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On Saturday night, the Calgary Flames eliminated the Vancouver Canucks from the Stanley Cup playoffs. Nobody expected much out of the Canucks this year, but the Flames’ ascendance is even more surprising. Their line-up is young and largely unknown. But hockey success is not the biggest surprise of this Spring in Alberta. Provincial politics is…
Statutory holidays require banal social media posts from politicians. But I was startled by the tweet sent out by B.C. Premier Christy Clark on Friday, April 3: “Good Friday reminds us that hard work and sacrifice are rewarded. I hope you have a restful and meaningful long weekend.” Now I know it’s easy to be…
This column could have been about the B.C. government’s feeble 20 cent raise to the minimum wage, or it could have been another lament about the state of the debate around the ongoing transit referendum. But instead I thought I’d focus, for a change, on something good that’s come out of Victoria. Steve Nash retired…
The Metro Vancouver transit referendum begins this month. Despite a long campaign supported by the vast majority of mayors and political parties in the region, the ‘No’ side is leading in the polls. Why can’t the ‘Yes’ side seem to galvanize public opinion for a mere 0.5 per cent increase in the provincial sales tax…
At a glance, the B.C. budget introduced last week by the B.C. Liberal government tells a story of success and prosperity. This year’s surplus was larger than expected, at a whopping $879 million. As the only provincial administration not currently running a deficit, Finance Minister Mike de Jong was able to boast, “We are the…
My first full-time job was at the Nalley’s chip factory on Annacis Island. I started the gig a day short of my 18th birthday. The first thing that shocked me was the astonishing amount of waste that occurred during production. The facility was old and somewhat in disrepair. Grease fires regularly broke out in the…
Syriza has won the elections in Greece. A new left party, they’ve gone in just over a decade from the fringes of political life all the way to power, swept in on a promise to end years of vicious austerity policies. This historic win for Syriza has alarmed right-wingers and bankers around the world. It…
Three key B.C. political issues to watch in 2015 Since Christy Clark took over as Premier of British Columbia, she has convened the Legislature in Victoria so seldomly that it’s easy to forget about provincial politics altogether. With a federal election looming sometime in 2015, and the next B.C. election still more than two years…
Canadian Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq arrives in Lima, Peru this week for the annual United Nations climate talks. Under the Harper government, Canada has been a global embarrassment on this most urgent collective problem facing humanity. Each December for the past nine years, the Harper government has been singled out by activists and civil society…
Peter Armstrong didn’t get everything he paid for in Vancouver’s municipal election. Armstrong, President of the Non-Partisan Association and founder of the Rocky Mountaineer, poured in $470,000 of corporate and personal money for the campaign to elect Kirk LaPointe and the NPA. LaPointe fell short of defeating Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson, but the NPA took…
It’s sometimes hard not to be despondent about electoral politics. In Toronto, the years-long surreality TV show known as the Ford brothers was finally defeated, only to be replaced by John Tory, an old school conservative who previously backed the Fords to the hilt. Rather than progressive ex-city councillor and Member of Parliament Olivia Chow…
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” – Antonio Gramsci. These words from the Italian revolutionary’s Prison Notebooks are on the sign outside the old Video-In space on Main Street. This is where the Coalition of Progressive Electors has rented a campaign office for…
Maybe Kirk LaPointe and his team with the Non-Partisan Association are Seinfeld fans, because so far theirs has been a campaign about nothing. The NPA, the traditional party of Vancouver’s establishment, has never looked so played out and anachronistic. They have failed to define a clear, policy-based set of alternatives to the status quo at…
