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By cityprole, on June 14, 2013, at 11:34 am Bad landlords face licensing crackdown
With multiple tenants crammed into decrepit properties, one London borough is taking direct action
Lisa Bachelor The Guardian, Friday 14 June 2013 14.46 BST
Here in British Columbia, Canada, especially in Vancouver (and I suspect, any other major city in the country) such criminally sub-standard crowding exists alongside single family dwellings, looming over-priced condos and other assorted attempts to eke out a way to exist amid inflated costs and lousy pay… The local and Federal governments, in both British and Canadian cases, is to blame, even indirectly, for creating the conditions for the (Read more…)
By thescottross.blogspot.com, on May 24, 2013, at 2:31 am Justin Trudeau is popular? It doesn’t matter.
The federal Liberals are still extremely behind in the polls. The last three major polls conducted, with 100% accuracy, show the Liberal Party is far behind the Conservatives and in fact the Grits are at their lowest level of support in Canadian history. Those polls were of course conducted in the last three general elections and they are the only ones that matter.
A lot of Liberals will take refuge in a new opinion poll out that shows their party with an incredible lead, 44% to the Conservatives’ 27%, with the NDP even (Read more…)
By cityprole, on May 19, 2013, at 11:28 am Holmes Hydro can proceed without environmental assessment The Canadian Press Posted: May 18, 2013 1:30 PM PT Last Updated: May 18, 2013 2:19 PM PT And this is our BC Supreme Court? Bought and paid for…disgusting display of arrogance and ignorance..the Court must have been stacked with Albertans, because no BC judge in his or her right mind would use an excuse like convenience and economic ‘hardship’ to ignore an environmental assessment..really, tell us, what will it take to get this Province to stand up for itself? To protect the beauty we have, to maintain our coastlines and (Read more…)
By cityprole, on May 16, 2013, at 11:50 am Middle Schools Closed In Cowichan Valley, School Bus Fees Implemented
CP | By The Canadian PressPosted: 05/16/2013 10:48 am EDT | Updated: 05/16/2013 11:14 am EDT (found in Huffington Post)
And this action was signed off on instantaneously, about 2 seconds after the results of the dismal election were announced…viva the People’s Republic of Vancouver Island! If ever we needed to separate and form our own Province, this should make it obvious…. and watch those ’environmental impact’ studies get fast-tracked for a pipeline through our Province..let’s get ready for the fight if our lives, folks,for our beautiful interior and coastline…because nothing else (Read more…)
By kevin harding, on May 15, 2013, at 12:12 pm Once the disappointment over the BC election isn’t so painful, there’s something that needs to be talked about regarding polling. This is a quick, stream-of-consciousness post, and I plan on writing more later.
While Mario Canseco of Angus Reid said, this morning, that it’s not a “methodology” problem, I think it is. Forum Research, while still off, was the closest to the results, with a survey sample of about 1,100 using telephone voting. Angus Reid, Ekos, Ipsos, etc., all used web-based voting with samples of about 800, and were wildly off.
The polling firms claim that web panels can (Read more…)
By cityprole, on May 15, 2013, at 11:19 am By now the entire country knows what happened here in BC…the re-election of the Provincial Liberals (or Con-Lites) …to say that I am depressed is to state the case in an all-too delicate way.
If I can derive any tiny bit of satisfaction from the election, it is that… a) my old home riding, Kitsilano in Vancouver, did not elect Christy Clark as their MLA – and this is Gordon Campbell’s old riding, where we fought long and hard to unseat him (unsuccessfully, I should add)… and b) Vancouver Island, my current home base, stubbornly true to form, went (Read more…)
By thescottross.blogspot.com, on May 15, 2013, at 3:51 am Christy Clark is unstoppable.
She became Liberal Leader with only the support of one MLA. Members of her caucus criticized her. 17 of them fearing defeat didn’t run for re-election. Practically every pundit and journalist thought Clark was going to lose and so did every single polling firm. But last night she won.
Not only did she turn around a failing election campaign, Clark turned around a failing party.
Her predecessor with an approval rating of only 9% was the least popular Canadian politician in the last 40 years. The poorly implemented Harmonized Sales Tax had mobilized over 700,000 British (Read more…)
By EclecticLip, on May 14, 2013, at 2:54 pm Here’s to hoping that any and all British Columbians reading this, take their opportunity to vote.
In the broad sweep of history, with precious few examples, democracy is a fairly new phenomenon — not unlike the concept of retirement — so it would be a pity to waste the opportunity for political involvement, that almost none of one’s ancestors enjoyed. Unless they were royals, nobles or conniving courtiers — but how likely is that, really? Just once, I’d love to hear about a reincarnation party where everyone dressed up as subsistence farmers, existing tenuously on the precipitous (Read more…)
By thescottross.blogspot.com, on May 14, 2013, at 1:51 am Christy Clark had as much chance of winning BC’s election today as Canadian politics has gender equality, and that’s close to zero.
With six female premiers, soon to be five, Canada looks like a pretty equitable place, but just as with Christy Clark’s chances on election day, looks can be deceiving.
For instance, on the face of it, British Columbia looks like a province of better gender representation, Christy Clark wasn’t its first female premier after all, Rita Johnston received that honour back in 1991. But considering the similarities between Johnston and Clark, what is clear is not gender equality, (Read more…)
By cityprole, on May 9, 2013, at 12:21 pm Underground grow-op found under fake horse paddock Fake fire pit, dog house and horse paddock all hid underground operation CBC News Posted: May 7, 2013 2:16 PM PT
Canada’s Provincial and Federal governments can be said to be implicit partners in this ‘enterprise,’ and so many others around BC and the rest of the country, since they refuse to acknowledge that legalizing marijuana would make all this infrastructure an expensive waste of time and money….unfortunately, we as taxpayers get stuck with a massive bill for the bust, the so-called clean -up and the legal fees, the incarceration (rare) of (Read more…)
By cityprole, on April 19, 2013, at 12:17 pm China’s largest bank in deal to finance Kitimat refinery ICBC will also provide engineering and construction help to build refinery CBC News Posted: Apr 18, 2013 6:08 PM PT Last Updated: Apr 18, 2013 9:38 PM PT
Fascinating, isn’t it, how the BC Liberals keep on sneaking around the public all the while acting as if they are ‘horrified’ at the thought of a pipeline, yet they so obviously are up to their guilty necks in this refinery business…
David Black, a truly worthy successor to the Black name in Canada, although supposedly not related to Conrad, late of the (Read more…) prison system..David Black is Canada’s small-time answer to Rupert Murdoch, took over every community BC paper he could find and dumbed them down to the point of torpidity… I wondered about his agenda at the time…now we all know.
And involving China? Well that’s just a natural, after . . . → Read More: Left Over: Here, KIti, Kiti, Kiti……..
By Obert Madondo, on April 14, 2013, at 10:23 pm By: Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive: A big announcement from the Adrian Dix and the BC New Democrats today. If elected, an NDP government will institute several measures to reduce the corroding influence of big money on our democracy. First of such progressive measures will be a ban on union and corporate donations. [...]
The post In BC, Dix and NDP will ban union and corporate donations if elected appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
By Marc Lee, on April 5, 2013, at 12:46 pm The following is based on a talk at the Bring Your Boomers election forum on April 3 at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver, the fourth in a series of intergenerational dialogues from Gen Why Media, and was co-sponsored by the CCPA, Get Your Vote On, LeadNow and Vancity credit union. I was asked to set the stage for a conversation on climate justice between three youth and five politicians seeking office in the coming election.
BC’s 2013 election comes at an important moment in history. Worldwide, extreme weather events from drought to floods to powerful storms and record-breaking (Read more…)
By Marc Lee, on April 2, 2013, at 2:05 pm Last week’s report from BC’s Auditor General dealt a huge blow to the credibility of carbon offsets and claims that BC had achieved a state of “carbon neutral government.” Coverage of the AG’s report was coloured by accusations from the Pacific Carbon Trust, the Crown corporation created to buy and sell BC offsets, and “experts” from the offset industry that the AG did not know what he was talking about. Letters from those vested interests were leaked to the media in a proactive attempt to discredit the AG, quash the report, or at least delay its release
. . . → Read More: The Progressive Economics Forum: Absolving our Carbon Sins: the Case of the Pacific Carbon Trust
By Obert Madondo, on April 1, 2013, at 6:53 pm By: Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive: A new study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Wilderness Committee calls for a radical rethink of British Columbia’s waste management policies. It argues that recycling can’t solve the province’s pollution problems and calls for a postconsumerist model of zero waste. While acknowledging [...]
The post British Columbia study advocates postconsumerist model of zero waste appeared first on The Canadian Progressive | News & Analysis.
By John Klein, on March 21, 2013, at 9:47 am Oww, my sides would be hurting from laughing at the irony of this situation, if it weren’t a deadly serious joke that the Conservatives are playing on Canadians.
On a public relations mission to convince the public that the BC coast will be safe from oil spills, the clean-up vessel ran aground on a sandbar, and was delayed by hours.
British Columbia’s largest oil spill response vessel got stuck on a sandbar en route to a federal news conference where Monday about strengthening Canada’s oil spill defences.
This was only a test. If this had been a real emergency,
. . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: Oil The Humanity!
By cityprole, on March 13, 2013, at 5:04 pm Pacific Pipeline Crucial For Canada, Baird Says In Asia
CBC | Posted: 03/13/2013 7:39 am EDT
What’s crucial, Baird is that you develop some level of adult understanding regarding the fact that BC doesn’t want it to happen..ergo, it will NOT happen.. Giving rosy reports to Asian business types doesn’t change the facts…we will do everything and anything we can to stop it if that is what it takes… I’m just hoping that you ConClowns won’t be re-elected and try and shove this down the West Coast’s collective throat, because, whatever you throw at us, it ain’t gonna happen without a . . . → Read More: Left Over: Throwing Down the Dirty Oil Gauntlet
By cityprole, on March 10, 2013, at 11:54 am B.C. premier’s office mobbed over child-care costs CBC News Posted: Mar 9, 2013 4:49 PM PT
Lots of people complain that those who cannot afford childcare should simply stay home, or conversely, have no children until they can afford them (the 12th of never for many.) Let’s be honest and creative here (and, full disclosure, I have no children) and take the money, with which we already subsidize the rich parent and pay into private schools, and transfer it to a subsidy for daycare, based on a sliding scale of ability to pay, just like our medical plan
. . . → Read More: Left Over: Subsidizing Reality in BC
By cityprole, on March 5, 2013, at 12:39 pm B.C. Liberals face budget vote amid ‘ethnic-vote’ scandal Premier Christy Clark doesn’t rule out possibility of scandal forcing her out CBC News Posted: Mar 5, 2013 7:04 AM PT
Clark, like the disgraced Campbell before her, unhappily faces the onslaught of very real scandal; unlike him, however, she is facing an election with nowhere to hide.
Early in his sojourn as the Premier of BC, martini-fortified Campbell was caught, red-handed, driving drunk in Hawaii while on vacation, by the police…rumoured to have a female passenger, not his wife, beside him….That rumour was hushed up, and rather quickly, but
. . . → Read More: Left Over: The Empress Has No Clothes…..
By thescottross.blogspot.com, on March 4, 2013, at 10:33 pm It’s not the low poll numbers or the ethnic voter outreach controversy, the real problem for the BC Liberals is that there are BC Liberals who want a problem.
Considering it was just 2011 when the federal Conservatives’ ethnic voter strategy made headlines it’s more than obvious that the current outrage against Christy Clark and her party is at least partially manufactured; by the NDP to score points, by the press to sell papers, and more importantly by BC Liberals still sour their candidate didn’t become leader.
The recent “scandal” for the BC Liberals centers around a leaked memo that
. . . → Read More: The Scott Ross: The Real Problem For BC Liberals
By Ian, on March 3, 2013, at 3:18 am Tomorrow, the Canadian polysyllabic pontificator Rex Murphy will be in Vancouver recording a live episode of Cross Country Checkup on religion in public life..
The Checkup is a long-time Canadian radio talk show, designed to spark dialogue across the country.
To arrange my thoughts for the discussion, I sat down for a Google+ Hangout with Mavaddat and discussed some of the issues that might come up. You can watch the discussion below the fold.
In the video, I referenced Murphy’s article about Hitchens and Dawkins, “Bluster masquerading as reason.”
I also discussed briefly Professor Edward Slingerland’s Vancouver Institute (Read more…)
By EclecticLip, on February 19, 2013, at 3:11 pm My column on plug-in car sales in Canada for January 2013, is now up at GreenCarReports. Since it’s hard to write ~600 words about sales statistics in the very small Canadian market, I discuss how Quebec — not B.C.! — is the leading province for plug-in vehicle adoption, and reasons why this might be the case. You can think of me as being “unpaid by the word”.
For Canada as a whole, the Chevy Volt retained a narrow lead, with the Nissan LEAF and Toyota Prius plug-in a close second and third — among reporting
. . . → Read More: Eclectic Lip: Plug-in electric car sales in Canada, January 2013 (via GreenCarReports)
By EclecticLip, on January 22, 2013, at 1:19 pm (originally written Nov 24, 2011. Part of Great Upload of 2013.)
It came to my attention that Naseem Nicholas Taleb, who authored The Black Swan (surprisingly, not about a ballet dancer, but about financial crises) discussed other avians in his book, among them the Thanksgiving turkey. Per the Wikipedia page, he seems to’ve co-opted the idea from a turkey anecdote by philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose atheism doubtless led antagonists to brand him cuckoo.
The abrupt change in the turkey’s situation is part of an argument that it’s ridiculous to project present trends very far into
. . . → Read More: Eclectic Lip: The Black Swan’s Thanksgiving Turkey
By Marc Lee, on January 22, 2013, at 1:14 pm I got way off my usual research agenda this morning for a business panel on CBC radio. The topic was the economics of casinos, the result of the City of Surrey voting down a new casino proposal. I have often disparagingly compared stock markets to casinos, but in fact I knew relatively little about the actual business of casinos. I don’t even buy lottery tickets. Perhaps it is the economist in me that knows the odds are stacked against me.
Like drugs, when it comes to gambling my preference is that we shine daylight on it, regulate it and tax
. . . → Read More: The Progressive Economics Forum: The dubious case for casinos
By EclecticLip, on January 19, 2013, at 2:45 am …which explains why the Canadian government is Hell-and-High-Water-bent on building a pipeline, any pipeline, anywhere.
First, the stats
Over the past few months, new stories have noted that Canada’s oil sector isn’t getting full price for its heavy oil — in large part because American pipelines are well-supplied with newly-flowing tight oil (“shale oil”) from North Dakota.
As a side note, I should clarify that heavy oil — termed Western Canada Select — is a somewhat-upgraded form of bitumen. Removing the sulfur and upgrading the oil a bit more, would turn it into the “light sweet crude” used
. . . → Read More: Eclectic Lip: Alberta oil selling at 50% discount to world price…
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