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.

B.C. and the Big One

By Jason Kirby and Ken Macqueen - Friday, March 11, 2011 at 5:56 PM - 21 Comments

Could a massive earthquake like the one that rocked Japan strike British Columbia? It’s inevitable. Over the next half century, exerts say there is a one in 10 chance that a Big One will hit somewhere in the province. The only questions left to ask are how big will it be? And where will it hit?

B.C.’s location along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a volatile region of active volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates, means a Japan-style 8.9 magnitude subduction quake, accompanied by a powerful tsunami, is possible offshore. So too is a milder 6.5 magnitude quake near the surface on land. Both would be devastating. “You might say an 8.9 is thousands of times stronger, but if [a shallow quake] happens in the wrong spot, like right under Vancouver, you now have hundreds of people dying and billions in dollars worth of damage,” says Paul Kovacs, executive director, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction in Toronto.

One area in which B.C. is at risk is the number of old buildings that would most certainly topple as their foundations begin to shake. Continue…

Vancouver's Olympic Village to become a hot property—finally

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 11:26 AM - 3 Comments

Les Bazso/Vancouver Sun

Vancouver taxpayers breathed a collective sigh of relief last week as the Olympic Village, eerily quiet since Sidney Crosby’s golden goal on the final day of the Vancouver Games, showed, at last, a few signs of life. Even Bob Rennie, its marketer-in-chief, had taken to calling the development a “ghost town.” But with prices for its condo units slashed by as much as 50 per cent, at Rennie’s direction, potential buyers packed its narrow, cobbled streets, snapping up more than half of the 240 units in just four days. Bargain hunters like John Van Hoepen, a Lower Mainland contractor, were out in force. With its high-end finishings, proximity to the new SkyTrain line, downtown core and water, Van Hoepen figures his deeply discounted condo will pay off. “The old prices were ridiculous,” says Taylor Miller, a local video-game producer. He and his girlfriend, Brynn Harris, live in Yaletown, a lively young neighbourhood across the water. They consider the quiet jumble of glass and brick towers on the False Creek inlet an ideal place to start a family, and were on the hunt for a two-bedroom, with a den.

While the tide seems to finally be turning for the $1-billion project, which Rennie recently rebranded the Village on False Creek, a fierce debate over what went wrong still dominates conversation in B.C. It’s not easy, after all, to lose money on a condo development in Vancouver, voted, once again, the most livable city anywhere by the Economist, with a real-estate market that barely skipped a beat during the recession.

When fingering blame, most start with Vancouver’s 2006 decision to award the Olympic Village to Millennium Development, a local firm, on a $193-million bid. The city, meanwhile, retained title to the eight-block parcel; to guarantee housing would be finished on time, it needed to be able to step in and take over if trouble arose. But because the city held on to the deed, the developer couldn’t get a Canadian bank to finance the project, forcing it into the arms of a U.S. hedge fund, which demanded—and received, as Vancouver taxpayers belatedly learned—a loan guarantee from the city.

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Canada's worst spenders

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 11:57 AM - 7 Comments

There’s been plenty of speculation that Vancouver’s hot housing market is in bubble territory, and as interest rates rise, that view is going to be put to the test. A new Toronto-Dominion Bank report says that one in 10 British Columbia households could find themselves scrambling to pay their bills if the Bank of Canada ups rates, as TD predicts it will—up to three per cent by the end of 2012.

The province has been Canada’s real estate debt champion since at least 1999, and it is the only one where the average savings rate is negative, according to TD. Vancouver in particular seems to most resemble the housing run-up seen in the U.S. Two weeks ago, Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University who correctly forecast the U.S. housing bust and helped develop the influential Standard and Poor’s Case-Shiller real estate index, likened Vancouver to San Francisco, one of the areas worst hit by the slump in the States. Compare that to Manitoba, where families have strengthened their balance sheets since 2006, and will be putting 40 per cent less of every dollar toward debt repayments than households in B.C., notes TD. Continue…

Q & A: Gordon Campbell

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 10:29 AM - 11 Comments

Later this month, three-term B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell—a three-term Vancouver mayor before that—will retire from public life. In 2010, he introduced the widely despised Harmonized Sales Tax. In November, after months of vicious public debate over the new tax, Canada’s longest-serving premier announced that he was stepping down.

Q: When you were first elected premier back in 2001, your peers included Mike Harris in Ontario and Bernard Landry in Quebec. Those seem like names from a bygone era. Does it feel like a long time to you?

A: Things change a lot less in 10 years than you’d think. It seems like a long time ago when I think about the things that were taking place. We came in with a major personal income tax cut, then we were confronted with a tech meltdown; 9/11; Afghanistan in October; SARS in November; there was a war in Iraq the next year; floods. All that stuff really grabs you right at the time you’re trying to work through a whole bunch of other things—we’d said we were going to balance our budget by 2003. So, it’s a very intense experience. But does it seem like a long time ago? Not really.

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This week: Good news, bad news

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 6:00 PM - 0 Comments

Good News

Fortified perimeter

A report prepared for Washington lawmakers reached a familiar conclusion: a “truly shocking” lack of security along the Canada-U.S. border. Of the 6,400 km that separate the two countries, only 51—less than one per cent—is under “acceptable control,” the report says. Which is why this week’s announcement of a White House sit-down between Barack Obama and Stephen Harper is welcome news. After months of speculation, the time has come for both leaders to hammer out the final details of a North American security perimeter that will not only boost security, but improve the flow of trade.

Loyal subjects

By a margin of three to one, Canadians support changes to the monarchy that would rid the system of its males-first succession rules—an issue that was recently raised in the British Parliament. Maybe that explains the report in a London tabloid that William and Kate have chosen Canada as the site of their first overseas tour after the April wedding. Clearly, the United States wasn’t even an option. A new survey found that only nine per cent of Americans are interested in whether the royal marriage even lasts.

In the safe lane

According to new figures released by Transport Canada, death by car is on the decline. In 2008 (the latest stats available), 2,419 people were killed behind the wheel, a 12 per cent drop from the previous year—and the lowest number of fatalities in nearly six decades. The dip is a direct result of tougher seat-belt and drunk-driving laws, not to mention airbags and impact beams. But gas prices deserve some “credit” too; Statistics Canada says the cost of a fill-up jumped 13 per cent over the past year.

Happy endings

Lots of people are lucky to be alive this week. In New Zealand, a hydro worker injured only his thumb and elbow after getting zapped with 19,000 volts of electricity (“I should be in a pine box,” he joked). In Utah, an accused robber is recovering after hurling himself out of the window of a moving police car—while wearing handcuffs. And in Scotland, a mountain climber somehow survived a 300-m fall off the side of an icy cliff. Rescuers found him standing up and looking at his map.

Bad News

Cruel and unusual

The reported slaughter of around 100 sled dogs in Whistler, B.C. has sparked outrage. The horrifying details of how the dogs were killed emerged in the workers’ compensation documents of a B.C. man claiming post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the incident. The man’s lawyer says his client shot the dogs after being told by the tour operator he sub-contracted for to make the business more “cost effective.” The tour operator insists it didn’t order the cull, but if dogs were euthanized it would be done in a “humane manner.” The B.C. SPCA and the RCMP are investigating.

Silvio “the Situation”

If the allegations are true, Silvio Berlusconi won’t be in office much longer. He’ll be in jail. The Italian prime minister—already famous for hosting “bunga bunga” sex parties at his home—is now accused of hiring two underage prostitutes. When one was later arrested for theft, Berlusconi reportedly pressured police to release her. Can you blame Jersey Shore producers for deciding to film Season 4 back in the old country?

Big, fat problem

As it does every five years, the U.S. government released new dietary guidelines this week. The mere fact Americans need to be reminded every five years to eat more greens and cut back on the salt is scary enough. But then again, Canadians may benefit from a similar scolding. According to a new report from the Heart and Stroke Foundation, nearly 90 per cent of Canadians consider themselves healthy, despite plenty of evidence that we don’t eat nearly enough fruits and veggies, and many of us are packing more pounds than we should.

How creative

A new study says creative people are more likely to cheat because they can find “original ways to bypass moral rules.” Although being clever, resourceful and imaginative looks great on a resumé, researchers also found that creativity “allows people to come up with a lot of excuses and justifications for why their behaviour isn’t bad.” Exhibit A: Lise Thibault. The former Quebec lieutenant-governor made her first court appearance this week, accused of creatively spending $700,000 in taxpayer money.

Provincial task force to examine dog slaughter

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 3:49 PM - 9 Comments

The B.C. provincial government has called for a task force to investigate the slaughter of 100 sled dogs in Whistler. Last April, the operator of Howling Dog Tours, a company that booked sledding tours, reportedly shot the animals and dumped their bodies in a mass grave. His decision to carry out the mass slaughter of the otherwise healthy and trained animals was supposedly motivated by a slow-down in the company’s business following the 2010 Olympic Games. Led by Liberal MLA Terry Lake, the task force will include representation from the B.C. SPCA, who are currently investigating the killings and will most likely recommend charges be brought to the operator. “The tragic and disturbing details that have emerged around how these dogs were inhumanely treated are not acceptable to British Columbians or to their government,” said B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, who ordered the creation of the task force.

CBC News

B.C. rethinks securities regulator case

By John Geddes - Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 6:17 PM - 11 Comments

The federal government is in danger of losing the clear support of a key provincial ally in its bid to have the Supreme Court of Canada rule that Ottawa has the constitutional power to establish a national securities regulator.

The British Columbia government is considering adopting a “nuanced position,” B.C. Finance Minister Colin Hansen told Maclean’s—a stance that would continue to back the federal government’s aim of creating the regulator, but oppose its constitutional arguments for doing so.

Last spring, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tabled legislation to create a national regulator, with the goal of replacing the hodge-podge of provincial stock market regulatory bodies. Flaherty asked the court to rule that the federal government can take this step under its constitutional jurisdiction over trade and commerce.

Continue…

Creating an urban jungle

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 2 Comments

Photography Stephanie Lim

Vancouver’s push to become the planet’s greenest city includes a bold new plan to plant 150,000 trees in the next decade, in what might be the largest urban tree-planting campaign in Canadian history. Indeed, it’s one of North America’s “most aggressive targets,” says deputy city manager Sadhu Johnston. Mayor Gregor Robertson snagged the 36-year-old whiz kid from a high-profile gig as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s environmental czar a year ago; Johnston is also the unofficial point man for Robertson’s “Greenest City” initiative, aimed at turning Vancouver into the world’s environmental pacesetter by 2020.

As for the trees, the interim goal is to get 50,000 more in city-owned spaces within the next five years, before ramping up planting starting in 2015. Vancouver’s Board of Parks and Recreation will have a total cost estimate ready next spring, when council will be asked to okay the program. But things are already rolling. Last month, Falaise Park, in the city’s east end, got 25 fruit trees, the first of three new fruit-bearing orchards going into city parks ahead of the spring.

And businesses, like it or not, will be key to the program’s success. The city will likely ask businesses to put 56,000 trees in the ground, says Johnston. Mandating that new towers, for instance, add an undefined number of trees to their plans is being discussed, he says. The payoff: not only are tree-lined streets great for property values, says Johnston, but trees play a big part in the atmospherics market researchers drool over. A year-old University of Washington study found that consumers spend 12 per cent more in treed shopping districts than in those without.

A rudderless ship of state sails on

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, December 10, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 25 Comments

Jonathan Hayward; Richard Lam/CP

It is an interesting experiment British Columbia has embarked upon, having disposed of not one but two political leaders in little more than a month. The question the province appears to be asking itself is: are leaders strictly necessary?

It is not uncommon for a province to declare one party leader expendable, though rarely a sitting premier, such as Gordon Campbell. But to attempt to do without a leader of either party, unless out of mere parsimony, is suggestive of a sort of generalized Presbyterian disdain for hierarchy.

Mind you, I suppose the NDP had no alternative, once the Liberals decided to “go commando.” The canny strategists in the Liberal backroom were plainly on to something: the party had already jumped several points in the polls since discarding Campbell, and might have gained still more, once more people realized he was gone. Clearly, voters were hungering for less leadership, and while it was always possible the Liberal leadership void was still enjoying a honeymoon, to be competitive in the long term the NDP had to close the leaderless gap with their rivals.

Continue…

The most dangerous job in the province

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 8 Comments

Jonathan Hayward/CP

It was just over a decade ago that New Democrat Dan Miller, who served a six-month blip as interim premier of British Columbia, described the lofty office as the most dangerous job in the province. It was fair comment back in an era when a tub of cottage cheese had a longer shelf life than most premiers; a time when the main prerequisites were a thick skin, an exit strategy, and a good lawyer.

Miller succeeded Glen Clark, who succeeded Mike Harcourt, who succeeded Rita Johnston, who took over the smoking ruin that was Bill Vander Zalm’s Social Credit government. Miller, in turn, handed the job to Ujjal Dosanjh, who lost it to Gordon Campbell and his Liberals. All this between 1991 and 2001, and don’t let the revolving door smack you on the way out.

Now it’s Gordon Campbell’s turn to declare moral victory, paste on a smile and walk the plank. There’s a certain symmetry to his decision—made, more or less, on Halloween eve as he took his grandson trick or treating. By then even the stubborn Campbell knew he was the walking dead, and that a chief architect of his demise was the eerily ageless Vander Zalm, a political ghost, reborn as the province’s most effective crusader against Campbell’s harmonized sales tax (HST).

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Smoke shacks and a waterslide

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

Getty Images

Nova Scotia: A 33-year-old man is suing a pub in Dartmouth, alleging that early one morning last May he was left “highly intoxicated” after being “over-served alcohol.” He claims that the bar is liable for the resulting car accident and injuries he sustained as a result of driving drunk. A bartender at the pub denied the charge.
Ontario: Tobacco farmers in Ontario have launched a $500-million class-action lawsuit in federal court against Ottawa for failing to collect taxes from illegal smoke shacks. The suit alleges that Ottawa ignored “flagrant violations” of the prohibition on the sale of black-market tobacco.

Manitoba: A Winnipeg man is suing a North Dakota hotel for damages, alleging to have suffered head and neck injuries because an attendant was not in place on the receiving end of a waterslide. The man is seeking $194,000 for medical bills and other economic losses, and at least $75,000 for personal injuries. Lawyers for the hotel say the lawsuit has no merit and asked that it be dismissed.

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Gordon Campbell, fiscal genius?

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 6 Comments

CP Images

Lately, it seems like Gordon Campbell is the kind of premier only economists could love. Despite an embarrassing nine per cent approval rating among British Columbians—many of whom are annoyed about having to pay the HST, not to mention their leader’s recent $240,000 TV promo funded by taxpayers—Campbell has been crowned the country’s most fiscally responsible premier by the Fraser Institute.

In a recent report, the Canadian think tank ranked 10 premiers on how they’ve handled government spending, taxes, debt and deficits since coming into power. Campbell bested the other provincial leaders with an overall score of 89.1 out of 100. Newfoundland’s Danny Williams, who finished third, is the only premier east of Manitoba to crack the top five. Meanwhile, Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty ranked last with a paltry 29.7 points out of 100.

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Hey, did you hear the latest about . . .

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

Quebec: Quebecers are the most likely to gossip at dinner parties. More than four in 10 say that friends’ chatter around the table revolves around family gossip, celebrities, or friends who aren’t there. British Columbians, by contrast, are the most weighty in terms of dinnertime conversations, with 68 per cent claiming that discussions are usually focused on current affairs—or so they say.

Ontario: Over 54 per cent of entrepreneurs in the province (and 56 per cent nationwide) believe they’ve had it easy in the recession, saying the downturn has had no effect, or even a positive one on the bottom line. The outlier is Toronto, the country’s financial engine, where only 47 per cent of small businesses claim to have ridden out the crisis without suffering a few bumps along the way.

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Who wears the big boy pants? (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 11:01 AM - 0 Comments

On the matter of Fish Lake—an issue that came to involve questions concerning the environment, the economy, provincial jurisdiction, federal oversight and aboriginal land rights, not to mention warnings of potential violence and racial strife—Environment Minister Jim Prentice decided to side with the grizzly bears.

“Fish Lake would be drained, and there would be the loss of all the associated wetlands and a number of streams,” Environment Minister Jim Prentice said. “Really, it was the loss of the whole ecosystem, which was pretty pronounced in terms of its environmental effects.”

“The loss of the job opportunities is difficult, but at the end of the day we have a responsibility to strike an environmental process and to follow the recommendations,” he said on CTV’s Power Play.

The worst of the west

By Ken MacQueen with Colby Cosh and Patricia Treble - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 3:30 PM - 81 Comments

In Prince George, B.C., the most crime-ridden city in Canada, almost all violence is connected to drugs and the gangs who sell them; Prince George RCMP

Darren Munch was shot multiple times in the middle of an August Saturday afternoon, in Prince George, B.C. The 25-year-old staggered to the middle of residential Oak Street where he collapsed and died, as children played in the sunshine and stunned residents tried to process the scene. Munch’s Facebook photo, which still lives on the Internet, shows a handsome young man in a black patterned T-shirt. He glares from behind dark sunglasses and under a billed cap, striking a don’t-mess-with-me kind of pose. But someone did.

Munch, whose death local RCMP say was “gang-related,” was the fifth of seven murder victims in Prince George so far this year, a disturbing body count in a community of just 74,000. Six of those murders are tied to gangs or drugs, says RCMP detachment commander Supt. Brenda Butterworth-Carr. Yet, the greatest outrage in the community seemed reserved for the Prince George Citizen, for running a front page picture of Munch’s body, sprawled on the pavement in a pool of blood. The next day the Citizen ran a gutsy, unapologetic editorial under the headline: “Take a look in the mirror.” This is a city in trouble, it warned. “It’s only a matter of time, if left unchecked, before the bullets fly across your lawn, before it is your child prone on the pavement, before someone you know goes to jail, or hooks up with a gang.”

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Never heard of the oil sands? Really?!?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

Alberta: Eighty-six per cent of Albertans have heard, seen or read something about the oil sands. That means one in six Albertans know nothing about their province’s most valuable resource. In Quebec, the land of abundant hydro power, only 66 per cent have heard about the oil sands.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba: Eighty per cent of women between the ages of 45 and 64 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba believe  that they are smarter investors than their mothers were at their age. And while 29 per cent of Canadian females have a financial plan, that number climbs sharply to 38 per cent of the women in those two Prairie provinces.

Quebec: If NHL players have their way, then La Belle Province should be next in line to get a hockey franchise. In a survey of 90 pro players, Quebec City earned the most support, with the backing of 37 per cent. Other top Canadian cities included Winnipeg, which finished second with 20 per cent of the vote, and Hamilton, a distant fourth, with 12 per cent.

Atlantic provinces: When it comes to entrepreneurship, the East Coast lags behind most of Canada. Only 3.1 per cent of individuals in the region took steps to create or take over a business. And just 7.4 per cent own a business, compared to Alberta and British Columbia, where 13.2 per cent of the population are owners. (Quebec was lowest with 5.1 per cent.)
SOURCES: Léger, Ipsos Reid, The Hockey News, Léger, Environics

Gordon Campbell's soup

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ian Smith/PNG/ Andy Clark/Reuters/ Darryl Dyck/CP

He swept into office with the biggest majority in the country’s history, having united the traditionally fractious right flank. But after he rammed through a new, “value-added” tax in the middle of a recession—a move loved by economists but despised by the public—his approval rating sank to just 11 per cent, making him the most unpopular leader in Canada’s history. In fact, Brian Mulroney’s goods and services tax was widely seen as a major factor in the once-mighty Tories’ wipeout in the subsequent election. Canadians eventually came to accept, if not love, his GST. But the Tories languished in the political wilderness for well over a decade.

Premier Gordon Campbell, too, steamrolled into office. In 2001, with B.C.’s unruly right united under his free-enterprise banner, he won the biggest landslide in B.C. history: his Liberals took all but two of the province’s 79 seats. But after ramming through his “value-added” harmonized sales tax in the dark days of the downturn last year, his approval rating has sunk to just 12 per cent—within a point of Mulroney’s record-setting low. It is the lowest approval rating ever recorded for a sitting premier, pollsters Angus Reid told Maclean’s. Campbell is now less liked than Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate and Lyndon Johnson in the worst days of Vietnam, and distrusted by a stunning 83 per cent of British Columbians, according to Angus Reid.

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'Abandoned' in Africa; Bike-lane backlash

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Jean-Marc Luneau/ Getty Images

British Columbia: A middle-aged Victoria woman is suing two denture product companies, claiming their goods caused her to experience tremors, pain and difficulty walking. Both PoliGrip and Fixodent contained zinc, though her lawyer claims their instructions didn’t tell users how much to use. Excessive zinc consumption can interfere with the absorption of copper, and a copper deficiency can cause neurodegeneration. After taking medical leave from her job, the woman is now working reduced hours. In February, PoliGrip’s maker announced it would reformulate the product without zinc.

Alberta: An Edmonton man is suing the German airline Lufthansa for $86,000, claiming that, after booking a flight to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he was flown instead to Gabon’s capital Libreville and “abandoned.” Without an entry visa, he was detained by police, the statement of claim states. Three days later he was able to leave for Kinshasa but says that his luggage didn’t make the trip. No statement of defence has been filed by the air carrier.

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Catching a lift to class

By Claire Ward - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Ron Niebrugge/Alamy/Getstock

Simon Fraser University students may be getting a new way to hitch a ride to school. In response to growing demand for more sustainable, reliable transit service to the mountaintop campus, Translink, B.C.’s transit authority, is taking proposals to determine the feasibility of a 30-person gondola linking Production Way SkyTrain Station in Burnaby to SFU. The proposed 2.6-km sky lift would cost an estimated $70 million, and effectively replace the need for Translink’s fleet of 60-foot diesel buses to travel up and down the mountain’s steep, icy slopes each winter—a route that is closed between 10 and 15 days a year due to heavy snowfall, often causing class cancellations. The new service, say proponents, could also be responsible for removing some 50,000 hours of bus service from the mountain.

“It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 1,870 tonnes in the first year alone,” says Gordon Harris, president and CEO of SFU Community Trust, which initially raised the idea with Translink. SFU Community Trust’s initial feasibility study estimated that a gondola could save Translink $1.6 million a year in operating costs.

Modelled after the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, which connects Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, the new route could potentially move up to 3,000 people an hour in roughly half the regular transit time—about eight minutes. But despite community enthusiasm for the project, Translink must prioritize. “We do not, at this point, have money for expansion,” says Translink spokesman Ken Hardie. The money to get this project off the ground, he suggests, may have to come from some sort of public-private partnership.

Bad news, bears

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

ISTOCK

When faced last month with a charging black bear in the woods near Castlegar, B.C., logger Jesse Mengler had to act fast. He grabbed a baseball-sized rock from the ground and struck the bear right between the eyes with it, knocking it out. Mengler, a baseball pitcher in his youth, is not the only one to meet a hungry bear in B.C. this year. The number of run-ins between man and bears are way up, according to statistics from the B.C. Conservation Officer Service. At the current rate, 20,000 bear complaints are expected this year in the province. Most years, the annual total is closer to 16,000. And in Castlegar, a city about 600 km east of Vancouver, 60 bears have already been destroyed this year. Only 15 were killed in all of 2009.

Kendra Wiberg, the coordinator for Bear Aware B.C., says that an intense forest-fire season may be responsible for the spike in encounters. In 2003, bear-human interactions were as much as 20 times greater than the year before in the cities and towns where Bear Aware tracked complaints, she says. That also happened to be the worst year for forest fires in a decade—more than 265,000 hectares of forests were destroyed. (This year, fires have scorched more than 300,000 hectares worth of forest in B.C.) “A lot of their food was burned up, so they go looking in cities or towns,” says Wiberg.

And things may be worse this month. Typically, September is when bears go on a feeding frenzy, eating 20-plus hours a day, in preparation for winter. British Columbians may want to work on their aim.