Poll

JunJulAugSepOctNovDec

Time for Media to Stop Defending/Promoting HST

The hurt has begun: BC consumers are now being hit with a higher sales tax (HST) almost every where they turn.  And as a result some of those who can hardly afford it, like food servers, are already taking the hit.A friend of mine told me the following story: each morning he has coffee and toast at a neighbourhood restaurant;...

OP/ED: Tax sleight of hand

Many people in British Columbia feel both dismayed and betrayed by the HST. It is a $2 billion shift in hidden sales taxes from business to consumers done by a government who said sales tax harmonization was not on the radar screen during the most recent election. True, government reduced income taxes to soften the blow of ...

DOBBIN: Is this what a police state looks like?

Police states don’t appear full blown, over night. They are, like any other social phenomenon, part of a social and political process - the end result of a long term corruption of the political culture and the incremental diminishing of democracy. This is a process that has been taking place for at least twenty years in Canada...

DOBBIN: The Canadian ‘good banks’ myth

The sorry spectacle of Conservative cabinet ministers flying around the world defending banks from a tax to cover their next, inevitable, meltdown is bad enough. What is perhaps worse is that it is being largely justified by the perpetuation of the myth that Canada did not have to bail out its banks.Wrong.We are, according ...

OP/ED: Heroes and villians in the face of an environmental disaster

The oil spill that now jeopardizes the entire ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico, and potentially beyond, is a chilling reminder that all is not well with our planet. And what’s actually worse: the amount of oil gushing from the seemingly impossible-to-stop deep-sea oil well or the complacent attitude taken toward the spill by...