgeting in order to examine the actions of the City of Abbotsford and Abbotsford’s city council vis-à-vis the City’s current (past and future) Budgets.

I think that armed with even the most basic understanding of what a budget is, what a budget is for and what the budgeting process should involve makes it clear that no matter what city hall and city council call it, the document they called and approved as the 2009 budget was and is not a budget in terms of what an authentic budget entails and the information a bona fide budget contains.

If the document that Abbotsford city hall and city council approved had been a real operating budget, city council would not have had to immediately scramble around for additional revenue to cover operating costs. In a real, substantive budget those operating costs would have been covered by property taxes and the other revenue sources of the City of Abbotsford.

What city staff and city council continue to try to pass off as a budget is a document whose main purpose would appear to be to hoodwink the citizens of Abbotsford into accepting the fiction of a tax increase of only 5.5%.

Explaining why it was that after announcing and passing their fudged budget, council embarked on a search for the additional revenues needed to cover what the city’s actual operating costs were going to be.

The need for revenue to cover costs that the 5.5% claimes tax increase was inadequate to cover, is also likely why the city transferred $300,000 into each of water and sewer as ‘administration costs’ this year. That way the taxes needed to cover that $600,000 would be hidden from citizens in large water and sewer levy increases.

What about the five year 2009 – 2013 budget City hall and council passed? The need for investing hundreds of millions of $$$$ in infrastructure would have been part of any legitimate budgeting process with the result that funding to cover these expenditures would be or should have been included in the budget. There should be no need to scramble for large sums of additional revenue to pay for the needed infrastructure.
Indeed any responsible, any real long term budgeting process would have included the need for investing hundreds of millions of $$$$ in water treatment, sewage treatment, roads etc in the budget process that included Plan A.
All of which leads to the conclusion that Abbotsford city council has failed to engage in an accurate and proper budget process on both a yearly and long term basis over many years.

Budgeting is a planning and control process for delivering services in a cost effective manner – if done properly.

If done improperly, where the financial numbers used in the budgeting process are fudged rather than an accurate reflection of current (and future) operational needs and costs, you end up in the financial mess, the financial bind Abbotsford city council has put Abbotsford and the city’s taxpayers in – on the hook for hundreds of millions of $$$$ for infrastructure that should have been part of the budgeting process over, at the minimum, the past six years but that currently are unfunded and lack any financing plan.

The facts, the financial reality that is coming home to roost at City Hall, make it clear that budgeting, planning and control are effectively nonexistent for the City of Abbotsford – and have been nonexistent and/or ineffective for years.

Budgeting is a vital tool in managing Abbotsford and imposing discipline on city spending and operations. Pouring millions of dollars into bailing out city council and city staff will not remedy the demonstrated lack of a true budget process; it will only enable city council to continue it’s undisciplined, irresponsible financial behaviour.

Which is why the citizens of Abbotsford need to begin now to contact (with repeated regularity), their MLAs (John van Dongen, Michael de Jong, Randy Hawes), the Premier (Gordon Campbell), the Finance Minister (Colin Hansen) and Minister of Community and Rural Development (Bill Bennett) to urge them to “Just say NO” to Abbotsford city council’s request for a gas tax.

Since the current and future financial quagmire/crisis the City of Abbotsford faces demonstrates that current (and past) budgets were not accurate, realistic or effective tools for managing the city’s finances citizens can have no assurance as to the current true state of their city’s finances.

Despite statements made by city council members about the fact that the city’s financial statements are audited – anyone with experience with the audit process, especially as an auditor, is well aware of the inaccuracies and incorrect information an audited set of financial statements can contain. Remember that ENRON also had audited financial statements.

Which is why, among numerous other reasons, we need to urge the provincial government to have the provincial Auditor General do a thorough audit and evaluation of the financial/accounting records, results and financial position of the City of Abbotsford.

We need an accurate understanding of the finances and financial state of Abbotsford in order to have a accurate starting point to begin to impose financial discipline and properly planning and budgeting to meet the operating needs of the City of Abbotsford.

Citizens can continue to ignore city council’s financial irresponsible actions, finding themselves groaning under an evermore onerous tax burden, in order to bail city council out of their financially irresponsible ways.

Or risk becoming the residents of the first major Canadian city to go bankrupt as Abbotsford’s city council financially mismanages the City into destitution and insolvency.

Alternatively we can “Just say NO” to Abbotsford city council and stop enabling their spending addiction, and lack of financial responsibility.

Consider, Media

Nickel-and-Dimed to death.

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The nickel-and-diming to death of citizens by Abbotsford’s city council has moved from finding as many new ways (new fees, increased fees, zealous bylaw ticketing, etc.) to shake citizens down for as much of their cash as possible – to trying to save money by applying the same principles of nickel-and-diming to expense reduction.

This expansion of city council’s nickel-and-dime behaviour was predictable given the financial bind council has put the City in and their refusal or inability to make prudent spending and spending reduction decisions.

Instead of council making sound, financially responsible decisions, council has chosen the nickel-and-dime the public to death approach.

As if closing the Abbotsford Recreation Center pool four hours early on BC Day to save four hours of staff wages was not penny-ante enough, the City compounded this conduct by failing to adequately warn people that ARC would be closing at 6 PM.

I have been swimming at the pools in Abbotsford for nigh on 20 years and the pools have always opened late on long-weekend Mondays and stayed open to their regular closing time.

Sometime between Saturday 10 PM and Monday 4 PM a small notice, hard to notice because it was tucked out of the way, appeared setting out the change in hours. I know that this notice was not there Saturday at 10 PM because several of the regulars I had warned about this change scoured the admission desk and could find no notice.

I could warn them only because staff had asked me if I was aware they were closing at six on Monday.

This lack of notice leaves those returning from long weekend travel (and Monday evenings on long weekends travellers fill the pool) or who attended agri-fair and who want to go to the pool to cool off and relax – to arrive at ARC to find the doors locked and the pool closed. Let us not forget (as the City did) the regulars who, not having been warned, will arrive and find the doors closed.

To save four hours of salaries. Well, four hours of salaries less the admission fees forgone; which on the last night of a hot summer long weekend are likely to exceed the salaries saved. Resulting in it having cost the City money (income) to “save” paying wages. A rather pyrrhic victory on the “saving money” front; but then pyrrhic victories on saving money are all too often business as usual for Abbotsford’s city council.

Council’s inadequacies have placed Abbotsford in a financial bind at a time when it is facing the need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure to maintain the city’s liveability.

Citizens are not asking for brilliance, merely for competency.

Because unless we can manage to create a culture of competence at City Hall and on City Council we are in real danger of having Abbotsford become unliveable and/or the first Canadian city to go bankrupt.