It’s Spring Break here in British Columbia, but our CTF office keeps humming away with another edition of our Monday Morning Quarterback – five things we’re pondering this week.

1. What a debacle this Prince George wood centre has turned into. Another reminder of how inefficient government is on things like this.

2. The experts on this stuff sound unconvinced that the $11 million B.C. taxpayers are sinking into the Premier Clark Indo-Canadian outreach eff – er – sorry, the Times of India Bollywood film awards will generate any significant bump for the provincial treasury:

Lindsay Meredith, a marketing professor at Simon Fraser University, said he is wary of any peremptory claim for the value of a promotion.

“We have lots of correlational variables, we have lots of measurement techniques that look for correlations, but we can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that advertising causes sales. So it’s a tough animal to measure, to start with,” Meredith said.

“If people are seeing your message, if they’re watching your TV show, that’s step No. 1. It gets much more complicated after that. They have to remember what the content of the exposure was all about.

They have to decide that they actually liked what they saw, and then ultimately they have to try your product.

“Trying to hang an actual dollar ( amount) for sales generated off of exposure to a communication is extremely difficult stuff. It’s getting even more complicated by social network systems because this is creating a whole parallel structure to mass media now.”

3. Love the headline on this story: “Mayors complain they’re alone in fight for TransLink cash.” Uh yes, your worships, you are – certainly few taxpayers are clamoring to give that $1.4 billion a year behemoth more dough.

4. The Transit Police continue to sputter away in a desperate attempt to appear relevant: this time, they claim they need 160 officers with guns to deal with future fare card fraud. Of course, if you read all the way to the last four paragraphs, you get an alternate, real-life version of the Transit Police’s claims:

Officials in both Seattle and San Diego maintain fare evasion has been reduced since they introduced their Orca and Compass smart cards respectively.

San Diego had faced similar problems to TransLink’s U- Pass scandal in terms of seeing a proliferation of counterfeit passes and resold passes before it introduced its Compass card.

“People were collecting used day passes and selling them again,” said spokesman Rob Schupp. “It was big business.”

But James Dreisbach- Towle, integrated information systems administrator, said the Compass card technology has made it difficult to counterfeit. The technology, which is the same used in TransLink’s Compass card, is “contactless,” which means it does not have the same magnetic stripe as a credit card and “is a little bit harder to hack.”

Catch that (I added some bold parts to make sure you did)? Fraud has gone down in those systems since moving to Compass card-like technology. But here in Vancouver, these overpaid cops claim it will rise? Ridiculous.

5. In case you missed it, here’s a transcript of my speech to the Kamloops Canadian Home Builders Association on private/public pay equity. I’ve been getting great feedback on it.