Carbon tax to hit polluters where it hurts

The pocket book. - yup, until the average driver gets hit over the head with a hefty gas tax, we're just not going to be conserving our precious fossil fuels. The BC provincial government is doing the right thing by putting a carbon tax up for consideration in next year's budget (as reported in the always vigilant Public Eye Online by Sean Holman).

Sure, make allowances for people who buy more fuel-efficient vehicles and for truck freight carriers that would otherwise get hit with a disproportionate share of the tax. But the wave of gas-guzzling SUV's that has hit the roads over the past decade would never have gotten off the assembly line if we had implemented this measure in time across North America.

Oil is a finite resource and when we do use it, the planet seems not to like it. This carbon tax's time has come.

Current events on a rainy Vancouver afternoon

The world is a nasty place today (as opposed to yesterday, when everything was just balmy).

Canadian opposition parties throw all their energies into defending a confessed and unrepentant double-murderer. Soon after, Conservatives begin negotiations with contractors to paint the House of Commons blue when Canadians vote them in unanimously in the coming election.

Yasser Arafat aims a laser beam at Jerusalem from beyond the grave. In related news, a new poll shows terrorist heads of thuggish kleptocracies are guaranteed a loving memory by the people they brutalize.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf imposes martial law to deal with the threat of rising Islamic extremism. No one saw that coming, right?

Olympic fever is inciting Chinese parents to use unconventional methods to prod their children into becoming superhuman overachievers. In a linked story, a father in southern China tied his 10-year-old daughter Huang Li's hands and feet and watched her swim in a chilly river for three hours.

Peace in our time, Stopwar.ca style

Who likes war? Not me. Neither does anyone I know. Yet the latest outing by the Stopwar.ca people outside the Vancouver Art Gallery just showcased the problem with the peace movement today: hijacking by loopy people.

Millions of Canadians would protest for peace if it didn't mean standing next to dinks holding giant banners stating that 9/11 was an inside job.

How would it have felt for featured speaker Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya (suspended from the Afghan parliament for rightly calling out her fellow politicians for being war criminals and drug lords) to realize that she'd fallen in with a bunch of wingnuts? It must have been a hard thing for someone with such apparent integrity to make that sacrifice in order to keep bringing attention to her troubled homeland.

Joya has a lot of valid criticisms of NATO's involvement in Afghanistan. Sadly, all of it was pretty much ignored as the crowd droned internally with their "Out Now" mantra - a position which Joya doesn't actually seem to share, if one listens carefully enough.

"Out Now" and "Leave as soon as possible" are not the same thing.

The masks are coming off the stooges

So says Vancouver journalist Ian King about shallow moronic apologists for anti-Western zealots. The smug jerks are hitting out blindly at the latest Tyee column from acclaimed author and deadly accurate journalist Terry Glavin.

Glavin once again rips into the significant segment of the anti-imperialist left in Canada that is mute about the struggle of Iranian dissidents against the Islamic Republic's thuggish regime.

Time and again in the comments section, the usual suspects trot out the same tired and dishonest rhetoric to defend their hero, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once more, they gloss over the regime's failings to strike at phantom Neo-con spies.

Yet Glavin couldn't be clearer that Canadians who are upset with the totalitarian Iranian regime can condemn it without fearing to be seen as puppets of Bush:

Ottawa has taken a leading role at the UN in the focus on Iranian human rights, and after Kazemi's murder in 2003, diplomatic engagement with Tehran was confined to human-rights questions. Canadians are well placed, then, to focus on shaming the regime and exposing its tyrannical violence, simply by helping pro-democracy forces tell their stories to the outside world.

King is dead-on with his own take on condemning Iranian human rights abuses, supporting dissidents and protesting any invasion of the Islamic Republic:

It is possible to hold all three views at once, rather than simply defaulting to "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". This is not rocket science.

Exactly.

No thank you, Anti-Poverty Committee

Vancouver is tied with Calgary as the most polite major city in Canada (Moncton actually finished first of any municipality in the survey, so small-town values still count for something). Evidently, the pollsters were never in touch with any member of Vancouver's Anti-Poverty Committee.

Here is a group which has abandoned any effort to protest its legitimate concerns over housing the homeless in favor of shock tactics and thuggery.

The Hell on Earth that is Vancouver's Downtown Eastside has many causes, among them a decision long ago to release all mentally ill Canadians from asylums on to the streets, a thriving drug trade (the bane of any city with a half-decent port) and an extreme climate that makes most other Canadian cities uninhabitable six months out of the year for those without shelter.

But breaking into buildings for illegal squats that will inevitably get broken up by police is becoming a very tired tactic for getting attention, and a useless one in terms of actually getting homeless people indoors. So long as homeless people are represented by such dorks, they are badly served.

By the way, kudos to the Campbell government for providing $41 million in new funding for homeless shelters.

Canada's Afghan mission gets unexpected boost

"We were wrong," says dumbstruck Mobilization Against War and Occupation Vancouver representative Kira Koshelanyk. "Most Afghans actually think their country is headed in the right direction, and just 15 per cent of them want foreign troops out of their country right now. The rest think NATO should stay, at least until the country is secure. Who knew?"

Well, the statistics from the CBC and the Munk Centre are true, even if the quote and attribution shown above are entirely false. Koshelanyk and her colleagues at MAWO said no such thing.

Of course MAWO has no intention of issuing a press release showing that more than 70 per cent of Afghans think their president is doing a good job in running the country (Try to remember the last time a Canadian leader got such high marks). Considering the guy is leading the largely corrupt administration of a country that is facing an existential threat from opium-financed jihadist thugs, that's a lot of admiration for a so-called puppet regime.

Will Afghanistan ever become the kind of country where Canadians can travel anywhere safely outside of a NATO convoy? The history of the country certainly doesn't lend itself to optimistic predictions. But progress has been made; A real estate building boom in Kabul speaks volumes about the Afghan population's morale.

Thanks to 24 Hours Vancouver reporter Ian King for the heads up on the poll. Nice post, Ian.

Third Tuesday Vancouver: face to Facebook

At Third Tuesday Vancouver, a cool mix of Vancouver-based marketers, public relations experts, writers and technologists are doing their darndest to get a handle on social media for communications, marketing and society - over a couple of beers, natch.

There's a lot to learn from social media experts like Tod Maffin and Tanya Davis. One point (of many) that I took last night from a talk with featured Third Tuesday Vancouver presenter Joseph Thornley of Thornley Fallis: It doesn't take all that long to become an expert and potentially monetize social media applications. (Full disclosure: while Joseph did not actually get to give his presentation due to a sudden venue change, I did manage to pick his brain later in the evening).

The process of figuring out how to convert Facebook links and Twitter messages into cash is sort of like a gold rush where no one actually knows where the gold is. The central problem is mitigated somewhat by the fact that you can Digg for the stuff from the comfort of your living room.

BC traffic jams and roads to nowhere

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).

Our sustainability woes are no science fiction

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.

Vancouver strike over! Now, about that refund...

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 Vancouver strike is over! Well, sort of...

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?

Canada open for business, but not for sale

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!

Protest Myanmar, but is the junta listening?

Vancouver residents braved near-torrential rain yesterday to rally for the dissidents in Myanmar.

"I am here today because I cannot tolerate injustice, oppression, violence and the blatant suppression of human rights," said organizer Deanna Scott. (CNEWS)

Sadly, the junta that is in the process of shooting monks and rounding up the "ringleaders" for mass protests in that poor country probably aren't paying attention.

If the generals actually cared what the world thought of them, they would have thrown in the towel in the 1980s.

China and Japan prop up the Myanmar regime through investment and economic aid. Until those Asian heavyweights stop lending their support, the junta is free to do what it wants.

It took a massive display of violence to get Canadians and others to wake up to the horror show going on in Myanmar. But it's a sad truth that international protests can only ever exert real pressure on countries with at least some element of democratic government.

But perhaps this rally will do more than reassure our own guilty consciences. For Myanmar's oppressed, let's hope so.

Vancouver's Insite gets injection of time

Surprise, surprise those who assumed a law-and-order Conservative-led government would force Vancouver's (and North America's) first legal drug injection site to close at its first opportunity. Personally, I figured it was a 50-50 shot.

There are those who say that closing the facility would have amounted to mass murder, given the number of fatal drug overdoses prevented by having Insite around. It's an odd argument, akin to saying that the elected representatives of virtually every city, regional and national government on Earth outside of Europe ought to be charged for negligent homicide.

It sort of throws out the whole idea of personal responsibility and societal norms.

Ah, well. In this case, the Conservatives have erred on the side of pragmatism, given that the experiment so far is hinting at some concrete benefits, like 800 of the 7,200 people there actually heading into rehab. Fewer people are injecting heroin right on the sidewalk (which shouldn't be an issue in a Canadian city to begin with, but it seems like progress).

Besides, we don't seem to have any other options on the table these days. Civil City, anyone?

Near-shoring to Vancouver ending before it begins?

Business columnists are all abuzz with hype over the potential shift from US tech companies outsourcing overseas to near-shoring right here in Vancouver.

Somehow, the column seems a little dated. Just a few months after Microsoft's much-talked-about expansion into our Pacific Rim metropolis, the Canada-US exchange rate has moved up to par.

One leg of the near-shoring rationale has already collapsed. The other - similarity of culture, quality of work and shorter travel times - seemed pretty wobbly to begin with. Surely there are at least as many qualified American professional geeks as Vancouver-based ones.

At this point, our one saving grace - and it's a big one - is that Vancouver is quite possibly the nicest place in the world to live, and will likely remain so in future. Hopefully, that's enough to ensure our high tech industry clusters have a chance to thrive.

Mulroney in Vancouver

Lots of people love to hate Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

I'm not one of them, though I used to be.

He's in Vancouver this week, promoting his new book. Evidently, the reviews coming out of Toronto for Mulroney's memoirs have been less than generous.

Rightly or not, Mulroney's administration became synonymous with corruption and pork-barrel politics. The Meech Lake constitutional mess nearly tore the country apart, and the GST made my comic books and chocolate bars more expensive (yes, well, I was still in high school at the time).

The first time I voted in a Canadian federal election, I enthusiastically marked my ballot for Jean Chretien. That Kim Campbell wasn't Mulroney made no difference. I was voting for change.

The country did change, but not the way I thought it would. Thanks to Mulroney's GST, the Liberals that took office were able to boast billion-dollar surplus budgets (after they reneged on an election pledge to kill the tax). The FTA (which the Liberals also forgot to tear up after they took power) which later morphed into NAFTA sent US dollars flowing north. The Quebec sovereignty issue is still a mess, but more thanks to Chretien's negligence and bungling than Mulroney's active intervention. And in the end, the Liberals showed Canadians who the true masters of pork-barrel politics were.

I hope you sell lots of books, Mr. Mulroney.

Parlez vous Cantonese?

A hefty majority of English-speaking Canadians want to be more fluent in French, according to a new poll from Angus Reid.

Hardly surprising, really. Who wouldn't want to have a second language?

But Canada is a trading nation within a globalized economy, and French is just one of several international languages that will help our nation thrive. Here in Vancouver, we've already got a bit of a head start on the rest of the country.

We ought to be promoting bilingualism anyway. Making an intermediate level of fluency in a second language (not just French, but Mandarin, Cantonese and a bunch of other Asian and European languages) a requirement of getting a university degree might be a good start.

Let's get the word out.

A dollar a day and a housing boom to stay

Everybody and his blog is shouting from the rooftops about the Canadian dollar's rise to parity with the US greenback.

Frankly, I'm not all that convinced that this is a good thing, particularly for people like me that rely on foreign clients for part of my income. If our currency goes much higher, our international friends are going to go elsewhere.

But I've also been hearing a lot from people who are concerned that Canadians are going to undergo the same housing slump that has hit the US. I don't see it happening, though. In particular, the housing market right here in Vancouver seems set for even more insane prices.

Oh, the housing cycle will eventually take us down. But international investors looking to park their money somewhere are probably going to keep propping up our local housing prices for a little while longer. They won't want to put their money into the radioactive market to our south, at least until the worst of the fallout subsides. Besides, the Olympics aren't even here yet.

Patience, first-time home buyers. The time is not yet ripe. But soon...

We don't have a democracy or a free press

So says Green Party candidate Jack Etkin. Is it any wonder that so few people take the Green Party seriously, resulting in a 1.2 per cent share of funding amongst the federal parties?

Not getting that many votes doesn't necessarily mean our democracy is broken. It just means your particular message hasn't caught on with the electorate. Same goes for freedom of the press.

When your biggest media coverage of the year comes from a candidate who gets exiled from the Green Party for seeming to admire the work of the 9/11 terrorists, a lack of press freedom might not be the underlying cause of your difficulties.

It's a joke, and a not very funny one at that. On the west coast, in the birthplace of Greenpeace, the Greens ought to be a major political contender, or at the very least, a kingmaker. Climate change and environmental issues are now top of the agenda in many voters' minds, as they should be.

The Greens need to find a way to become relevant to the average voter without whining that the rules are stacked against them.

Why are Vancouver City workers on strike?

I'm sure I'm not the only one asking the question.

While I'm pretty insulated from the effects of the strike (city managers have even managed to set aside time to spoon-feed me data for an upcoming magazine feature article), countless City residents are certainly losing their patience.

I'm not anti-union. Frankly, I wouldn't mind belonging to one that managed to get me the kind of benefits that City workers had even before the strike started.

But on the whole, some of CUPE's demands just seem greedy.

The City's offer of a 17.5 per cent raise over five years seems decent enough, and pretty much in line with the private sector for outdoor work not involving oil rigs in Alberta.

Meanwhile, why is CUPE asking for a no-layoffs policy? The government is not an employer of last resort. If there's no work, there's no work.

Besides, it seems to be a red herring, given that over the past ten years, the City has laid off just 10 workers of a workforce of 3,500. How much more job security could one possibly need?

CUPE also wants all auxiliary work only assigned on the basis of seniority. Why shouldn't merit be at least a factor, even if not the primary one?

Perhaps Vancouverites are already aware of these kinds of examples, though. It may explain why I have yet to hear a single commuter honking their horn in support for the strikers outside City Hall.

9/11: Views from the left coast

Six years on from the 9/11 attacks of 2001, Canadians still stand in solidarity with their southern neighbors.

Of course, not everyone is on the same page. Mobilization Against War and Occupation, based out of Vancouver, still spews the stale lies about the Taliban being a popular resistance movement valiantly fighting vampiric foreign devils in NATO uniforms. Osama bin Ladin's old allies in the war on civilization may triumph in the end, but will they remember to thank MAWO on V-Day?

Ah, well. I'm sure CUPE is happy to have their support in their revolutionary struggle against the ruthless oppression of Vancouver City Hall.

Then there's the Republic of East Vancouver. Kevin Potvin's socialist rag rails ceaselessly against a 9/11-inspired Islamophobia - a terrible pattern of prejudice that happily for our local Muslim community does not actually exist. Nenonen, take a pill: Calling Muslim terrorists who kill innocent people (mostly other Muslims) barbaric is not bigoted - it's just the way it is.

Of course, entire communities of useful idiots have mobilized around the banner of Vancouver 9/11 Truth, which includes as an unalterable provision of its constitution the following:

In the case of Sept 11, 2001, there exists an overwhelming body of evidence suggesting that (1) the attacks of that day could not have been carried out without complicity from within the highest levels of the US government, and (2) the official "investigation" was in fact a cover-up, by US authorities and media alike. The truth about 9/11 is not known, not because it is unknowable, but because it has been concealed.

Note to nutbars: Even Noam Chomsky calls the theory of US involvement in 9/11 hogwash.

Way to push the edge of the local lunatic fringe a little further out there, team!

Buy Chomsky's book, says Osama bin Laden

The intellectual left throughout the entire Western world must be having a rough day.

The brilliant left-wing American intellectual and constant critic of American foreign policy has been bestowed with a glowing testimonial by none other than terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Coming on the heels of petrol-powered socialist crusader and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez' recent praise of Chomsky's intellectual heft, Osama's statement pretty much cripples the intellectual left at a stroke. After all, once you've got the world's most famous terrorist thug proudly in your corner, it's probably time to give up the university lecture circuit.

All those who continue to cite Chomsky's work to critique US involvement in the world are now suspect, tainted by Osama's poison handshake.

Of course, Chomsky and his fans (many of whom can be found right here in Vancouver - the left coast) are no doubt disgusted by the announcement of Osama's seal of approval; the American-born critic has stated that despite its foreign policy failings, its democracy and freedoms help it to remain the greatest country in the world. And while Chomsky critiques American military involvement overseas, he has stated clearly in his books that terrorism such as the 9/11 attacks ought to be condemned in the most extreme terms.

The problem is, many fans of Chomsky absorb only the professor's well-constructed criticism of US and Western policy. They purposefully ignore Chomsky's appreciation of US achievements and his hopes for his homeland to one day rise again to its full potential as a bastion of freedom and human rights.

Just for the record, Osama - Chomsky is Jewish. Ouch.