A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

How sad that the Order of B.C . has been revealed to be politically influenced. The awards body has done an exceptional job at keeping itself above the political fray, but has clearly thrown that all away with this latest round of nominations, which honour a strangely predictable list of clubby B.C. Liberals and hangers-on including Gordon Campbell, Ken Dobell and David Emerson. Campbell was even a sitting politician when he was nominated, which ought to put him out of the running right then and there. But no. He's in, and only the second B.C. premier ever to get the award. (Bill Bennett was the other, but only in 2007 -  21 years after leaving office.) I know Campbell has his fans, but really, what is the "exemplary" behaviour he exhibited that has distinguished him as worthy of the honour? He did great things for all his friends, but little for the rest of us. I'm sure Dobell and Emerson are competent, caring people in their own way, but I suspect their tight ties...

A case of city envy Sure, I get the cliché about the grass always being greener somewhere else. I was in a coffee-shop line in Portland waxing poetic about that fair city just this past weekend, in fact, while up ahead of me a Portland couple enthused about a recent visit to Victoria. There you go. Still, I wish we could be more like Portland. No city can get everything right, but Portland comes pretty close. I gave up amalgamation as a column topic years ago, because there’s just no point. It’s not going to happen of its own accord in our region, and the province is never going to step in to force anything. So I’ve let it go. But then I go to a place like Portland and get thinking about the possibilities. In a region and climate not that much different from ours, Portland has created a friendly, vibrant city. Whether you’re walking, cycling, using rapid transit or driving a car, it’s an easy place to get around in.   There’s cheap food everywhere, courtesy of the city’s many foo...

Good column this morning from TC writer Paul Willcocks , who notes the correlation with income levels in the HST vote. It really is unsettling to see what has happened in B.C. - having grown up on the Island, I too share a memory of young people of my generation having much more of a chance of finding a decent-paying job, buying a house and having a "good" life. I got married for the first time when I was 17, a fact that might signal a life on welfare in this day and age. Happily, my husband had a great job at the Campbell River mill. We had two cars, a cabin that we owned on the beach (!) in Royston, and within a couple of years had moved up to a new house in a nearby subdivision. My two oldest kids have managed to buy into the housing market in the Comox Valley, but they're 37 and 34, so of a previous generation themselves. And it has certainly stretched them to be homeowners regardless. My youngest child, in her mid-20s and living in Victoria, doesn't stand a ch...

This study from the Canadian Centre for Police Alternatives puts some figures to a trend that many of us have already figured out - the tax burden has shifted significantly in B.C. in the last 10 years in ways that leave high earners paying less and the poorest paying more. Not too surprising that voters defeated the HST given that reality. When taxes decrease for people with higher incomes, it also has a disproportionate effect on the tax base. A one or two per cent tax reduction on an income of, say, $300,000 is significantly more of a loss than can ever be made up through a corresponding one or two per cent increase for the province's lowest earners. What does it mean for the rest of us? Less money for government-funded services, the risk of rising social disorder, government spending at the most expensive end of the scale due to the savings of today morphing into the ballooning costs of tomorrow. With reduced investment in preventive services and strategies due to sinking t...

A different take on the issue of human trafficking - which, as this professor points out, is a phrase that tends to bring out emotional prose, gigantic numbers and no real evidence that it really is the major problem everyone says it is. I'd hate to be considered pro-trafficking, because that would be just plain weird, but I do think it's one of those issues we use to justify throwing money into initiatives that sound good until you realize they're not actually helping anyone other than the people paid to do them. Yes, there are vulnerable people out there trapped in horrible situations. But maybe we should be figuring out how to help them instead of chasing ghosts.