Not so valuable a village anymore

Fans of the recycling approach to reduced resource consumption have found prices seemingly doubled at Value Village, a large chain of mammoth stores that resell donated clothing. Value Village is a US-owned, private, for-profit retailer usually associated with charities that collect second-hand clothes to support their causes. Competitors in the local market, like the Salvation Army Thrift stores and Saint Vincent de Paul society, have recently found—rumours have it—that Value Village staff buy up used clothes at their outlets, where the prices are much cheaper, and resell them in Value Village stores for much higher prices.

The solution would be to stop shopping at Value Village and make an effort to seek out and patronize these other used clothing outlets. Being smaller and less corporate, they may not have the budgets for advertising or for high-rent locations, so it might take a bit of snooping around to find them. And always try to buy something, even if only for a lark. Since the goods are donated, an item sold for only a few dollars has the gross profit for the outlet equivalent to a much more expensive item purchased in a conventional store. A bit of profit for them always improves the whole recycling economy, and besides, you help the cause they serve too. Win-win, no?

Water, water not everywhere for much longer

Beginning in 2002, the Liberal government of BC began to hand out “water licences” by the mitful to anyone with the scruples and forethought to get in line. The water licences apply to creeks, streams, and rivers running through crown land throughout the province, and allow the holder of the licence to divert a certain amount of the river’s flow at a certain point along the river. Why would you want to do that? Traditionally, it might be to irrigate your farm, water your cattle, or drink—if you’re way out there and don’t have city water service.

But since 2002, everything has changed. Thousands of permits have been awarded or are currently in the process of being awarded to big US energy companies—the sinister Carlyle amongst them—who see billions of dollars in profits, 100-megawatt power plant by 100-megawatt power plant, throughout the wilderness of BC.

These are usually called “flow of river” power plants, and bring to mind low-impact, even invisible, submersed micro power plants quietly humming away in the wild and causing no environmental damage while providing green energy solutions to a globally warming planet.

In fact, “flow of river” power plants can divert a whole river several miles through blasted-out tunnels and carved-out channels that lay waste to local ecologies and alter fish, farm, and recreational uses of rivers forever. In exchange, these massive companies are paying in licence fees and energy royalties essentially nothing back to the province or to the public that owns the crown land and rivers that are being so altered and exploited.

Save Our Rivers, a group formed to bring the issue to light, estimate the value of the water licences and the energy they can generate over the course of the 40- or 50-year life of the licence in the tens of billions of dollars. Big California industries and Arizona housing developers, in particular, are anxious to see this additional energy brought to the western market grid. Extensive and misleading propaganda flying around about how British Columbia is also a net importer of electricity provides the justification for the government’s participation in this historic theft of public assets. A moratorium on further water licences is called for so that at least a public debate about them can take place before the asset is completely gone. Ask your MLA if she heard about these water licences.

Immigration: the big issue behind the curtain

Immigration policy is that issue that percolates just below the surface in federal election campaigns, playing a huge role particularly amongst new Canadian voters, but never such a big role in the mainstream of issues for the rest of Canadians. The Conservatives typically address their immigration policy by keeping their mouths shut. A certain Alberta Reform Party founder caused enough trouble by suggesting non-white employees of his small business would be relegated to the back room.

The NDP are perennially conflicted: adherence to a strong tradition for social justice clashes with the traditional union brothers’ interest in keeping wage rates high by closing the door.

The Liberals get the free ride, usually by parachuting into ridings a visible minority candidate and brushing their hands together as though that were a job well done. But it was the Liberal regime of Paul Martin that split up the stream of immigrants containing wives and husbands of people already here from moms, dads, brothers, sisters, and children. All streams of immigrants have lengthy line-ups, but while wives and husbands are waiting up to 18 months for immigration documents, other immediate family members are waiting up to 7 years. They used to be in the same line.

If the Liberals were serious about good and healthy immigration policy, they’d consider reuniting the flow of spousal and family immigrants. Among the recently relocated, the fabric of community is most thoroughly torn. Community fabric is the root of all good, and it is imperative to see it woven most quickly among those who have it most torn—new immigrants. If someone was good enough to be invited into Canada, and their spouse is important to them, surely their parents, children, and siblings are good enough too, and are just as important to them, and to Canada.

Iraq cost is going to be pricey

What a bizarre spectacle the US war on Iraq has become, if it wasn’t already bizarre from the very start. The war is off the front pages, but the drip-drip-drip of American blood continues to pool slowly, and little news items buried inside the papers keep the body count of Iraqis growing like some macabre drum beat. No one is serious anymore about arguing how to win. The only question in American leadership now is how to get out, fast and costly, or slow and costlier?

There remains among all segments of American life a complete lack of awareness—first, about how getting out may not be an option offered to American forces, making moot the argument about how to get out; and second, about the significance of the ongoing enormous financial costs of the war. Americans acknowledge that it is costing a lot of money, but no one has seriously spoken about economic trouble as a result. Yet, it was the economic cost of the American war on Vietnam—not the body count of Americans, certainly not the Vietnamese body count, and not the utter futility of the war’s aims—that brought that war to a halt and caused the ignoble retreat of Americans, best exemplified by that lasting shot of the helicopter struggling to lift off the roof of the US embassy in Saigon.

The ramifications of near US bankruptcy following that debacle were felt for a decade in the US and around the world. The US largely survived that misadventure. Getting away by the skin of their teeth again, with economic fundamentals radically different today than they were in the early 1970s, is less likely.

The US was correct then to visit leaders in China and Russia to secure their safe exit from Vietnam. One’s competitors in that geopolitical game are always going to take advantage when you’re locked in a trap; how could they not? If Iran, China, and Russia today are again engaged in keeping the US pinned down in Iraq, can it be any surprise, and can it in any way be regarded as unfair? What did the US do to Russia when it was pinned down, trying to deliver education to women in Afghanistan?

Reserves are dwindling

In articles and columns in leading newspapers that are about global oil and gas reserves, industry leaders repeat over and over that supplies are not drying up, that peak oil and peak gas are a long way off. But in articles about other matters buried deep in the business pages, the truth stands up. In a New York Times article on March 27 about a bribery scandal surrounding the CEO of Total, France’s biggest energy company, and regarding a gas concession contract in Iran, the following sentence appeared: “Analysts say Total’s aggressive practices may indicate the direction that the rest of the industry is headed in as shrinking reserves force companies to search harder for deals in difficult parts of the world.” A UBS banker in London is quoted saying, “A lot of the majors actually are going to have to move toward Total’s model rather than the other way around, as they replace volumes from the United States and the North Sea.”

There should be no further discussion about whether oil and gas reserves are in decline, and we should instead be focused on what public policies are necessary to navigate the nation through this new emerging reality of declining oil and gas production.

Where to do lunch

Go have a soup and sandwich at the Euro Bakery and Deli, 1468 Commercial Drive, and tell me that isn’t the freshest and best tasting soup and sandwich around.

Reza and Iwona Pourdana took over the place a few months ago. He’s originally from Iran, she’s originally from Poland, and they met in an Edmonton English language school 20 or so years ago. Running a bakery and café, they admit, turns out to be really hard work (made all that much harder when you try to do it so well), but it remains their dream come true.

I’m just licking my chops from split-pea soup that would make a Quebecois blush and a turkey breast grilled sandwich with a taste so complex, I was transported. I’m not kidding, it’s really good. And then there are the crepes, sweet and savoury. Reza is a professionally trained chef, from BCIT. His crepes are masterful works that I won’t try to describe, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. Order one, you’ll see what I mean.

Isn’t this the Canada we hope we have? An Iranian and a Pole get together on the Canadian prairie and come to East Vancouver to become entrepreneurs, offering something of real, lasting value to their community. That’s a kind of sunshine, isn’t it? Drop in for lunch, tell them Kevin sent you (like they say in those old-timey newspapers!). You’ll enjoy it there.