Time for another edition of the Monday Morning Quarterback – five things we’re thinking about in B.C. this week.

1. City politicians love the grandiose mega-projects that feed their utopian visions, but at the cost of the bread and butter infrastructure cities truly need, says Terence Corcoran in the National Post. Need more evidence? Check out my op-ed today on there B.C. regional projects that will cost us billions – and the tenuous connection they have to the environment.

2. This Cowichan Valley Citizen letter to the editor from Cheryl Trudell in Duncan cracked me up:

I attended a North Cowichan council meeting late in November. We are facing yet another property tax hike unless cuts are made somewhere.

Dave Devana (chief administrative officer) presented options but warned if staff is to be reduced, morale would be greatly affected.

So, by that same logic: let's build a pool so the kids won't be sad.

Let's expand the office space to make happy employees.

Let's build a road into the peninsula so developers won't be angry (and take us to court - again).

Dear Dave: I am frustrated by all the tax increases. How will you make me feel better?

Cheryl Trudell, Duncan

3. Hard to argue with the NDP on their concerns over BC Hydro. The debt is mounting, and Moody’s recent credit downgrade is worrisome.

4. We have got to quit thinking of Canada in American terms. Our situation is very, very different (thank goodness!), as Andrew Coyne reports:

Instead of looking at the gap between rich and poor, or the poor and the middle, attention has shifted to the gap between the very rich and everyone else: the top 1%. Yet even here the “growing gap” is no longer growing. The share of all income going to the top 1%, according to figures provided to the TD by Michael Veall, the reigning Canadian expert on the subject, was 13.6% as of 2010, down from a peak of nearly 16% — again, about where it was in 1998. The big surge was in the decades before that.

So again: how have we convinced ourselves it is increasing? One is forced to conclude it is the influence of the American media. Every one of the ailments we imagine ourselves to be suffering is a reality in the United States: where our incomes are growing, theirs are stagnating; where poverty here is at record lows, there it is at record highs; where inequality in Canada has not grown in recent years, in the United States it has surged.

Again, the explanation, at least in part, is not hard to find. While we have been largely spared the ravages of recession in the last decade, the Americans have endured two, the last especially severe. The big surprise in that TD study, it would seem, is that Canada is not the United States.

5. Good on the Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce for getting proactive on property taxes—too many groups and citizens are just passively accepting annual tax increases of several times the rate of inflation.