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The Labour Day weekend is upon us. Summer is over and the kids are heading back to school …? Maybe, maybe not. This year the Labour Day weekend also marks the unofficial kick-off for the municipal election campaign. We already have two in the mayoral race. We can expect, over the next few weeks, other candidates for city council, school board, and regional district to start declaring their intentions. Our downtown competition, the Prince George Citizen, has embarked on a campaign to try and...

Are First Nations governments the new environmental movement? Or more, appropriately; are they the environmental voice that governments will actually listen to? For years, First Nations leadership has been the only government body that pays more than lip service to environmental issues. From logging issues in the 1990s to pipeline issues and the Mount Polley mine disaster today, First Nations have long espoused that protecting the land is paramount to them, as it should be to all...

With the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge sweeping the city and the nation, another challenge has been launched that isn’t quite as chilly but does require some action. Prince George Chamber of Commerce director Dorothy Friesen, who is a member of the Hell Yeah Prince George Facebook group, challenged every member of the group to get out and vote in this year’s municipal election. So let’s put things in perspective: In the 2011 civic election, 15,266 people voted in Prince George. That’s 28.8 per...

The mid-summer doldrums have arrived. The heat is on, Christmas displays are up in the stores, and thoughts turn to … egad, politics? Enjoy the lazy days of summer while you can, because it won’t be too long before we, in the media, and aspiring politicians start bombarding you with information. The campaigning has already started in some camps, will kick into high gear after the Labour Day weekend, and reach a fever pitch by October. It’s easy to tune out the endless pontificating,...

There are a few fallacies in how city council set out to determine whether councillors should be paid more. Firstly, it felt the barometer for compensation should be a “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality. The committee ,struck by council was given a fairly strict mandate to examine what other municipalities of similar size are paying. This approach inevitably leads to wage leap-frogging. When Prince George increases its stipend to catch up with Nanaimo, Kamloops then looks at Prince...

Several city councillors talked about showing leadership Monday. It’s easy to talk about leadership, it’s another thing to actually show leadership. But the majority of them did. They balked at a recommendation to increase their own stipend by about 20 per cent over the next four years. It was the right thing to do. If this council is remembered for anything, it will be how zealously it tried to cut costs and increase revenue. The result was, in Coun. Lyn Hall’s characterization,...

Will the proposed Prince George Regional Performing Arts Centre become an election issue this fall? The Prince George Regional Performing Arts Centre Society would obviously like it to be debated by all the candidates as residents prepare to cast their ballots. Mayoral candidates Lyn Hall and Don Zurowski each identified the proposed centre as an issue. Hall, as a member of the current council, voted to make the project one of the city’s “unfunded” capital project priorities and add it to...

British Columbia Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Jody Wilson-Raybould calls it a game-changer. She is absolutely right. The Supreme Court of Canada, in a unanimous decision yesterday, granted declaration of aboriginal title to more than 1,700 square kilometres of land in British Columbia to the Tsilhqot’in First Nation. The decision overturns a 2012 Court of Appeal decision that gave the Tsilqot’in the right to hunt, trap, and fish in the area but fell short of declaring title on...

We waited six months for this? Six months after the Joint Review Panel issued its 209 conditions for the Northern Gateway project to proceed, the Conservative government waited until the absolute last second of its deadline to respond, saying “yes,” without adding anything to the debate that has gripped B.C. and now the nation. It’s quite incredulous that a government that has touted this project as in the “nation’s interest”, equating it to “nation building,” issues a short press release...

Refineries seem to be all the rage now. With the federal government’s decision on the Northern Gateway pipeline expected any day now, there are two proposals to build oil refineries on the west coast. Black Press owner David Black made a lot of waves and got plenty of ridicule when he floated out his plan to build a refinery at Kitimat. Black’s Kitimat Clean plan could use bitumen coming from the Northern Gateway pipeline – if it’s built – or else it could aim to build a separate pipeline...