Pacific Spirit Park Development Decision

AllTheRootsThatDon'tQuiteFit

GrassVille

Here's the lede from Jeff Nagle of Black Press:

"Metro Vancouver has lost a court battle against the provincial government over the expropriation of part of Pacific Spirit Regional Park that was handed over to the Musqueam Indian Band in 2008.

Twenty-two hectares of the park in Vancouver near UBC – worth an estimated $200 million – was taken from Metro without compensation and transferred to the Musqueam to settle a lengthy court dispute between the band and the province.

Mayors from Metro's member cities feared the land raid set a possible precedent for the province to confiscate other regional or civic parks or public lands to satisfy aboriginal demands or to negotiate future treaties.

Metro lawyers had argued the province violated the Local Government Act when it expropriated the park land without adequately notifying or consulting the regional district.

The B.C. Supreme Court previously rejected Metro's court challenge, finding there is no legal force behind principles contained in the act that require notice and consultation for provincial actions directly affecting regional district interests...."

Which, of course, means that once again the Astroturf Layers have won.

In this case one of those that did much of the carpet laying turns out be a former bagman for Gordon Campbell and, get this, a former (ie. defeated) Vancouver Park Commissioner.

I've written a lot about this previously. A good place to start, if you are interested in the backstory, is here.

The only way you can find any actual online trace of the original fake grass, however, is through the Wayback Machine, as all signs of it, even at the outer edges of the Google cache have been, apparently, scrubbed.

Sheesh.

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And, while this was set up to make it impossible to argue about in most of the mainstream proMedia given the aboriginal connection, there was in my opinion, a middle ground that could have saved this invaluable chunk of the park....Only trouble was, again in my opinion, the developers who will get the biggest windfall in all of this may have made a little less money....

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