Paramedics face crises everyday as a basic part of their job. In British Columbia, they are also facing entirely avoidable crises of understaffing, low pay, and burnout. All of this was cruelly exposed in the summer heat dome, with soaring distress calls, long waits for ambulances and unnecessary deaths. It wasn’t always this way. BC’s […]
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Southern British Columbia has been hit by two catastrophic weather events in a few months. First was heat and fire, now rain and floods. On November 13 and 14, the skies opened as an “atmospheric river” flowed across much of southern BC, resulting in overflowing rivers, landslides, mud slides, and ruptured railways and highways. This […]
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On Friday November 12, the last day of COP26, a peaceful rally of several hundred for climate justice was disrupted by over-the-top action of the Vancouver Police Department. An Indigenous man, as part of a ceremony, placed red handprints, representing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, on the building that houses Canada’s Department of […]
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The BC Supreme Court made news in September by deciding not to extend an injunction against old-growth logging protesters at the Fair Creek watershed. This would have ended the ongoing RCMP enforcement of the injunction, had the BC Court of Appeal not granted a temporary injunction about a week later. Protesters have been in the […]
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Renovictions, when landlords feign the need for renovations to evict tenants and jack up the rent, are a fundamental part of why housing is so unaffordable in Canada. Regulations governing rent increases vary from province to province, and the pandemic has brought some temporary rent freezes. In non-pandemic times, BC, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia […]
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For years, governments have been shovelling rhetoric about commitments to reduce carbon emissions. The most famous is the international commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Yet, emissions have increased by 60% since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit. The Kyoto Protocol and […]
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The city of Surrey is the second largest in British Columbia, with nearly 600,000 mostly working-class residents. It is home to families from Canada and dozens of other countries and is host to some of the largest multi-ethnic celebrations in Canada, including the massive annual Vaisakhi parade of up to half a million people, a […]
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BC Hotel workers are continuing their struggle to defend their jobs and their livelihoods against the ruthless hotel management. Affected hotel workers, many of them members of Unite Here Local 40, are fighting for the right of recall, which is the right to be rehired after a lay-off at their previous pay rate with the […]
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Since last August, activists have set up numerous blockades in protest of old growth logging in the Fairy Creek watershed. The self-named Rainforest Flying Squad, a group of volunteer activists and grassroots organizers, set up camp as the BC government granted permits to Teal-Jones, a BC-based logging company, to cut timber in the Fairy Creek […]
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Aquaculture, Mismanagement and Climate Change In 2020 the Fraser River sockeye salmon run collapsed. This catastrophic and historic collapse is a real existential emergency for these fish and the people who rely on them. This follows a series of record-breaking bad years. Between 1980 and 2014, sockeye returns in the Fraser River fluctuated between a […]
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