In total, the City of Edmonton has a $9.4-million stake in the building, equipment and other assets leased to Greys Paper Recycling to run its recycling operation.
(…)
“We wanted them to be successful but we never became an investor so we don’t have investor’s risk,” Iveson said.
How many more times does something like this have to happen before the left comes to realize government can’t pick winners.
So if I understand this, the City of Edmondton bought and paid for a expensive building full of expensive machinery and turned it over to green nuts to operate. Their innovative “process” for recycling waste materials did not produce a quality product that people wanted to buy. So they went bankrupt and now the City of Edmondton is left holding the bag. Oh, well. Odd they didn’t test to see if there was a market for their product before spending millions of dollars, but if one polar bear was saved, it was worth it.
The cultish obsession of the left with recycling will ensure that, even as an economic failure, this was still the right thing to do.
This is easy to fix. Just pass a law that “mandates” 50% post-consumer blah blah blah. Then everyone has to buy the crappy paper anyway. They can just throw away the useless stuff and recycle it again.
If they have a ‘stake’ of over 9 million dollars but are not investors then they are patsy’s, aka useful idiots.
And even worse, paper used to be (I don’t know about today) the one, single thing that recyclers made money on when, of course, governments sold people on recycling by saying it would pay for itself through sales of the recycled goods.
If there is one investigative journalist left in the city they should be on this. This smells from the inside out, this has fraud written all over it, who is connected to who and how did the money flow. But alas, I remembered that this is the left taking care of the left so nothing to see here move along everyone it’s all over.
The reason most people enter politics is for the pay cheque first. Secondly they think they are smarter than the plebs on the street. Fallout from bad decision making is hardly a deterent as the attention span isn’t there and media hardly exposes such incompetence.
The only time I saw money being made on paper was when the Boy Scouts had a paper drive.
Do they still do that anymore??
building- free
equipment- free
raw material- free
still go broke- priceless
We should make it law that anyone receiving the “peoples money’ post a net worth statement prior to them receiving any of these funds. Then, if and when they go udders up we get a follow up net worth statement to see how well they have done personally during the time that the people’s funds were used (abused). No one ever loses using “other peoples money”.
Better yet, stop spending tax payers money on these scams!
“…we never became an investor so we don’t have investor’s risk,”
What???
You put in $9.4-million but you’re not an investor because why? Maybe because you knew that money was gone, you’d never see any return on it?
No risk because it was already gone.
Taxpayer money. Other peoples money is a lot easier to throw away than your own, isn’t it?
A true statement by the Mayor. The City never invested,they just gave the rate payers money
away. It’s amazing how you can spin lies and stupidity into sound policy.
I think the guy actually believes half of his own BS.
It gets worse. It looks like one of our recycling firms was engaged in an arbitrage scheme. You only get a 5 cent refund for the same container that gets you a 10 cent refund in Alberta.
Alberta government cracks down on alleged can caper with $844,000 fine
According to documents filed with the EAB, Alberta Reclaim and Recycling was found to have imported more than 8.3-million beverage containers, weighing about 171,220 kg, that were trucked to Edmonton from the Yukon between Jan. 5, 2012, and Jan. 8, 2013.
The elaborate plan was uncovered when Canada immigration officials were directed to a warehouse in northwest Edmonton after receiving a tip that illegal immigrants were working there.
Business as usual then.
Seek elected office, gain access to public treasure, spend said treasure on your backers.
The ability to extort large groups of people ,small sums of money, while pretending to “serve” the greater good” is a recipe for theft and corruption.
Kleptocracy rules.
Taxes must be voluntary, as the current waste and destruction by fools and bandits(Do-Gooders) hinges upon their ability to steal unchecked.
That 10 million pissed away on delusion, this is what political science graduates call “Investment”.
Time to forget reform.
Let us RESET.
Face it; All promises made by government are lies.Healthcare. Old age pension. Unemployment insurance.Serve&protect.Law&order.Welfare.
Every level of government is in breach of promise/trust and out of control.
Parasites can not help their nature.
Nor can they restrain their appetite.
There is little point in trying to salvage the wealth stolen from each productive citizen , gone to feed the waste and destroy crew.
It is gone.
Reform will salvage nothing.
Reset might save our children.
No tax level should exceed 10%, in total.
The wealth used to uphold the necessary illusions of civil society is best represented as people.
Today we have 5 “helpers” for every 5 producers.
So each of us carries a freeloader, who handicaps us.
Who eats before our families do.
small wonder families are now so small.
1 helper in 10 producers is the upper limit, before people resist or start to pursue the prize.
Face it most of what we currently fund(or borrow for) is useless, stupid and not working.
As for our creditors.. the only collateral they ever really had, was the word of our parasites who borrowed those funds,promising our grandchildren as collateral.
So I would be more than happy to surrender these same people to them.
Why not?
The UN has no problem with slavery.
“We wanted them to be successful but we never became an investor so we don’t have investor’s risk,” Iveson said.
Yup, that’s gotta be right up there with, “The budget will balance itself”.
Where do we find these morons – the Bombardier School of Business? Is the electorate that stupid?
Guess so.
It’s in Alberta–why am I not surprised?
When Alberta politicians start getting involved with business, chances are those turn into financial sinkholes. (Novatel, anyone?) I worked for 2 of them during the 1980s and I swear that neither of those companies could make money if they tried.
Both became dependent upon government money. One survived only on contracts and there was little effort shown in trying to make its own products, market them, and do so with its own money. Another survived because it was well-connected with the provincial government and, by knowing the right people, it always managed to be bailed out just before it was about to go belly up.
The first one was eventually taken over by a private sector firm, as I recall. The second one went through a number of different owners, most of whom were likely looking for a tax writeoff, and it eventually vanished without a trace.
By the way, this isn’t unique to Alberta. I worked for a firm in Saskatchewan that was like that as well. It was pretty much the same story–lots of government bailout money and it couldn’t make a profit if it tried. This was under the Blakeney NDP.
Then the Devine Conservatives took office, pledging to end that sort of thing. When it looked at that company’s books, it realized that it couldn’t close it down as it would have thrown more than 200 people out of work, which wouldn’t have been good publicity for the government.
The result was that the company limped along, business as usual. It went through a series of owners as well, being unloaded almost as soon as each one figured out that it had bought a financial clunker. It’s now a subsidiary of an eastern Canadian company.
That’s the new mathematics those Young new politicians had learned in school. 5+7=11 is a correct if you can come up with a convincing story to support your conclusion.
?
no market research?
I guess that’s part of the new business model based on gubbamint subsidies.
sigh. I’m in the wrong business . . . . . .
the world economy is a colossal multi-quadrillion dollar centuries old ponzi scheme.
Some things never change.
Like dozy lefty politicians and Hippie insiders wasting Redmonton’s tax revenues.
And Glen Campbell’s old song about the place.
Good times.
Life imitates Seinfeld, TimR:
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheBottleDeposit1.html
There was a time that Edmonton was “ahead” of Calgary on recycling. They used to take the recycling down to the Calgary landfill and secretly dump it
Thanks. I hadn’t seen that episode. You can never get back what you pay in deposits. For a carton of milk, they charge you 25 cents deposit on the carton. But then they add 8 cents plus GST in recycle fees on top of that. You can only ever get back the quarter, the rest is just tax under another name. The only people that do well under the system are the dumpster divers as they know which containers are worth money. Many normal people don’t know they have paid a deposit on that juice box, can, or carton and put it in the trash.
If the greens have their way, maybe we will go back to the old system where a horse-drawn milk wagon dropped off your supply of milk in glass bottles and took back the empties.
The Gang Green would never permit that, it worked.
Without subsidies.
It occurred to me that while Iveson doesn’t particularly impress me, things could be worse: we could have Jan “People are more important than potholes” Reimer as mayor again.
I remember one dodgy scheme which started while she was still in office. It involved making plastic similar to lumber because it had sawdust mixed in with it. I head that the plant seemed to have a lot of “accidental” fires, for some reason…..
We have that sort of arrangement for milk cartons here in Edmonton as well.
But the city has other ways of extracting money in the name of recycling. Buy some major electronic device, and one has to pay an additional fee for that purpose. The last time I had to fork over money for that was when I bought an LCD computer monitor for around $120 and had to shell out an additional $25 on top of that.
The story about bringing in bottles from the Yukon to recycle reminds of those Humane Societies that import dogs from other countries so they have more dogs to rescue and more charitable donations.
I think we have to get involved. I know we do not want to but do we want to give our money to idiots. There is a man in Alberta working on infiltrating the NDP in Alberta. We should do this for all provincial governments and then the federal government. I need some help getting people to become Ontario Liberal members. We can then work on government statements and proposed MPP’s
aaah, that would be such a neat thing. milk wagons. feeding carrots to the horses. cracking jokes with my classmates when they leave a ‘landmine’ about be careful, don’t go over it with your bicycle tires.
reminds me of a quirky incident back in the days of the room sized mainframes. and all those gamillions of punched cards. the recycle box wasn’t quite full, so the boss grabs a stack of brand spanking new pristine unused cards, and . . . . . dumps them in the recycle box to top it up.
funny some of the things one remembers that were so trivial and incidental at the time but very telling.
my other recycling story? happened whilst I was at McMaster U in Hamilton. summbuddy had the termidity to spot the boys in the garbage trucks show up in the wee hours. yup, tilt away, in goes all the refuse in the garbage truck. ok. now grab the big blue dumpster full of all that paper dutifully collected by thousands of office workers, faculty and students and . . . . away it goes in the same garbage truck.
I found it and the ensuing outrage amusing.
For a dollar a fine Tory or WR can join the dips, we can hijack the convention and recycle Rach
I was at a rural municipal dump recently and asked the gal how the recycling went.
“It all goes in the pit” was her reply.
A scam from start to finish. Edmonton used to have quansets full of recycled 2 l plastic soda bottles. Had ’em for years – maybe they still do. No market but that doesn’t stop. It’s like something out of the Soviet Union.
“How to steal”