Caught in the act

Re Contractors slag shoddy Athlete’s Village, News March 24:

It came as no surprise to read of the lucrative sole-source contracts awarded for the design and project management of the athlete’s village.

The construction community has been aware of this situation for quite some time.

Last year, an insider conceded to me that Yukon Party apparatchik James Graham was hired to sole-source the design in his home province (in essence, the sole sourcer was hired to do the sole sourcing).

The entire scenario has played out exactly as our source had originally described.

So, why didn’t anyone from the consulting community complain? After all, the contract for the athlete’s village is the largest Yukon government design contract in the past decade.

Mainly for the same reasons that contractors on site prefer to remain anonymous when criticizing the quality of the ATCO trailers.

Whitehorse is a small town and goodwill is equity here. It is also more productive to focus on your work in hand rather than risk being drawn into a political controversy.

For the record, I made some well-placed calls to the highest level of the Yukon government bureaucracy to lodge a complaint.

However, when I found that civil servants at the deputy minister level were willing to engage in games of deceit and dishonesty to protect their masters, I realized that my opponent was too formidable.

Athlete’s village project manager Mike Frasher states “All of our work has been tendered. We put it out, we get market prices and we award contracts — it’s all open to the public.”

We don’t expect the Yukon government to publicly tender every project.

However, we do expect that the government, and its representatives, will tell the truth in public when they don’t.

Jack Kobayashi, Kobayashi and Zedda Architects, Whitehorse

The view from Watson Lake

In the gospel according to Al Pope, all American and Canadian peacekeepers and reporters are liars.

Only the Muslim people can be trusted to tell the truth.

If someone rams your fence and sets off a bomb on your property and then comes back full speed the next day, are you going to stop and frisk him or verify that he has a bomb for sure?

My own reaction would be that I would shoot. To kill.

The terrorists make sure they run checkpoints with a few people who are unarmed in order to discredit our troops.

Yes, they may take out a few unarmed people but those people are hardly innocent and hardly civilians.

The civilian population wants peace, but the extremists won’t hear of it. Trouble is, they hide behind civilians and that is very effective.

Hamas does that. Al Qaeda does that.

Al Pope condones it.

If the US was really after oil and not peace, they would invade Saudi Arabia because that’s where the oil is.

But then who wants to cloud the issue with logic?

Dale Worsfold

Watson Lake

Musher responsibility

Re Quest on the rocks, News, March 3:

I would like to remind Quest organizers that the opposite of love is indifference.

Clearly this year’s Quest left few people indifferent, therefore it must be love.

We all might take a moment, myself included, to tip our hats to the volunteers and board members who make the Quest happen every year.

It’s a colossal job including significant personal expenditures and without these selfless people there would be no Quest for everyone to complain about.

I would take issue with the notion expressed by reporter Genesee Keevil that mushers were “sent” out of 101 into the storm on Eagle Summit.

Mushers make choices all the time: what kind of gear to carry, how much food, when to drop a dog, when to leave checkpoints….

Who better to judge their situation than the mushers themselves?

It isn’t up to the Quest to have mommy out there. Perhaps Keevil’s next article could be about musher responsibility.

Pete Neilson

Braeburn