The Canadian Tiger Woods That You Probably Have Never Heard Of.
The greatest golfer of all time… Moe Norman. The original Tin Cup.
Amazing story.
This got me thinking… Canary in a Coalmine?
When a company that has been the fabric of the Vancouver and BC tourism scene forever, decides to pack up..
VANCOUVER — Intrawest has announced to its staff that it will move its headquarters to Colorado from Vancouver.
In an internal memo to all employees obtained by The Vancouver Sun, CEO Bill Jensen told employees that the move will take place by the end of this year.
You have to wonder what the real reason is?
The good news is I am sure someone will take their place:
David Seymour, a senior policy analyst with the Frontier Centre, told Business in Vancouver that the city’s high real estate prices are the result of municipal efforts to curb growth.
“For the last 20 years Vancouver as a municipality, or the various municipalities that make up the Vancouver housing market, have tried their damndest to basically prevent the city from growing any further,” Seymour said. “… It’s been very difficult and costly to build new houses in the [Greater Vancouver Regional District].
“One of the axiom’s of economics is if you reduce or constrain supply the price will go up, and that’s basically what’s happened in Vancouver.”
Welcome to the incredibly shrinking city..
Play The Vancouver Real Estate Game
Is it a Crack Shack Or a Mansion:
A sorry statement on the reality of Vancouver housing prices…
You are playing Part 2 of the Crack Shack or Mansion game.
The game features real Vancouver real estate listings, as of April 21st, 2010.
Can you tell the difference between a crack shack and a Vancouver, BC mansion, listed for one or two million dollars?
Vancouver’s Main Export Could Be Wiped Out.
This bud’s for you! Interesting article on how much BC stands to lose from our “illegal” agriculture.
Wonder where all the money goes? On the bright side, they could follow California, legalize it, and charge HST. Deficit solved.
British Columbia’s cannabis activists and law enforcement officials are bracing themselves for a political earthquake that’s set to hit California this fall when voters head to the polls to legalize marijuana. Vancouver-based activists fear BC‘s bud industry could be wiped out if California opens the door on pot decriminalization.
“We’ve got to protect our pre-eminent position by legalizing now,” said Marc Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture and “BC‘s prince of pot.”
Speaking from his magazine office on Hastings Street, Emery said BC‘s marijuana industry could only compete with a possible pot haven in California if the province legalizes cannabis within the first two years of any such move south of the border.
If California legalizes, the demands for BC marijuana at $2,400 a pound will greatly diminish, said Emery, who faces a five-year jail term in the U.S. for drug trafficking and distributing cannabis seeds over the Internet.
According to Emery, the homegrown market will evaporate if Canadian pot users flock to California for cheap, high-quality cannabis that could be available for as little as $10 per ounce, compared to the current rate of $200 in Vancouver.
Should BC also decriminalize pot, Emery said the provincial economy could benefit from industry innovation focused on developing high-quality cannabis strains.
The BC marijuana industry is estimated at $5 to $8 billion and, if decriminalized, presents significant taxable revenue. William Austin, a BC Marijuana Party activist who phones MPs as part of the anti-prohibition drive, said the province and law enforcers are failing to see the bigger picture.
“The black market won’t go away but [legalization] will be a significant hit and it will allow the police to actually focus on more dangerous things like people-trafficking or weapons smuggling,” said Austin.
Yet, if California voters legalized marijuana, the impact on BC police would change little in the short term since pot “causes a considerable problem for law enforcement,” said RCMP Sergeant Dave Goddard. “It’s still going to be illegal here in Canada,” he said.
If other U.S. states such as Washington and Oregon legalize cannabis, Staff Sgt. Goddard said the impact would eventually be felt in Vancouver. “It would certainly reduce the market for BC bud and it would certainly have a domino effect here,” he said. “But we won’t be seeing that for some time.”
The California Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act would allow the recreational use of up to 28 grams of weed for adults over 21 and cultivation of up to 25 square feet of plant per household. It would be illegal to smoke in public, in the presence of minors, or on school grounds. Driving under the influence of pot would remain prohibited.
If cannabis becomes legal in California, the state will take ownership of an industry with an estimated value of $14 billion, which would help its bankrupt government plug a deficit of $42 billion in 2009.
Source. 
photo credit: themadpothead
Caught In A Lie: Looks Like We’ll Stop The HST In BC
Amazing. BC has a tea party. When you have a government that resorts to lying to get elected, and then proceeds to add even more taxes on the people, there is a limit to how far you can actually go. Even in BC.
The recent news the Premier Gordon Campbell won’t seek reelection is also good news.
“I recognize today that people are pretty — they are very upset in fact,” said Campbell in an interview with Keith Baldrey for Global TV. “They think they were misled with regard to the HST initiative that we undertook.”
“I still think it was the right decision to make,” Campbell continued. “We all knew that we would be hit hard politically as a result of that decision. It was not a comfortable decision to make. So I understand why people are upset. I don’t underestimate how upset people are and the anger that people feel about it.”
Gordon, you lied about the BC deficit to get elected. Now to overcome that lie, you take a bribe to punish BC residents with the HST (BC gets $1.5 billion from the federal government to do the HST). It also means a $1.9 billion tax shift from industry to BC families.. or $1,700 in higher taxes for a family of four.
The good news is that the Bill Vander Zalm petition to repeal the HST has passed the 500,000 signature mark, with 7 weeks to go.
The petition has achieved the 10% Elections BC threshold in 56 out of a total of 85 ridings across the province. 34 ridings have reached the Fight HST internal threshold of 15% of registered voters or more.
“What is really exciting about this report is the big jump in signatures in both Vancouver and Burnaby this week. We were a little slow getting started in those ridings, but they are catching up quickly, with signature gathering in those regions keeping pace with all other regions now,” said Chris Delaney, Fight HST lead organizer.
With just over 8 weeks left to go in the 13 week signature gathering campaign, Delaney says the Fight HST petition is poised to hit the 500,000 signature mark, equivalent to over 1/3 of all the voters who voted in the last provincial election.
“This is the largest sample of public opinion ever done in the history of BC. It shows a deep, pervasive and across the board rejection of the government’s policy to implement the HST. It has become much more than just a legal petition to repeal the HST. It has become a referendum on the tax and the government that gave it to us,” Delaney explained.
Fight HST leader, Bill Vander Zalm, says it’s time for the government to act.
“We are calling on Premier Campbell and Finance Minister Hansen to publicly announce they will repeal the HST right now. There can no longer be any purpose to continuing with a tax that nobody wants, and which the government has just admitted it won’t even pay itself when it comes to government purchases. How many more voters do they have to hear from before they will do the right thing and get rid of this tax?” Vander Zalm asked.
The campaign also weighed in on the government’s recently released HST list with Vander Zalm saying it simply doesn’t tell the truth as there are more than 30 items “missing in action.”
“We spent some time reviewing the list and have determined it is totally bogus,” Vander Zalm said in a release. “The government has, once again, deliberately tried to mislead the public when it comes to the HST. They just can’t seem to ever tell the truth.”
Vander Zalm said the list excludes almost all services that will now have HST applied to them.
“They left out items such as catering, computer repair services, consulting services, commercial leases, fishing charters, home appraisals, investment counseling, limousine rentals, skiing and even parking fees,” he said.
As they say, get out and vote. You can find a location to sign the petition here.
Vancouver’s Green Guys
If you’ve been watching our Canucks in the playoffs, you had to notice those two green guys. The Green Men who mock opposing players as they sit in the penalty box, became infamous after their gyrating performance for penalized Nashville Predators became a YouTube classic last December.
They have their own Facebook page here, The Green Guys Behind The Canucks Penalty Box, with over 45,000 friends (a little more than all of Moose Jaw).
The Green Men were revealed by the Vancouver Sun as British Columbia Institute of Technology students Ryan Sullivan and Adam Forsythe, whose Green Men alter-egos go by Sully and Force.
The inspiration, according to Sully in an interview with Nucks Misconduct:
After watching an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” which is where the Greenman originates from, we both looked at each other and I do believe we actually yelled “Eureka” at the same time. It was a little weird, but we knew it was fate. We knew we had to become Greenmen and go to a Canucks game. As for hesitations, there was a few … I mean we aren’t really wearing anything so that was a concern… and the first game we went to, it was about minus-5, so as we walked from our car to GM Place, it was quite tempting to bail out. I’m sure glad we didn’t though!
You can read more about the Green Men on the Canucks’ Web site.
In Praise Of Earth Day
With Earth Day around the corner, it’s great to know that global warming can be beat.
Maybe Iran is just trying to save the world.
Global Warming / Nuclear Winter
The dust kicked up into the atmosphere after a big enough nuclear blast could offer enough protection from sunlight to reverse the effects of global warming. Of course, it could also plunge us into a new ice age if too much sunlight is blocked.
Author: John Hawley
Text: If we do not do enough to thwart Global Warming, and the oceans start to rise, could we use the effects of Nuclear Winter to offset global warming? Of course we would have to be careful about radiation and radioactive contamination by using the cleanest possible nuclear devices.
Response #: 1 of 2
Author: Mark Fernau
Text: This is a good question, but fortunately you do not have to use nuclear bombs to put the dust and particles in the atmosphere. The idea is to reflect sunlight back to space and you could do this by putting lots of sulfur particles into the atmosphere. You do not need dust from nuclear explosions, you could just use rockets or supersonic transports or whatever to get the sulfate particles up to the correct height in the atmosphere.
The real problem with this is not nuclear winter and radiation, it is that the human race would be playing G What happens if you miscalculate and put too much reflecting material into the atmosphere and send the Earth not only into nuclear winter but into an ice age? I am not sure I would want to risk it. Another idea I like is to have every one in the world paint their roofs and driveways white. Much easier than the first approach although more complicated because of all the clouds and stuff that would be in the way to mess up your calculation of how much white is needed. Cheers,
Response #: 2 of 2
Author: Don Libby
Text: Actually, some scientists (e.g. Reid Bryson at the University of Wisconsin) believe that there is sufficient dust in the atmosphere already to effectively counter any global warming effect from C02. Since the “nuclear winter” effect is due to the huge clouds of debris thrown up into the atmosphere, we could think of all the dust that has already (and is still being) thrown up by less drastic human and natural activities as providing some of this sheltering effect. Good thinking, a global parasol might be helpful. I wonder if we could not provide the shade with less potential harm than nuclear explosions would cause, such as putting a huge tarpaulin into earth orbit to create a solar eclipse.
Food for thought. It may not be as bad as they want us to believe.
Victoria: Newly Wed or Newly Dead
This is what happens after 10PM in Victoria. RCMP at their finest again.
Hey Ann Coulter – Ask Canada This.
Ann Coulter is speaking in Canada this week, and a senior University of Ottawa administrator has warned her to use “restraint, respect and consideration” when speaking at the school.
In an email sent to Ms. Coulter on Friday, a copy of which has been obtained by the National Post, Mr. Houle wrote: “Our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or “free speech”) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here.”
He continued, “Promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.”
This law apparently excludes our Heather Malick.
This has been applied to include anything insulting to the poor, our multi-generational welfare class predominantly in the eastern third of Canada, our postal workers, women of course, any identifiable race except white, and the french.
So as not to be hateful.. just ask:
Why do the French want to leave Canada so badly? Is it they are tired of all the money we throw at them after every tantrum? Or is because we threaten their culture – ignoring the 20-30 million just south of their new country. It’s one of the Canadian puzzles.
Why do we lay back for every tax that is slapped on us? Remember what was said when GST was dropped? My mother-in-law even lamented over the removal of the toll on the Coquihalla after it was paid for… “they should just keep taking the money”. Not to mention the wide array of enviro taxes, stacked on top of “HST” and deposits, and anything else they can slip in. We never met a tax we couldn’t love.
Ask how many have family doctors? How long does it takes to get results from tests? How much does free health care really cost? How long to get an aged parent looked after? Does the system actually drag things out to save money with your aged parent? This type of questioning could get you run out of the country though.
Why do we put up with state-run media. Even the Chinese complain about theirs. We seem to enjoy paying ours so they can keep our nasty anchors that no one watches on the air.. these folks would have been retired 20 years ago anywhere else. Yes, we have to pay to watch Fox News. CNN is free.
Have we noticed that the entrepreneurial spirit – the one that brings wealth, has been effectively bred out of our kids? When the state looks after you, tells you what not to do, you kind of lose incentive to become something great. (We have employment insurance – go figure.) And, if we do find great success, where is the first place we move to?
And don’t forget to ask what’s up with that David Suzuki guy? Was he appointed a czar? If you want to see Al Gore in 20 years – we have his clone. Except he has made his living by not ever getting elected.
All of the above are respectful and shouldn’t get you charged. Welcome to Canadian leftwing-approved free speech.
But you may want to watch this video of the last controversial American that came here.. they stripped it off of YouTube… here’s the last video there that is allowed, as it doesn’t allow us to embed or share the hate.
Welcome to Canada.