Fertile delta land … part of the Pacific Flyway … below sea level:
Current:
.
Proposed:
.
Tsawwassen First Nation is open for business. With a new mega-mall on its land near Delta expected to be completed in May 2016, the TFN is now looking into building a liquefied natural gas export facility on a 32-hectare (80-acre) section of land designated industrial.
We’ll see what happens. Tsawwassen First Nations may well have just bankrupted themselves building their “mega mall” – I mean we’re in an environment where this type of retail store is not doing so hot (Zellers went under to be bought out by Target, Target is now gone, Sears is on life support) and most of the other “mall” type businesses are all cookie cutter anyhow. Do they really think folks are going to drive all the way out to Delta in numbers great enough to keep that place full? There’s a long, long history of failed “mega mall” projects across North America that were better situated than this one.
Time will tell. It will be many years before shovels hit the ground for a project like this – despite it being on First Nations land I’m sure there’s still a fair bit of environmental paperwork that needs to be completed.
Going to the Pacific Centre Mall by car, doing some shopping and stopping off somewhere for a bite could easily take, say, an hour and 40 minutes. With the 21% TransLink tax that will cost you $15 for parking.
Richmond, Burnaby and soon Tsawwassen have free parking.
And yet Pacific Centre has the highest sales per square foot in North America:
http://www.retail-insider.com/retail-insider/tail-insider.com/2012/08/many-of-north-americas-most-productive.html
Very interesting.
Thank you!
Anecdotally, so no source to cite, unfortunately, when the 2001 Transit Strike was under way, Pacific Centre’s sales plummeted by almost half and prompted Cadillac Fairview to be one of the more vocal parties calling for the labour action to be resolved.
What I could scrounge up was a DVBIA release about the impact of the strike on street-level merchants downtown: https://downtownvancouver.net/dvbia/files/transit_strike_impacts-june_11_2001.pdf
Also, very interesting.
It’s as though we have two universes operating here. Maybe all cities have. There are those that live downtown, and surrounds, and use transit a lot. Then also there are those that throng to the outer malls too.
I remember being in Lisbon, going on a shopping trip with friends in their Mercedes. They had a very large apartment downtown but we drove twenty minutes out to a mall and to a Carrefour. (look it up on-line if you’re not familiar with it). I was shocked and dismayed that the local shops were losing the business to this massive international chain. The prices were not an issue. The place was packed. The fresh baguettes were being sold within minutes of them coming out of the oven. Another time in London I needed an Apple shop for replacement cable. There, my friends drove out from the centre and to a suburban shopping mall. It was absolutely packed on a Sunday. It took my friend a long time to find a parking spot. The shops were crowded like it was Christmas Eve. It’s like Bangkok, crossing town takes hours and everywhere is packed.
Every First Nations in BC may soon have an LNG business – two on Vancouver Island have already signed contracts. Facilities connected to the One being investigated will depend on whether the LNG is for export or just for regional supply. The power requirements are huge, but transmission to a Tsawwassen site shouldn’t be too onerous. Many observers think only a few of the 50 proposed LNG facilities overall in BC will ever be developed (demand?). We’ll see.
We expect from “nations” that they are self-sufficient, so any activity that adds value to society should be applauded.
How much tax revenue, if any, in terms of GST, PST, employee taxes, CPP, EI and/or corporate taxes will Canada or BC receive of this ?