The Ministry of Agriculture and Lands’ continued refusal to disclose sea lice infestation data could set a dangerous precedent for future public information requests, environmental groups argue in a submission filed today to B.C.’s information commissioner. In March 2010, after six years of drawn-out proceedings, the commissioner ruled that the ministry could not conceal 2002-03 fish […]

Often when discussion turns to how to grow an area’s economy, broad questions such as /what type of city do we want to be?' are among the first to come up. This week, for the sake of discussion, I’ll offer up a bit of a paradigm shift on that way of thinking. Perhaps a large part of the conversation on how to drive economic...

 I  have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. … I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given […]

National governments have been back in the news over the past two years because of the financial crisis and the havoc it wreaked on the global economy. Belying the ideology that nations were obsolete in the grand new order of transnational corporations, they are now front and centre trying to save the corporations that supposedly […]

When I think of winter coming, I imagine cosy weekends filled with children’s laughter and hot chocolate shared in the warm glow of a living room.  But for too many people here in the BC Southern Interior, that first snowfall may feel a little more ominous.  For some of our friends and neighbours—maybe even your […]

There is a movement afoot, a less than secretive fraternal order of men donating the combined powers of their upper lips to a cause. Self-sacrificing, self-effacing, they are putting their best faces forward and adorning the fleshy canvas below their septum with a mo’, a moustache, for one month. Solidarity in the furry face...

Whatever the Western media calls them, the illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank are very far from being outposts. They are connected to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by fast, Jews-only motorways. Their villas have swimming pools and lawns (a settler is allocated eight times more water than a Palestinian). Even the most recent and […]

Mark Hume of the Globe and Mail has done an outstanding job of taking the Sea to Sky highway shadow toll story to an entirely new level in the Monday edition of the paper, and managed to get some rather creative answers from both Macquarie and the BC government.   Truly,creative doesn’t even begin to describe […]

Make no mistake about it: Carole James will be gone as NDP leader well before the next provincial election. But remember: in politics, like comedy, timing is everything. And the next BC election isn’t scheduled until Tuesday, May 14, 2013.  Yes, 2013.  So for the NDP there’s no rush: in fact, it would be politically dumb to replace James […]

Last Monday I had the opportunity to go somewhere I’d never been before: a City council meeting. I was assigned a story about the Museum Select Committee and was encouraged to attend the meeting by my editor so I could see the Committee’s presentation.  Usually, I curl on Monday nights, but I managed to find a spare and off...