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...

 We should have known it was too good to be true. Harper’s many, many repetitions of his government’s commitment to get all the troops out by July 2011 are well known. I think he may actually have meant it because by these repeated statements he framed the issue so strongly that all Canadians expected – […]

Rossland sure has had its share of hot spots in the past.  One of them was the Allan Hotel, which stood where our Subway sandwich shop now stands. The Allan was built around the mid-1890s and until its complete destruction in 1978, it buzzed with a cafe, a beer parlour, and a supper club called the Loose Cabooze.  At some...

Now that I’m back from some well-enjoyed fun in the sun, I am amazed at the number of people who have suggested the biggest story that happened in BC in the past few weeks was the decision by Premier Gordon Campbell to step down.  They are wrong.   As repeatedly explained on this blog long […]

I used to play trumpet, and my crowning musical achievement came not with playing reggae and ska/rocksteady covers at the Garden Works Christmas party (1997), but with having had the privilege of playing “Taps” at my elementary school’s Remembrance Day assembly, circa 1989.    As the only trumpet player in my school band, the...