With the devastatingly horrific accounts of John Fulton’s murder becoming public, I find myself taking a moment to look at depression and the varying degrees of severity manic depressives (technically bi-polar affective disorder) experience.   “What do you know?” you ask. Well, let me tell you before you embarrass yourself in the forum below. Though […]

Governments love ‘sin’ taxes. They fill up the coffers while creating the illusion that government is the high-minded protector of society’s moral well-being. But should government be running ‘sin’ businesses? If the performance of the BC Lottery Corporation (BCLC) is any indication, the answer is no – it creates far too much risk for players […]

Canada and the European Union are currently negotiating a new free trade agreement called the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA). According to a detailed report prepared by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Negotiating from Weakness, if CETA is implemented as currently written, Canada’s progressive...

 This week I spent a whole bunch of time trying to help someone whose hard drive had crashed.  Her laptop got dropped, after which she wasn’t able to turn it on.  When I plugged it into another machine, the computer couldn’t even see that there was a hard drive there.  I phoned her to let […]

Any cop, lawyer, judge or prosecutor knows that when you give in to blackmail, it’s not the end of the shakedown. Not by any means! Too bad the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission never learned that lesson.It’s only a few months ago that the CRTC caved in to the demands of Canada’s private television...

Touching on the deer population is something I exclaimed I would never bother with as the whole thing is really absurd. Seems the absurdity has reached levels that make me want to dive in as Mayor Taylor puts us on the map again with his apparent Charles Bronson approach to deer control in Grand Forks. […]

The very last issue of the Weekender will hit our mailboxes tomorrow, and the Nelson Daily News is already closed for good.   It has been suggested that, as the owner of an on-line media outlet, I should be delighted at the newspapers’ demise.   Nothing could be farther from the truth.   For starters, […]

As you may have noticed I haven’t been blogging much over the last couple of weeks. (Largely this is because I have been immersed in fighting the privatization of the local sewage treatment system). But in part it is the result of having some doubts about what the point is. I often say to people that the left – whatever that...

Perhaps I’m just following it out of pure jealousy and morbid curiosity, but I have been all too amused and interested in the historic falls that two of the worlds’ more well-off stars took these past two weeks. If Mel Gibson thought he had a lot of crap flying his way before, the s**tstorm that […]

So here we go. In the midst of a trial about the murder of a young boy by a person with a mental illness, the local media is writing up articles about the illness and its impact on a person’s life. An example of too much, too late perhaps?   As a community we need […]