A contest of manners

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Topp again livens up an NDP leadership debate.

While candidates avoided confrontation, some in the audience were undeterred from interacting. In his opening remarks, Brian Topp spoke for double his allotted time, despite two warnings from the moderator, and was finally booed by a small group of delegates – a blunder referenced by some audience members afterwards. “Brian Topp — when he ignored the moderator — took the audience to boo him off stage,” delegate Matthew Laird said. “It was very much a turn-off.”

More on Saturday’s discussion from the Times-Colonist, Canadian Press, Georgia Straight and Globe and Mail.

Let the people decide how they want to decide

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 2:30 PM - 0 Comments

Jonathan McLeod rips the idea of asking the courts to rule against first-past-the-post.

A judgement in favour of pro-PR side would likely spell the doom of the current voting system for not just Quebec, but every province. Here in Upper Canada, we rejected electoral reform by a direct vote. If you’re trying to enhance democracy, you shouldn’t do things that will that will directly thwart the will of the people. If you want PR, get it back on the ballot. Don’t turn to the courts.

Voters in Ontario rejected proportional representation in 2007. Voters in British Columbia rejected similar reform two years later.

The newest math

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 0 Comments

After one version last week and another last night, the official House of Commons math now adds 15 new seats for Ontario, six for British Columbia, six for Alberta and three for Quebec.

The provinces thus break down as so.

Ontario 38.8% of the population and 35.8% of the seats
Quebec 23.1% and 23.1%
British Columbia 13.3% and 12.4%
Alberta 11.0% and 10.1%
Manitoba 3.6% and 4.1%
Saskatchewan 3.1% and 4.1%
Nova Scotia 2.7% and 3.3%
New Brunswick 2.2% and 3.0%
Newfoundland 1.5% and 2.1%
PEI 0.4% and 1.2%

House of Commons math

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 40 Comments

If the Star’s sources are correct, the Harper government’s plan to rebalance the House of Commons will see 13 seats added in Ontario, six in Alberta, five to British Columbia and two to Quebec.

The NDP has tabled its own bill on seat distribution which generally uses a formula based on the results of the 2011 census. On the question of Quebec, it would ensure that Quebec maintain the same proportion of seats as it had on Nov. 27, 2006: the day the House adopted the Prime Minister’s motion that the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada.

At that point, Quebec had 75 of 308 seats, or 24.35%.

Under the government’s changes, Quebec would have 77 of 334 seats, or 23.05%.

Update 4:03pm. Using the government’s seat numbers, you would have to give Quebec a total of eight more seats (83 of 340) to get to 24.41%. Seven more seats, or 82 of 339, equals 24.19%.

Now you can hire someone to nag you

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

When Gordon McGladdery’s girlfriend moved back to Vancouver from Seoul, where the couple had been living and teaching English, his to-do list suddenly started taking a back seat to “wasting time on the Internet.” The 27-year-old, who stayed behind in the South Korean capital, realized he needed someone around to inspire him; and he figured other people probably felt the same way. So, almost two months ago, McGladdery moved back to Vancouver and launched Hasslers, a “personalized motivation service” with the tag line, “It’s for your own damn good.”

For a small fee, McGladdery will personally phone, text or email his clients, reminding them to go to the gym, finish their homework, or put in a half-hour of practising guitar. Reached by Maclean’s, McGladdery said he had 42 “hassles” to make that day, including in Pakistan and Chile. Even with little advertising, the service seems to be catching on. Mike Dickson, a 23-year-old University of British Columbia student, says a friend signed him up for it; the aspiring journalist will get “a quick little pester” every day or two reminding him to keep writing. If a friend or parent hassled him, it could get annoying, Dickson says, but the anonymous text is “great.”

McGladdery, who formerly played guitar with the Victoria, B.C., band Oh Snap!, aspires to a career as a singer-songwriter. For now, he’s living off his savings until Hasslers takes off. The key to his success, he believes, is that a real person is making the calls. “Everybody can make themselves a schedule,” he says, “but they just ignore it. It’s harder when you’re letting somebody else down.” As for his girlfriend, who left Seoul early to go back to school, she’s now his fiancée.

Tatiana and Krista go to school

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Brian Howell

Not many kids get to delay the start of kindergarten by a few days so they can fly to Manhattan for a network television appearance, but then few children are as unique as Tatiana and Krista Hogan. Last Wednesday, the twins from Vernon, B.C., who are conjoined at the head, and their parents, Felicia Simms and Brendan Hogan, were the star attractions on Anderson Cooper’s new syndicated daytime talk show. This week, one month from their fifth birthdays, they’re back with their kindergarten classmates at Okanagan Landing Elementary, enjoying every minute of it.

“They love school,” says grandmother Louise McKay. The staff at the school have gone out of their way to make the girls comfortable, including setting aside a quiet room if they need a break and retrofitting a special toilet, she says. “They have a really nice team behind them, they’re helping us out trying to figure out ways of accommodating Tati and Krista so they’re comfortable at school.”

The girls have certainly caused a stir. One girl, especially, followed them around the first few hours, clearly curious. They quickly formed a friendship. “Every morning she waits for Tati and Krista to get there, and takes them over to play finger puppets,” says McKay. “They’re laughing and giggling.”

Continue…

A state of perfect disharmony

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 4:30 PM - 8 Comments

So the harmonization comedy continues. Scant weeks after the people of British Columbia, in a magnificent fit of self-destructive fury, voted to unharmonize their provincial sales tax from the now-misnamed Harmonized Sales Tax, word came that talks between Ottawa and Quebec on a plan to compensate the province for harmonizing its own tax were at an impasse.

You could tell the talks were at an impasse because the two sides put out a press release announcing the talks were going swimmingly. “HST and QST harmonization,” it read: “Discussions proceeding normally.” And so they were, if by “normally” you mean sailing past the Sept. 15 deadline for an agreement to which the federal Conservatives had pledged themselves in the recent election campaign. The most they would say now is that they hoped to have a deal by the end of the month.

Mind you, it was always a mystery just what they had to talk about, the feds having already promised, publicly and often, to yield to Quebec’s demands. They’d even named the figure, $2.2 billion—by a remarkable coincidence, the very sum the Charest government had asked for at the start. What was there left to negotiate?

Continue…

Picking sides

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 4 Comments

While Thomas Mulcair says he has the support of a “very large majority of my Quebec caucus,” Brian Topp went west yesterday and picked up the support of four prominent New Democrats from British Columbia.

“The British Columbia party is in many ways the heart and soul of our party,” Topp told reporters at a news conference. “And no one is going to become leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada without doing very well in British Columbia.”

Romeo Saganash is apparently set to announce a leadership bid. Nathan Cullen and Peggy Nash are still thinking about it. Pundits Guide has launched a special minisite to track the race.

You’ll absolutely love ‘minkfish’

By Jacob Richler - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

Early one morning on a recent West Coast Fishing Club trip to the Haida Gwaii, I dipped a baited line into the frigid waters with the expectation of an imminent battle with a ripped and angry tayee, as the biggest chinooks are locally known—and instead, promptly reeled in a five-kilogram ling cod. I had never seen one before and it was ghastly, with a huge and hideous head, monstrous pectoral fins and a long, slender, amber-flecked grey body that once on deck writhed like an eel. “You should keep it,” said chef David Hawksworth, who was fishing on the same boat, and went on to explain that from a culinary perspective, if not that of an angler, he often preferred ling cod to salmon. So keep it, I did.

Two days later, back in Toronto with company over for dinner, I pulled the ling cod from the refrigerator. The fish had been cleaned and filleted for the journey home, and sizing it up thus, I could not think of another creature whose aesthetic could be so vastly improved through a simple act of decapitation.

The remaining flesh of the two long fillets was thick, firm and white. While the grey skin still wore its scales, chef Hawksworth had assured me that these were so tiny as to be undetectable on the palate, once cooked—and that is what I call convenient fish design. So I progressed directly to portioning it up, and cooking it.

Continue…

Don’t give these kids the keys

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 13 Comments

Tom Zytaruk/Surrey Now

The 911 calls started rolling about 3:30 p.m. last Wednesday, just as the B.C. Lower Mainland’s notorious rush hour was starting to build: so many high-powered luxury cars were weaving recklessly through traffic as they raced south on Highway 99 that it looked like a Need for Speed video game come to life. A squadron of Ferraris, Lamborghinis and the like flew past anxious drivers as they streaked out of the narrow George Massey tunnel under the Fraser River toward Surrey and the seaside community of White Rock.

Lower Mainland RCMP scrambled to get a helicopter over the scene for an accurate measure of the speeds, which may have exceeded 200 km/h, but there wasn’t time, said RCMP Supt. Norm Gaumont, the officer in charge of traffic for the region. RCMP cruisers corralled some of the racers in Surrey, while the rest were pulled over in White Rock. In all, they impounded 13 vehicles worth $2 million by police estimates.

“I’ve got a Ferrari 599, I have three Lamborghini Gallardos, I have an Audi R8, I have three Nissan GTRs, I have two Maserati Turismos, I have two Mercedes SLS and I have an Aston Martin,” said Gaumont, reading through the list of cars impounded for seven days under provincial anti-street-racing laws. None of the 12 males and one female, all from Vancouver or Richmond, was older than 21. Six were novice drivers, required under B.C.’s licence system to display an “N” sign on the rear of their vehicle. “My son drives a ’94 Mazda,” said Gaumont, “and he thinks he’s pretty hard done by after this.”

Continue…

The demise of the HST (IV)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 2, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 6 Comments

Scott Brison points to the Harper government.

For all this rhetoric, federal Liberal finance critic Scott Brison – the Liberals got all of this rolling during the Chrétien era – notes the Tories did little to help sell the tax in B.C. or elsewhere by wading into sometimes furious provincial debates. “They have refused to share any political risk or pedagogy to explain any tax change, and left provincial governments flailing in the wind,” he said in an interview. “If it’s important politically to the federal Conservatives, they ought to be putting some skin in the game politically.”

The demise of the HST

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 30 Comments

Stephen Gordon considers British Columbia’s rejection of the HST.

For an economics professor who has spent much of the past six years trying to bridge the wide — and apparently broadening — gap between what is known to economists and the talking points that are the stuff of politics, the B.C. HST referendum is an unsurprising disappointment.

The little mill town that could

By Tom Henheffer - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Midway was devastated when, three years ago, its lumber mill closed. Residents of the tiny B.C. town, located just north of the U.S. border, started packing—200 were suddenly out of work—and the schools got ready to close. Then, a year ago, something incredible happened.

Midway and a few surrounding Kootenay communities banded together and, with the help of private investors—including 42 locals, who raised a total of $700,000—put together $1 million to buy the mill. They found a new tenant, and a $10-million mill refurbishment project brought life back to the community. But now they have to raise another $800,000 or lose their investment—and control of the mill.

“You could see the hope. People started making plans for the future instead of just next week,” Randy Kappes, Midway’s mayor and the owner of the town’s single gas station, told Maclean’s. Now, he says, “they’re holding their breath.” The agreement, hashed out last January, included a $1-million mortgage from the mill’s owners, Montana’s Fox Forest Products. Originally, the loan was to be repaid in full, 60 days after the first lumber began rolling out in October. But Fox refused to close the deal until the deadline was pushed up to Aug. 31. Lawyer’s fees and start-up costs ate up most of the capital, and new investment stalled, explains Stephen Hill, the deal’s chief architect.

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Power to the people

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 1:50 PM - 2 Comments

In light of events in British Columbia and Wisconsin, Greg Fingas defends direct democracy initiatives.

The leading example is of course California, whose combination of conflicting citizen initiatives and political gridlock has made it virtually impossible to make reasonable budgetary decisions or carry out any long-term planning. And direct democratic processes shouldn’t serve as the only outlet for citizen involvement between elections. Indeed, both of the above examples could have been avoided if the governments involved had consulted with residents to determine whether their policy choices were even faintly defensible.

But there’s always some risk that a government that believes itself to be four years away from any accountability might push far beyond the limits of reasonable political choice. And some mechanism for citizens to take back our representative authority in case of emergency might work wonders to reduce the danger of overreach in the future.

Premiers’ ‘life-saving’ pact

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Garrett Shakespeare, a North Vancouver swim instructor and nightclub DJ, turned 23 on July 22. When you have lived more than a decade with paroxysmal nocturnal haemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare and fatal blood disease, you don’t take such events for granted. But this birthday was special: he got back his life. Thanks to a joint purchase agreement reached among Canada’s premiers, announced coincidentally on his birthday, Shakespeare and other PNH sufferers have started treatment with Soliris, one of the world’s most expensive drugs, but one shown to restore health and longevity in those with the disorder.

“I’m so happy,” says Shakespeare, who has lived with debilitating pain, frequent hospitalization and the threat of organ failure or a fatal blood clot because the B.C. drug plan had deemed Soliris not “cost effective.” The drug costs about $500,000 a year, and patients require treatment for the rest of their lives. In June, Maclean’s wrote about Shakespeare’s plight in a story about the inequities caused by the lack of a national pharmacare strategy. There are fewer than 90 Canadians with PNH. Some had treatment paid through private health plans, some in Ontario and Quebec were treated on compassionate grounds, others did without. About 30 other countries provide the drug free for PNH patients.

Shakespeare and his mother, Rita, learned he’d get the drug in a meeting with provincial Health Minister Mike de Jong. “She started crying right away,” Garrett said of his mother’s joyous reaction, “and didn’t stop the whole way home.” He praises the lobbying efforts of Barry Katsof, a fellow sufferer and the founder of the Montreal-based Canadian Association of PNH Patients. Katsof, a 63-year-old retired businessman, receives Soliris under a Quebec program. He calls it “a miracle drug” that restored his health. Katsof said the provinces negotiated an unspecified price reduction, something he hopes will inspire greater co-operation and an equitable, cost-effective national drug strategy. “This is truly life-saving and life-altering for people.”

Pro-HST campaign contracts doled out to firms with Liberal ties

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 2:46 PM - 8 Comments

The branch of the B.C. government responsible for orchestrating the province’s pro-HST campaign secretly handed out three contracts worth more than $250,000 as of June 1, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail through an access to information request. Campaign Research Ltd. received the highest paying contract for conducting the government’s telephone town hall meetings about the HST. The firm, which previously worked on Liberal cabinet minister George Abbott’s failed leadership campaign, received $167,800. Backbone Technology, Inc., which has worked for the Liberals since 2001, was paid over $50,000 to design the province’s HST information website. And former aide Marc Andrew was paid more than $30,000 to provide “political analysis” to Tom Syer, head of the HST information office. Rules require that government contracts worth more than $25,000 be handed out after an open, competitive process. But in this case, a loophole was used that allows contracts to be awarded without public notice if doing so would “compromise government confidentiality.” Finance Ministry spokesman Matt Gordon told The Globe and Mail that these contracts fit that category because they included strategic information of a “privileged nature.”

The Globe and Mail

‘The blunderer must continue to prove to himself’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 2:35 PM - 0 Comments

Tom Hawthorn eulogizes the remarkable life of former NDP MP Frank Howard.

Howard gained a reputation as an advocate for penal reform, denouncing the “deplorable conditions” at St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary at Montreal. Few knew his advocacy came from personal experience. The parliamentarian confided his criminal past to party leaders and close friends, but the public remained ignorant until he made a televised confession in 1967.

After receiving an extortion note, which he shared with police, Howard purchased air time on CFTK-TV in Terrace, B.C. He admitted to having spent time in jail, though he refused to offer details of his crimes, which were later revealed by reporters who checked legal records. The admission was big news, in part because of the dramatic circumstance. The Vancouver Sun’s front-page headline read, “MP Frank Howard admits: I served time in penitentiary.”

Mr. Howard’s autobiography is available for purchase here.

Just say no, for various reasons

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 1:39 PM - 58 Comments

Stephane Dion explains why Alberta and British Columbia should rejected the Senate Reform Act.

This unbalanced distribution of Senate seats -a historical artifact -is a problem for the two western provinces and an anomaly of our federation; Stephen Harper’s reform would make the situation much worse. In the existing unelected Senate, this problem is mitigated by the fact that our senators play their constitutional role with moderation, letting the elected House of Commons have the final word most of the time. But in an elected Senate, with members able to invoke as much democratic legitimacy as their House counterparts -if not more, since they would represent provinces rather than ridings -the underrepresentation of British Columbia and Alberta would take its full scope and significance.

The case for leaving as is

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 27, 2011 at 1:15 PM - 0 Comments

Matthew P. Harrington argues against the currently proposed Senate reforms.

At present, the Senate is regarded as a deferential body, confining itself largely to amending or revising legislation passed by the Commons, largely because senators lack democratic legitimacy.

Once members of the Senate are themselves elected, however, there is little justification for their continued deference to the House. After all, a senator elected by an entire province arguably has a stronger mandate to govern than members of the Commons, who are sent to Ottawa by relatively small segments of the electorate. This would create increased opportunity for gridlock as members of the Senate and Commons disagree over legislation.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall wonders about party discipline in an elected Senate. B.C. Premier Christy Clark says the Senate should be abolished, but if not, her province will need more seats.

The good news about B.C. prawns

By Jacob Richler - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

Photography by Simon Hayter; Getty Images

What with the spring runoff in late May, the surface waters outside of Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay turn distinctly brackish, a toxic mix for the spot prawns that lurk below. So, on a recent prawn hunting expedition aboard Organic Ocean One, the first stop of the crisp, spring morning was for harvesting purer seawater, sucked up from 10 m below, where it is irreproachably salty and hideously cold. “About 4˚ C,” explains Frank Keitsch, a cigarette dangling from his lip as he lowered the vacuum pipe into the insalubrious depths. “That’s what prawns are happy in.”

That, and hollandaise sauce, and lemon-caper aioli, and even—freshly shelled and still wriggling some—in a little ponzu, I thought to myself, waiting impatiently for the holding tanks to fill so that we could get on with things. Ducking under a low door frame adorned with a bumper sticker that reads “Friends don’t let friends eat farmed fish,” I entered the cabin to check on Steve Johansen, Keitsch’s partner in this fishing operation, and the unofficial spokesperson for the spot prawn fishery at large, who was working his cellphone.

Over his shoulder, I could see he was making last-minute adjustments to the orders on his list, which was scrawled by hand on a sheet of foolscap. It read like a who’s who of the Vancouver restaurant scene. The celebrated sushi bar Tojo’s was down for 4.5 kg of Johansen’s daily catch—same as the Blue Water Cafe, the Raincity Grill, Bishop’s and Cioppino’s. Eclipsing them all, Coast, on Alberni Street, had a request in for 18 kg. West was in for a mere two kilograms, while Robert Clark’s sustainable seafood C Restaurant had just downgraded an earlier order for 11 kg down to nine.

Continue…

British Columbia: Now with less tax and more tax

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 3:28 PM - 117 Comments

We are now in a moment in Canadian politics where tax policy is based mostly on how people feel about different taxes. B.C. premier Christy Clark is now at the cutting edge of feeling-based tax policy, thanks to her decision today to cut the HST, hike the provincial corporate tax rate, and distribute cheques to some of her fellow British Columbians. Economists find every part of this notion vexing. On Twitter, Stephen Gordon linked to this old blog post explaining why Canada needs a lot more HST-ish taxing and a lot less corporate-tax-rate-ish taxing.

This is pretty nearly conventional wisdom among the wise. Colleague Coyne will surely be gallumphing along any moment to explain that the only way Clark could make British Columbians’ lives any worse would be to make them wear bicycle helmets all the time. But no matter. Clark has inherited an unpopular HST policy from her predecessor Gordon Campbell. Defeat in a referendum on the tax could blow a hole in Clark’s premiership before it really gets started. So she must be seen to be Doing Something. Cutting the HST, which looks to consumers like a tax on everything, looks popular. Hiking corporate taxes, which look to consumers like a magical kind of tax that no real person pays, looks painless.

I’m not sure it’ll help as much as Clark needs it to help. BC voters’ referendum options now come down to a choice between less HST and none at all. I think it just became easier to vote for “none at all,” because “as much tax as we’ve been paying” suddenly has no champion.

The Commons: Anything is possible

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 30, 2011 at 12:05 AM - 81 Comments

So where are we? What are we doing? Where are we going? Where is this going?

Strictly speaking, we are in Courtenay, British Columbia. And Jack Layton is on a platform in the middle of a high school gymnasium. And he is claiming that “change is possible.” “We can do better,” he says. “We do have a choice.” He is surrounded on all sides by people holding signs that read “Together” and “We Can Do This.”

At present, it is 6:40pm by Pacific Standard Time on Friday evening. Polls here will open in 60 hours and 20 minutes. They will close 12 hours after that. And maybe a few hours after that we will know what is. But right now we can only know what might be.

And right now, anything is possible. Continue…

Thieves on the lamb

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 1 Comment

A gang of animal thieves appears to be on the loose around Langley and Abbotsford, B.C., where farmers have reported a spate of barn break-ins. Suspects have made off with lambs, ducks, goats—even pigeons. “I’ve been doing this job 2½ years,” says Cpl. Holly Marks of the Langley RCMP, “and it’s only in the last six months” that it’s become a real problem. In neighbouring Abbotsford, the police department now has an officer assigned to investigating livestock theft, a position that wasn’t staffed in 2010, according to Const. Ian MacDonald.

The most recent incident took place in Langley on March 23, when two separate break-ins were reported: one farmer lost 17 lambs, and another lost five. (One lamb apparently escaped the robbers, and was found in a neighbour’s yard.) On Feb. 28, six ducks, 65 chickens and some feed were stolen from a different farm, which was also targeted in late December when 17 ducks went missing. Abbotsford saw four goat thefts in February and March, with a total of 17 animals stolen, MacDonald says. Most bizarrely, in February, up to 4,000 pigeons were taken from three different farms. “That was a real head-scratcher for me,” MacDonald says: at about $7 per pigeon, “the value per pigeon is much lower than goat.” The vast majority of the stolen goats were female, and could fetch “several thousand dollars” through breeding, he says.

No charges have been laid, but police have some leads, especially in the “pigeon scenario,” MacDonald says, where there was an eyewitness. As for the missing lambs, one of the animals was a rare, rusty red colour, “very distinguished,” Marks says, which could help to identify them if they appear at auction. Langley locals wonder if stolen lambs might end up on unwitting buyers’ dinner tables at Easter.

'Sensible, pragmatic, courageous'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 2:47 PM - 31 Comments

Scott Brison considers British Columbia’s carbon tax.

“If you look at Campbell’s government in terms of tax policy and carbon tax, he was a centrist,” Brison said during a one-hour interview with The Province editorial board. “A carbon tax is not a left-wing or a right-wing policy, it’s simply a sensible, pragmatic, courageous [policy],” adding it also was “a risky idea” politically.

Here is the official explanation of that carbon tax.