The Harper government seems intent on proving to its detractors that things can always get worse. They’ve one-upped themselves with the farce called the Fair Elections Act. It has been described as a direct threat to the right to vote and an assault on democracy by the very people our democracy assigns to examine these things....

To the leaders of my province, I am a 34-year-old farmer in the Southern Interior working with my wife and son to build a business growing and selling food.   We do not have the finances to own farmland, so we operate entirely on leased parcels. Because large agribusiness and government subsidies to the industrial food system...

This open letter to Mayor Brian Taylor was submitted by Grand Forks resident Julia Butler.  Dear Mayor Taylor At the council meeting on March 10, I presented council with a letter from Coralee Oakes, Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development stating, “I assure you that the Province of British Columbia does not...

According to BC Hydro, in Earth Hour 2014 their customers accrued less than half the savings achieved in 2013. Is this because the lights people turned off were more efficient lights or is it because fewer lights were turned off? Maybe it’s a combination of both; however, it’s my belief that climate change has almost disappeared...

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial,...

The notion of ‘big ideas’ periodically raises its head in Canadian politics and I recently criticized the NDP for taking a good idea – a national day of action – and wasting it in on, well, small ideas. Specifically I suggested that the party’s focus on excessive interest rates and other charges effectively redefined citizens...

Fifty years ago municipal councils were elected to one year terms. Forty years ago the law was changed to allow for two-year terms. Twenty-four years ago terms were extended to three years, and now councils are to be elected to serve four year terms. The reasons for every term extension were to reduce election costs, to give...

Recently three prominent conservation organizations: Ducks Unlimited, Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation and the Nature Trust of B.C. were highly critical of the B.C. Liberal Government’s agenda of increasing grazing leases from 10 years to 20-25 years. The criticism was directed at range tenures that included the lands ...

It’s difficult to know which is the more disturbing aspect of the crisis in Ukraine. Is it the deliberate obfuscation of the truth by Western leaders like Stephen Harper (and their complicit media)? Or is it the truth itself — the casual acceptance by the West of an illegal, coup-installed regime in Kyiv populated by neo-Nazis...

It would be tough to miss the ad, particularly if you're trying to watch anything online. The one where WorkBC tells us that: “BC's growing economy will lead to one million job openings by 2020.” Since it was uploaded to YouTube in February, it's had more than 900,000 views, the bulk of them paid for by the very people it's...