Earlier this week, the Saskatchewan Party government admitted it would no longer hand over the $8 million once intended for the $12-million to-$14 million development in Saskatoon's inner city. The NDP had approved the funds for Station 20 West, which would house a low-cost dental clinic to train senior dentistry students, a medical clinic, public health and counselling clinics, a co-operative grocery store and other community organizations.And given all the Sask Party's fumbling around about how much the project would have cost and how much had been raised, it was quite obvious that nobody in the Sask Party cabinet had actually studied the project at all or talked to anyone about it before they canceled it. Somebody told them it was just a grocery co-op.
They put about as much thought into this one as they did into the cancellation of the pulp mill deal.
Here's the funniest line in all of the news stories:
Withdrawing financial support for the project was not a political decision, [Health minister] McMorris insists.Oh, sure.
"An NDP idea? Gotta kill it!"
They just couldn't stand to admit that an NDP project was a good idea.
UPDATE: Ah ha! Maybe it was a west-side landlord who is the source of the complaint. Wall is quoted in one of the news stories with this justification of canceling the project:
"...we'd be competing with grocery stores, competing with others who are already renting now to community clinics in the area"Now, everybody knows the complaint about 'competing with grocery stores' in the area is ridiculous because there has not been a grocery story in the area for more than a decade. But there are landowners who rent to other businesses -- did one of them get worried that his tenants would move? Did one of them decide that, instead of fixing up his property so he could rent to someone else, it would be easier just to phone up the boys in Regina to get the project killed? The Star Phoenix should check out who owns the property whose tenants would have moved to Station 20.
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