Poll

Dec

The Trail Resident Card, one year on: a lose-lose-lose situation. Mission accomplished?

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...

MP shreds closure of newspaper

 “The closing of the Nelson Daily News and the loss of 25 jobs in this community is another blow to rural B.C.,” said BC Southern Interior MP Alex Atamanenko today. He was reacting to Monday’s news that B.C. media chain Black Press purchased eleven papers from Glacier Media, including the Nelson Daily News, the Trail […]

TECH TALK: How safe are teens spending time in front of the computer this summer?

 I’ve heard it said that raising teenagers is like trying to nail Jello to a tree. It’s only fair to my adolescent readers to point out that, from their perspective, dealing with parents is often a very similar experience. So, what does this have to do with technology? Well, McAfee just released a report in […]

Time for Media to Stop Defending/Promoting HST

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;...

OP/ED: Tax sleight of hand

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 ...

RIGHT TO THE POINT: Protesters ...or criminals? You decide.

 A hateful and dangerous gang of vandals did their best to get a riot started in Toronto during the G20 summit and, even though they torched cars, smashed windows, insulted and attacked police and did their best to bully innocent spectators, no one was seriously hurt. This group of malcontents are casting a cowardly disrepute […]

TECH TALK: Porn sites not the only risk factor

 In times past, people could protect themselves from computer viruses by staying out of the “questionable” corners of the internet. While this hasn’t been true for years now, many people still believe that watching where they surf will keep their computers un-bugged. Antivirus company AVAST! just released an analysis of infected websites that should, once […]

DOBBIN: Is this what a police state looks like?

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...

Remembering Zach Larsen

 Several hundred people attended a Celebration of Life for Zach Larsen on Saturday at the Pentecostal New Life Assembly Church. I wouldn’t normally write a story like this in the first person – it’s not about me, after all – but I tried and tried to write it as an impartial observer and just couldn’t […]

ATAMANENKO: Education should be a boon, not a burden

During this time of economic recovery, many young Canadians are seeking to improve their chances at developing meaningful careers by opting to invest in higher education. But with federal funding of colleges and universities having been slashed almost continuously since the early 80s, students are expected to make up this shortfall by paying unreasonable tuition […]

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