Has anyone in B.C. seen the sun?

By Richard Warnica - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chuck Stoody/CP

While most of Canada has sizzled in recent months, it’s been downright gloomy in B.C. There were only seven days above 22° C in Vancouver between May and July (normally, there would have been about three weeks’ worth already). In fact, 2011 could be Vancouver’s coldest spring and summer on record, says David Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada. Making matters worse, it’s wetter than usual, too; the city has been drenched with 94 days of rain in the last four months. Victoria has also been colder and greyer than average.

Added up, it’s bad for business. Frank Bourree, a B.C. tourism industry analyst, says many restaurants have suffered because of the slowdown. Patios have been sitting empty and some proprietors have been forced to close. While the weather isn’t solely to blame, experts say it is giving potential tourists—especially Americans on the West Coast looking for a weekend getaway—second thoughts. (The plummeting U.S. dollar isn’t helping matters, either.)

B.C. relies heavily on U.S. tourism, and the industry had been hoping for a big year. While Tourism Victoria says the number of U.S. visitors to that city is up slightly from last year, the total is still down considerably from pre-recession levels. And things aren’t looking much brighter in the near future. The weather forecast for August: more of the same.

The tally

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 1:55 PM - 208 Comments

With 51 precincts reporting specific estimates—restricting the count to media-reported figures and, where available, police counts—it’s possible to account for approximately 21,000 anti-prorogation protestors at yesterday’s rallies. Continue…

Son of a Terminator, Big Brother is driving you and Just another self-hating Canadian

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 11, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

It’s coal in your stocking, bucko
Santa shook like a bowl full of Jell-O at the Southlake Mall in suburban Atlanta, but not in a good way. Police in Morrow, Ga., say 45-year-old William C. Caldwell III dressed as an elf and waited an hour in line to have his picture taken with St. Nick. When he reached the man in red, Caldwell, looking very elfin at five feet tall and 108 lb., said he was packing dynamite in his bags. Santa called security. The mall was evacuated but no explosives were found. The naughty elf faces a variety of charges and the prospect of Christmas behind bars.

The other shoe drops
Two Iraqi journalists are now one shoe short of a pair. Muntazer al-Zaidi, who famously chucked a shoe at former U.S. president George W. Bush, has himself become a target of flying footwear. Zaidi was speaking at a news conference in Paris when an exiled Iraqi journalist, arguing in favour of U.S. policy, hurled a shoe at Zaidi. Zaidi’s outraged brother attempted to rough up the fleeing journalist, who wasn’t immediately identified. And Zaidi later complained, “He stole my technique.”

Son of a Terminator
If the rumours are true, Tallulah Willis, 15, is dating Patrick Schwarzenegger, 16. Doesn’t that have the makings of the ultimate teen-romance action flick? Willis shares her time with daddy Bruce Willis, and with mom Demi Moore and her hubby Ashton Kutcher. And Schwarzenegger’s dad, Arnold, is the governator of California. The New York Post says the pair started dating at Halloween. A rep for Bruce Willis denies it, but dads are always the last to know. Continue…

Is there a future for Canadian TV?

By Jason Kirby - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 18 Comments

In late August, employees at CHEK-TV in Victoria gathered in the parking lot for one last goodbye. After 53 years on the air, Canwest Global Communications was about to pull the plug on the money-losing television station in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to stave off collapse. Then, with just hours to go before the final fade to black, general manager John Pollard announced a last-minute reprieve. He’d reached an agreement with Canwest CEO Leonard Asper that would see the station’s 40 employees, along with a handful of Vancouver Island residents, buy CHEK and run it themselves. But if Pollard, now a media proprietor in his own right, is at all nervous about betting his life savings on an industry that just saw one of corporate Canada’s most spectacular flame-outs, he’s not showing it. “We get to call the shots now,” he says. “We’re going to make this work.”

The daring experiment at CHEK is just one example of the way the media landscape is being forever altered. A perfect storm of the recession, new technologies and shifting tastes has threatened the way conventional broadcasters like Canwest, CTV and the CBC have operated for decades. Now, with Canwest’s move to put itself into bankruptcy protection, a wave of speculation has been unleashed about who will buy the Global Television network. More importantly, questions are being asked about how those stations can once again be made viable. Continue…

Canada’s best and worst run cities

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

CORRECTION:
The Maclean’s survey of Canada’s Best and Worst Run Cities, published in our July 27th issue, misstated the residential tax burden for the city of Longueuil, Quebec. The original figure, as compiled for Maclean’s by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, put the average tax burden per residence at $666. The city of Longueuil has now revealed its own estimate is $1241 per residence. The published figure was calculated using only those taxes directly assessed by the City of Longueuil and failed to include the taxes paid by city residents to cover services provided to the entire Longueuil Urban Agglomeration (of which the city forms a part).

The adjustment means Longueuil’s grade for taxation efficiency falls from an A+ to a C+, or from 1st to 14th among the municipal governments surveyed. Accordingly, it drops from fifth place to seventh in the overall rankings.

Maclean’s regrets the error.

This survey, the first of its kind in Canada, provides citizens in 31 cities across the country with comparative data on how well—or poorly—their city is run, measured by the cost and quality of the public services it delivers. (Why 31? We took the 30 largest cities in Canada, added whatever provincial capitals were not on the list, then subtracted a few cities from the Greater Toronto Area for better regional balance. Somehow that left 31.)

Though the overall results—Burnaby, Saskatoon and Surrey, B.C. lead the pack; Charlottetown, Kingston, Ont., and Fredericton trail—will be of particular interest, they are less important than the process this is intended to kick off. We aim not merely to start some good barroom arguments, but to help voters to hold their representatives to better account, and indeed to help city governments themselves. For without some sort of yardstick to measure their performance, either against other cities or against their own past record, how can they hope to know whether they are succeeding?

To compile the survey, Maclean’s commissioned the Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, expanding on the institute’s earlier work measuring the performance of municipalities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Unlike other studies, this does not try to measure quality of life, or which city is the “best place to live.” Rather, it focuses on the contribution of local governments to this end.

RELATED ARTICLES:
How Burnaby earned the top spot — What’s wrong in Charlottetown — Andrew Coyne’s analysis

This survey looks at a city’s efficiency—the cost of producing results—and the effectiveness of its services, including how well each city does when it comes to things like maintaining roads and parks, picking up garbage and putting out fires. Click below to see how the numbers break down. Continue…

Ignatieff in Victoria

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 10:18 PM - 30 Comments

The recording of Michael Ignatieff’s every public moment continues. Video from his Victoria town hall after the jump. More here.

Continue…

So you want to carry the Olympic torch, do ya?

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 21, 2008 at 2:17 PM - 7 Comments

Here, after more than a year in the making, is the route for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic flame, done up as a nice interactive map.

Guaranteed, there will be grumbling from some communities that didn’t make the cut, but, really, it’s a pretty impressive exercise: three oceans, more than 1,000 communities, scattered over 45,000 kilometres (10,000 kms more than originally planned) and spread over 106 days. Some 90 per cent of Canadians are within an hour’s drive of the route, so deal with it. It all starts in Victoria on Oct. 30, 2009, before veering North, way North, as far as Alert, within 900 km of the North Pole. Why stop there guys, go for the Pole, assert Canadian sovereignty over Santa!

Here’s how you apply to be one of the 12,000 torch bearers. Continue…

Stocks down (not what you think)

By John Geddes - Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 1:09 PM - 2 Comments

Stephen Harper is about to speak to a smallish Tory crowd at the Coast Victoria Harbourside Hotel and Marina. The view here on this sunny day couldn’t be better. Just below the hotel where he’s speaking is the office of Orca Spirit Adventures whale watching company. (A few years back, I spent a memorable day on one of their boats, which I can see docked from where I’m writing.)

The location is important, given that today’s Victoria Times-Colonist features a front page story under the headline “Killer whales threatened by salmon shortage.” Salmon stocks are down, the whales aren’t getting enough to eat, and they are “losing blubber and developing strange behavioural patterns.”

Stock markets will bounce back, eventually. We know that, no matter how worried we get. But fish stocks? They have a way of collapsing permanently. In this case, the black and white whales would go with them. It would be helpful to know what the Fisheries and Oceans department has to say about today’s news in the local paper, which is based on reports from independent scientists.

But the Times-Colonist tells us that a DFO official said the federal government’s experts are not granting interviews during the election campaign. This strikes me as absurd. By the way, the Prime Minister will be talking about banks today.