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 ...

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...

The B.C salmon farm industry's decision to not co-operate with provincial reporting strategies has rendered government officials impotent and incapable of regulating the notoriously secretive industry, environmental groups Ecojustice and T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation said today.As of April 1, 2010, salmon farms have...

 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...

"BC Greens oppose the Enbridge  pipelines between the Alberta Tar Sands and Kitimat. The Michigan  spill proves that Enbridge has misled the public on the general safety  of pipelines and on its own record of spills," said Green Party of BC  Leader Jane Sterk."It seems that it is only after a disaster happens that the...

Vancouver seems an unlikely place to nurture such a rustic troubadour as Dustin Bentall, but Canada seemed like an unlikely country to be the birthplace of artists like Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel or Neil Young. If you look you’ll find as deep a frontier spirit and hard luck charm as any...

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...

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...

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...