At last Monday's regular council meeting in Trail, the issue of renewing the Trail Resident Program card program came up and a motion supporting the idea was passed with relatively little fanfare. Born out of the breakdown of regional recreation, the TRP card was designed as a two-tier pricing system for Trail recreation...

The hurt has begun: BC consumers are now being hit with a higher sales tax (HST) almost every where they turn.  And as a result some of those who can hardly afford it, like food servers, are already taking the hit.A friend of mine told me the following story: each morning he has coffee and toast at a neighbourhood restaurant;...

Many people in British Columbia feel both dismayed and betrayed by the HST. It is a $2 billion shift in hidden sales taxes from business to consumers done by a government who said sales tax harmonization was not on the radar screen during the most recent election. True, government reduced income taxes to soften the blow of ...

Police states don’t appear full blown, over night. They are, like any other social phenomenon, part of a social and political process - the end result of a long term corruption of the political culture and the incremental diminishing of democracy. This is a process that has been taking place for at least twenty years in Canada...

Dear Editor, I would like to clarify for your readers the facts regarding statements that Mr. Alex Atamenenko made is his opinion piece on June 9. It is important for Canadians to understand that the Budget bill will not change the fundamentals of environmental assessment. These changes are about process in order to remove ...

The sorry spectacle of Conservative cabinet ministers flying around the world defending banks from a tax to cover their next, inevitable, meltdown is bad enough. What is perhaps worse is that it is being largely justified by the perpetuation of the myth that Canada did not have to bail out its banks.Wrong.We are, according ...

The oil spill that now jeopardizes the entire ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico, and potentially beyond, is a chilling reminder that all is not well with our planet. And what’s actually worse: the amount of oil gushing from the seemingly impossible-to-stop deep-sea oil well or the complacent attitude taken toward the spill by...

 It came to my attention last evening that the myth that Columbus was setting out to prove wrong the persistent belief of his time that the earth was flat is still being taught as history in our schools, even right here in Rossland, and I thought I'd shed some light on the situation. 20th century scholars have discredited the...

Ahh, the great challenge that faces all tax-collecting governments in our society – balancing taxes with services provided. Most people desire and occasionally demand lower taxes. On the other hand, most people also want more services, be they snow clearing, recreation programs, donations to service groups, or fixing leaky ...

April Fool's Day is probably as good a time as any to put our joke of a dispute with Trail over the recreation issue behind us and move forward under our own steam. A growing rift between the Golden and Silver cities on fronts as diverse as education, sanitation, and recreation shows no sign of improving and, if anything, the...