The Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition urges the CRD to recall, and remind the provincial and federal governments of the many meetings at which we and other groups and individuals spoke out against a Public-Private-Partnership (P3) approach to the sewage treatment project.
We urge the CRD not to bow to senior-level government pressures in favour of a P3, and to reject any grants from them conditional upon a P3. If the senior-level governments continue to mandate the project, then they must be made to understand local conditions and concerns, and that local taxpayers will not be bullied by them.
Do our provincial and federal politicians not realize that we understand that in the end, the users – the taxed public – will pay, except that we will pay far more if we go the P3 route?
What the provincial and federal governments are doing, by inflicting these P3 conditional grants on the CRD, is an attempt to make them look good now, while loading the costs on to future generations through multi-decade P3 agreements with any profits generated by the system going to business corporations, not local corporations.
Nancy Stuart, Saanich
