Right now, the Tamil people-smugglers are assessing Canada and, the more friendly they discover our shores for their human payload, the more ships bursting with Sri Lankans they will be able to send. It is an outcome that, under current laws, Canada is powerless to avoid. The only alternative is to modify the existing system. […]

I must admit: I have certain rules in handling responses from readers to postings on this blog.  No libel, no swearing, no racist remarks, no name-calling. But I do NOT try to kill off comments from people who disagree with me (although I wonder how could they!).  I don’t disqualify them because their submissions  have spelling ...

 Marijuana and bears and raccoons, oh my! Only in the Kootenays.   I see the humour in the story – who wouldn’t, when a cop watches a massive bear crawl onto his squad car and refers to it as a “big Kootenay hood ornament”? (Although I feel compelled to point out my heroic restraint in […]

After years of deteriorating farm income, mounting debt and ill-designed income stability programs, can life on Canadian farms get worse?  It certainly appears so. The government is forecasting that the price of many farm commodities will decline in 2010.  And despite a complete overhaul by the Conservative government, farm income programs are causing the same […]

Well, that didn’t take long!  Remember all those promises BC retailers wouldn’t use the HST to rip off consumers? And the Premier, the Finance Minister and the business community wouldn’t lie to us, would they?Been to Zellers lately?I was there today and the cashier asked, before ringing up the total for my single item, if ...

Last week, I talked a bit about consumer-level tools for working with digital photos. This week, let’s step it up notch. Simple photo editing tools like iPhoto or Picasa are easy to use, but they aren’t that powerful. At the other end of the spectrum are full-featured photo editors. The gold standard is Adobe Photoshop […]

After years of deteriorating farm income, mounting debt and ill-designed income stability programs, can life on Canadian farms get worse?  It certainly appears so. The government is forecasting that the price of many farm commodities will decline in 2010.  And despite a complete overhaul by the Conservative government, farm...

If anyone had any doubt it is game over for Premier Gordon Campbell, the latest Angus Reid poll spells it out in black and white.  But what’s worse are the figures that also show that, even with a new leader, the Liberals are heading for an election disaster.That will be Campbell’s political legacy, barring a miraculous...

 My son did a really neat thing this week – a neat thing that served to underline some ugly truths of our modern world. Let’s start the story with my shameless bragging: my 12-year-old son, upon hearing me discuss the food bank’s current crisis, took it upon himself (with no prompting from me), to answer […]

 Vancouver Police got it wrong in the beginning-- and they’re getting it wrong again at the end. The department has jumped on the politically correct bandwagon and supported calls for a public inquiry into what went wrong in the case of the 26 missing women, who are believed to have died at the hands of  Robert Pickton, already...