New Media

If you build it, they will come. Sadly, this mantra applies equally well to roads and bridges as cheesey Kevin Costner baseball movies.

When traffic congestion builds, the obvious short-term solution is to build more roads. But in the long term, the roads fill up, necessitating more and more roads until you end up with Los Angeles-style freeways. Get Moving BC’s proposal (as detailed in The Livable Blog) to build more bridges to solve our bottlenecks is just more of the same.

Thanks to Beyond Robson blogger Sean Orr for the heads-up (This is one issue where a lefty and a righty can meet in the middle).

I’m still astounded and disappointed by the defensiveness of some Canadian Conservatives whenever someone mentions global warming. After all, Conservatives ought to be embracing green issues, if only for crass political advantage.

Mind you, most BC-based Conservatives seem to get it, but east of the Rockies, environmentalists’ popularity is inversely proportional to the amount of revenue Alberta extracts from its tar sands.

Vancouver technology blogger David Drucker touches on the issues of sustainability in fascinating post on one of Isaac Asimov’s early influences, science fiction writer Lawrence Manning. The description of the 1933 story “The Man Who Awoke” is a reminder that long before the words greenhouse gases were even part of our vocabulary, North Americans were well aware of the environmentally-unsustainable nature of their lifestyles.

You don’t have to be green to save the ice caps. Just maintaining some fair measure of our own quite comfortable modern lifestyle within a paradigm of sustainability seems like a good enough reason to go green.

Eighty-eight days after the Vancouver strike started, we’ve finally reached a settlement.

Garbage workers will start clearing the streets of a surprisingly small pile of garbage tomorrow (most Vancouverites without private garbage collection have been throwing their trash into Burnaby’s fully-functioning dumpsters for months). The fruit flies that bugged us during Thanksgiving dinners have been given their eviction notices.

The question now is whether Vancouver City Hall will be refunding residents for three months worth of lost services. Not paying 5,000 workers for that long must have resulted in some cost savings.

A tax refund just in time for a little holiday shopping would be awfully nice.

The garbage men are still on strike in Vancouver.

Odd, since the inside-workers have abandoned labor strife in favor of a settlement. So much for a united front.

Even the parks board workers who are still on strike are only still sticking to their guns on a technicality (Globe & Mail). Almost 60 per cent of those workers actually voted to end their strike. They needed a two-thirds majority to accept a new contract (a unique situation amongst all unions in Canada).

Bottom line: Vancouver can look forward to sharing accommodations with increasingly pesky swarms of fruit flies (The cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving dinner was a definite draw for our little bacterial vector friends).

Just to check, if both sides get to vote on the latest deal, what was the point of bringing in a presumably-objective arbitrator?

Well, that’s a relief. The fed’s recent announcement are enacting legislation to ensure cunning foreign jerks don’t smack our strategic aims down with our own companies. It sounds like the move is long overdue.

Considering all the hubbub generated in Vancouver over the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), it’s reassuring to know that Canadians can always just make up legislation on the fly to ensure the country doesn’t fall into the hands of foreign devils.

Take that, Japan!