News for Youse: Port Mann tolls drop, Nordstrom confirms, zoning for bikes, and warships on alert

I won't be a part of this sham Port Mann tolling. The government started off on their well thought out plan by deceiving the people into thinking that they were going to "twin" the Port Mann. Then when the people took the bait, they switched to a different plan. Who ever thought that ripping down a perfectly good bridge, that was paid for already and putting up a toll bridge that throttles the public's right to drive on a national highway was a good idea? That doesn't make sense and whatever you believe about the intelligence of a politician, I contend there must be another reason. My calculation is that best case scenario, the bridge will generate 65.7M$ per year and take over 50 years to pay for if only 300,000 people use it every day for 50 years. That's a pretty slimy business case and sets a poor example to the people of BC. That is when it comes to infrastructure that we can't afford as a province, somehow holding specific repeat users of that infrastructure up to ransom, because their livelihoods depend on it, is fair game. But I believe in this instance it goes deeper than that. In order to say that people will save time by using this bridge can only come about by creating a segment of the population who disagree with tolls and accordingly will seek alternate routes, but more importantly, the traffic must be unimpeded by toll booths. Hence the scanning system and registration of vehicles. It is this technology of attaching a sticker to your windshield that is the real prize for the government. They could easily have gone into hock for the $3.5Billion and raised our taxes so everybody could use the bridge without all this fuss. But no, sliding this scanning technology in under the radar in my mind was the real coup. These so called stickers are RFID identifiers. That is, inside the sticker is an electronic device that holds identifiable information about you that links to a database about your vehicle and your financial data used to pay the tolls. When you pass under the scanner as you happily proceed to work each day, the sticker circuitry is "excited" by the scanner output waves, thereby releasing your information to the TREO corporation so they can bill you. While that sounds pretty cool to the trusting trendy types who don't think this is a threat, the fact is that as a method to charge tolls, it is also a method to track you. Because if the government can track your vehicle for the purposes of sending you a Port Mann toll bill, they can also track you where ever you are in the province just by installing scanners where ever they want. Think what this means. Tolling already paid for existing roadways and bridges is going on all over the world now. Not just new roads and bridges. There is already talk about taxing you for every kilometre you drive as a new source of carbon tax revenue. Further consider the outcry when people first learned about the Port Mann tolls and the adjoining cities and municipalities with already heavily used bridges started crying that their bridges should be tolled as though this sharing of pain would justify tolling of the Port Mann at all. So that is the next incremental step now that the technology and administrative support structure has gained a foothold. This new way to track you wherever you drive can very easily explode into a monstrous tax grab with tentacles that will invade your privacy, rack up your credit card and for those who see this evil for what it is, it will effectively box them into a a corner as a disincentive to free unfettered movement within a free country. It would seem the control freaks who run this country want just precisely that.