With the increased transit fares, I now pay twenty dollars more for my monthly Westcoast train pass. Adding the monthly park-and-ride fee now makes my total cost to go to and from work a bit more than two hundred dollars a month. Actually, in Translink’s shrewd, cunning and devious design they don’t consider a month as having 30 days but only 28 days, and I even pay for the eight-day weekends when I don’t use the trains.
During the Olympics I had to walk extra six blocks from the office to the train station because I can’t get into my usual connection using the Canada Line due to over-crowding. Translink admitted that there was a 31-percent increase in ridership during that season. To give you a better idea on how that quantifies, that’s about 1.5 million humans boarding the Canada Line per day during those periods. Do your math and it looks like that’s a lot of money to pay off Translink’s many expenses, right? Also, many people are not aware that Translink had a $17-million contract with the Olympics organizers VANOC. Then came the announcement that Translink barely broke even citing increased services and costs during the Olympics. These people call themselves managers but in a real business world they would have been in jail or bankrupt a long time ago for bad business practice. So why are they still out there and driving nice cars to work with their daily regimen of Starbucks lattes? That’s because they have us hooked no matter how much they increase the fares.
Then I read in the papers about a retired B.C. Supreme Court judge that will be receiving a yearly pension of $195,00. This just blows my top. That’s our tax money that this judge is going to pay for his condo in Maui and for his wife’s Mai Tais and pedicures for the rest of their lives.
Now comes the Hated Sales Tax and the arrogance of the Liberals who know they are the power that can do or undo anything they fancy doing - like inventing any tax just to get their hands on what’s left with us.
As one columnist puts it, we can complain as much as we like, but simply put, life is unfair and then we die. In my younger life I believed we all have to “work to live”, which means use our ability and talents then enjoy the benefits we reap from working. In this later years we force our aching joints and muscles to wake up every morning then pay a high price just to go to “live to work”. I guess now I can add a new twist to that - we have passed working to live and living to work; instead, here in Canada we now “work to die”.
On the one hand it’s a hopeless struggle but on the other hand it seems just having a job to go to nowadays is better than none. Just hope that the government will not finish up all the retirement money - else we’ll be working while dying while the judge’s wife is still sipping Mai Tais.
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