AlternativeFreePress.com

Winnipeg has announced a corporate welfare scheme for transit, a bus lane, which is the largest municipal infrastructure project in the city’s history. The project is eligible to receive up to $587.3 million from Ottawa, the province of Manitoba, and the City of Winnipeg.

The city will be going into further debt to cover it’s portion, suggesting the loan payments could be generated by raising transit fares, property taxes or both. Obviously since the feds and province are already in obscene amounts of debt, they will also be using debt to finance the project. The money will be borrowed from private banks, given to a private company for maintenance, and the interest owing will compound.

The Harper con-government supports the project and is clear that corporate welfare transit projects should be a top priority.

Winnipeg will pay a private company to maintain the corridor until 2049. This redistribution of public dollars to private corporate interests is similar to the corporate welfare schemes used by the city for the Chief Peguis Trail extension & Disraeli Bridges Project, but is the first time such a scheme has been used for transit in Canada

Written by Alternative Free Press

Winnipeg Outlines Historic Corporate Welfare Plan by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Source: Winnipeg Free Press