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Taxpayers the real losers in CVRD lawsuits

This foolish legal action was simply another harassment of a private company
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Taxpayers the real losers in CVRD lawsuits

For the second time in five years the Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed another frivolous CVRD appeal of a lower court decision. As we prepare to send our big cheques to the CVRD for 2017 taxes it is frustrating and a ripoff to see that the CVRD has again wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of our taxes on lawyers’ fees.

This foolish legal action was simply another harassment of a private company and an attempt for the CVRD to take over control of a provincially regulated industry, a tactic they continually try to do instead of paying attention to their own responsibilities.

Each time they proceed with such an action and each time they lose the CVRD completely exaggerates and puts out fake news on the reason for the action and predicts dire consequences if they lose. They include some nonsense that other local governments will support their actions by sharing the costs but that simply never happens.

They hide the total court and legal costs because taxpayers would go ballistic if it was made public. We are tired of this silly CVRD game wasting our hard earned tax money.

Five years ago they tried to shut down the crematorium using the sledgehammer of a court action with our money and the Supreme Court threw that case out too.

The real losers are always the taxpayers whose funds are committed in secret to new court actions by a bunch of legal amateurs on the CVRD board who don’t even listen to their own staff. When will this idiocy stop?

In another recent court ruling on the same matter by the BC Appeal Court the CVRD was chastised for being irresponsible by the three judge panel and wasting court time, so they assessed special extra costs to the CVRD they must now pay to the defendants for their legal fees. Nice going CVRD! Well done! Tell us how much money that is going to cost us including the four years of legal fees paid on this matter.

Our new MLA and the rest of the CVRD directors believe they can simply proceed to harass a business or other government in court using their unlimited access to taxpayer’s money even when they are told by staff not to.

This is an abuse of process and there should be a real sanction against the individual CVRD board members for their irresponsible actions — the best sanction is to require them (not us taxpayers) to pay the legal costs every time they lose in court which happens most of the time.

W.E. (Bill) Dumont

Cobble Hill