Burnaby Residents On The Hook For Liberals’ Olympics Tickets
BURNABY – Burnaby residents have the right to know if they will be footing the bill for Richard Lee and Harry Bloy to watch coveted Olympic events from a luxury suite during the Games, the New Democrats said today.
Kathy Corrigan
“The B.C. Liberals are spending nearly a million taxpayer dollars to buy prime Olympic tickets so that they and their friends can watch events for free. It’s simply not acceptable. To make matters worse, when the B.C. Liberals were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they tried to hide it from British Columbians,” said New Democrat critic for the Olympics Kathy Corrigan .
This week Carole James and the New Democrats revealed that the B.C. Liberals spent nearly a million taxpayer dollars on three thousand Olympic tickets, including at least two luxury boxes at coveted hockey and skating events. Many of the tickets have been set aside for B.C. Liberal MLAs and cabinet ministers for the purposes of ‘Olympic community engagement and leveraging’, 
Raj Chouhanaccording to documents obtained by the Opposition.
“While the government is cutting back on mental health services, supports for arts and culture, childrens’ sports, and funding for Special Olympics they're spending close to a million dollars on Olympics tickets without a shred of accountability to B.C. taxpayers,” said Raj Chouhan , MLA for Burnaby-Edmonds.
“The Games are for all British Columbians to enjoy. If MLAs want to attend the Games, they should buy Olympics tickets just like everyone else, not abuse their position to get ahead of the line.”
When the issue was first raised on Wednesday, Olympics Minister Mary McNeil said the government had not yet set any rules over how the free tickets will be distributed. The next day, the Liberals revealed that, in addition to the tickets for Liberal MLAs, they were setting aside up to 2,000 tickets which could be sold to B.C. Liberal insiders, while other British Columbians without tickets have to pay scalpers’ prices if they want to attend events.
“The bottom line is Harry Bloy, Richard Lee, and their B.C. Liberal colleagues hid their plans to buy these tickets from the public, and now that they’ve been caught they must be held accountable to the people of Burnaby,” said Chouhan.
“As MLAs for Burnaby, they have the responsibility to tell their constituents if they will be accepting free Olympic tickets.”
Corrigan noted that the $1 million for B.C. Liberals to entertain guests at the Olympics comes on top of around $1.4 million for tickets already shelled out by Crown corporations B.C. Hydro, B.C. Lottery Corporation and ICBC.
“In these difficult times, when the public is tightening their belts, for government to say, ‘we'll just lay out one million and worry about it afterwards’ is incredibly irresponsible,” said Corrigan.
Carole James and the New Democrats have been calling on the government to designate a formal role to the Auditor General to monitor and report on Olympic costs and bring back accountability and transparency around government spending.
