Monday 28 May 2012

Imagine someone bolted a giant advertising screen inside your home

Imagine someone came into your home and bolted a giant flat-screen TV to the wall of your living room.  Imagine that they went ahead and bolted another TV across from your dinner table and yet another in your kid’s bedroom.  Imagine that this perpetrator covered over the ‘off’ switches, hardwired the power cables, then disappeared back to the safety of his office and began pumping non-stop ads at you and your family ‒ Budweiser ads to sell you beer, Telus ads to sell you cell phones, and for good measure the occasional Terry Fox video so that you’d look like a jerk if you complained about it.  Imagine your astonishment if you found out that this vandal who was disrupting your previously quiet home was actually a Provincial Corporation, a breed of organisation that is responsible not to the local community but to the whims of wealthy corporate advertisers.

What if this Provincial Corporation offered to partly dim these screens in your home from time to time, or to turn them off for a few minutes on select nights, all this at their whims and musings.  Would you be satisfied with the reduced brightness?  Would you be able to return to a peaceful family life with your children despite the non-stop disruption into your private space? Would you consider the situation resolved?

As local residents re-group and plan their next steps, the incumbent BC Liberals continue to push residents ever closer to an unwanted but increasingly likely scenario: legal action against BC Pavilion Corp.