Remember some years ago when a movie was made in Rossland?  ‘Miracle’, it was called, about the famous US versus Russia hockey game at the 1980 Olympics.  The real game was played at Lake Placid in New York State.  I can’t imagine why the film-maker chose Rossland since it has no resemblance to Lake Placid whatsoever.  I don’t...

The B.C. government likes to boast that the province's personal income tax rates are among the lowest in the land, if not the lowest. Expect to hear it repeated a lot in TV ads over the coming weeks, when the legislature reconvenes in February and when the 2013 provincial budget is tabled.   On one level they're right. On...

Despite earlier cooler weather, heatwave conditions are expected to resume in New South Wales, Australia. Local weather service forecasts expect temperatures to rise above 40°C (104°F), as-experienced earlier in the week. The percentage of uncontained fires jumped as high as 20%. On Friday, local fire authorities have declared...

As we look back at how the arena scandal unfolded, Coun. Jill Spearn said that she felt “blindsided” by the recent surge of public resentment over the scandal and the way council dealt with the situation as they became aware of problems over the last year.Was council blindsided?The big question of 'who knew what and when'...

Council has refused to offer an apology for the manner in which they handled the Jason Ward affair since information about $185,000 in untendered contracts given by the former building inspector to his own, possibly fraudulent company came to the mayor's attention in September of 2011, to council's attention in January of...

The Mir Lecture Series presents James Loney at the Shambhala Music & Performance Hall in Nelson on Friday, February 8th. In November 2005, Loney and three other men were captured by armed gunmen and held hostage in Iraq.  Loney was part of a delegate from Christian Peacemaker Teams – an organization that sends activists...

There’s always something going around. You know, a bug, a cold, a virus, a flu--a whatever.  In Rossland’s heyday, when living conditions were a little more...er...”rustic” than they are now, and the population ever-growing, one can imagine that there would be the odd outbreak of some kind of disease or nasty illness, and...

The remarkable Idle No More movement is the biggest and most important national outpouring of grassroots aboriginal anger ever seen in Canada. Not since the late 1960s when Indians (as they then referred to themselves) and Métis confronted governments with demands for justice has such a dramatic and passionate expression of...

Columbia Power wants to hear from you. We have embarked on a consultation project to gather feedback and insight from the public to help in the process of determining what’s next for the corporation. The consultation is intended to tell the Columbia Power story, seek feedback on our proposed strategy, and gather information...

In this column I would like to share part of the speech I gave to those attending the “Open Forum” on a culture of peace and Department of Peace in Canada which took place in Ottawa early in November of 2012. Arms trade is big business – in 2010 total military spending in the world was around $1.6 Trillion.  According to the...