When Florio Vassilakakis of the Element Night Club called me, upset about a story we ran (Brawl involves 40 to 50 people outside Element Saturday night), my initial response was deep annoyance.   Oh God, I thought, Another prima donna businessman cheesed off at me for doing my job – not because my coverage was […]

 Right now, the Tamil people-smugglers are assessing Canada and, the more friendly they discover our shores for their human payload, the more ships bursting with Sri Lankans they will be able to send. It is an outcome that, under current laws, Canada is powerless to avoid. The only alternative is to modify the existing system. […]

I must admit: I have certain rules in handling responses from readers to postings on this blog.  No libel, no swearing, no racist remarks, no name-calling. But I do NOT try to kill off comments from people who disagree with me (although I wonder how could they!).  I don’t disqualify them because their submissions  have spelling ...

 Marijuana and bears and raccoons, oh my! Only in the Kootenays.   I see the humour in the story – who wouldn’t, when a cop watches a massive bear crawl onto his squad car and refers to it as a “big Kootenay hood ornament”? (Although I feel compelled to point out my heroic restraint in […]

After years of deteriorating farm income, mounting debt and ill-designed income stability programs, can life on Canadian farms get worse?  It certainly appears so. The government is forecasting that the price of many farm commodities will decline in 2010.  And despite a complete overhaul by the Conservative government, farm income programs are causing the same […]

Well, that didn’t take long!  Remember all those promises BC retailers wouldn’t use the HST to rip off consumers? And the Premier, the Finance Minister and the business community wouldn’t lie to us, would they?Been to Zellers lately?I was there today and the cashier asked, before ringing up the total for my single item, if ...

Last week, I talked a bit about consumer-level tools for working with digital photos. This week, let’s step it up notch. Simple photo editing tools like iPhoto or Picasa are easy to use, but they aren’t that powerful. At the other end of the spectrum are full-featured photo editors. The gold standard is Adobe Photoshop […]

 It seems to me that God doesn’t have a sense of humour ... or, at least, according to His earthly representative, He doesn’t. Do you remember the Dutch cartoons that threw the Muslim community into fits of violence? How about the Christian reaction to the Comedy Central Jesus cartoon? And now, the most recent outrage comes...

After years of deteriorating farm income, mounting debt and ill-designed income stability programs, can life on Canadian farms get worse?  It certainly appears so. The government is forecasting that the price of many farm commodities will decline in 2010.  And despite a complete overhaul by the Conservative government, farm...

If anyone had any doubt it is game over for Premier Gordon Campbell, the latest Angus Reid poll spells it out in black and white.  But what’s worse are the figures that also show that, even with a new leader, the Liberals are heading for an election disaster.That will be Campbell’s political legacy, barring a miraculous...