I must admit I have mixed emotions when it comes to telecommunications giant Telus.
On the one hand, I pay them a lot of money. Every month.
This modern age of home phones, office phones, cell phones, kids' cell phones -.aargh! Don't get me started!
On the other hand, I do get pretty good service from the company, which employs thousands of people in this province and has its head office located in Burnaby.
It also spends a lot of money here - more than $26 billion since 2000 building its wireless network and other services throughout the province. It recently announced it would spend another $3 billion and hire 1,300 employees over the next three years.
Telus has also been named one of the Top 100 companies to work for in Canada. In short, it seems like a model corporate citizen and one a provincial government might want to be closely associated with.
All of which makes the government's last-second switcheroo of not giving Telus the official naming rights for the refurbished BC Place stadium all the more mystifying and downright bizarre.
It had been assumed for months that this deal was etched in stone. Indeed, Telus had spent more than $10 million hard-wiring the new stadium with state-of-the-art technology. The company had even spent millions of dollars on impressive new signs that would be part of the proposed "Telus Park."
The company was offering to pay $1.5 million a year for 20 years for the naming rights, plus another $5 million in assorted other activities associated with the stadium.
No other company was mentioned in the same breath when it came to the naming rights. Bell was already in the stadium in a different way - as official sponsor of soccer's Whitecaps.
But official naming rights are a different, and more lucrative, bag than simply sponsoring a team.
The government has not offered up a credible reason why the apparent deal with Telus was suddenly off the table. Jobs Minister Pat Bell said the BC Place name was "iconic" and so the government decided to forgo the $40 million and stick with the suddenly magical name.
Bell also insisted the government could make more money selling advertising in and around BC Place on its own, but he hasn't offered up any kind of business plan or model to back up that lofty claim.
The premier, for her part, said the proposed Telus deal would have prevented other companies from advertising inside the stadium, but apparently Telus was only guaranteed 30 per cent of the ad space with the rest up for grabs.
This lame story coming from the B.C. Liberal government once again raises questions about its business savvy or more accurately, its lack of it.
As well, this mess is simply the latest mishap to befall the whole BC Place refurbishment project. The project's price grew from the original estimate of $365 million to a final tally of $565 million.
Much of the costs were supposed to be recovered through the sale of adjoining lands as a real estate development, which was supposed to be anchored by a mega-casino. While the new facility is impressive enough, it continues to experience a host of problems. The roof itself doesn't open quickly and has already needed repairs. The latest headache is grease leaking from the cables that suspend the roof.
Do I detect a pattern here?
It's unlikely the last chapter has been written on the Telus snafu. The government will likely have to pay back at least some of the money Telus spent on the stadium already, and the whole thing has the smell of a lawsuit pending somewhere.
In the meantime, I'll just keep paying my Telus bills, and keep looking for clues to solve the Telus Park naming mystery.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global BC.
