Tag: Politics

What about the Utilities?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

I started posting about municipal taxes a few weeks ago. An astute #newwest hashtagger on Twitter, apparently finding me inadequately critical of local tax rates, suggested that once utilities were included, I would find New Westminsterites pay way more than nearly anyone.

“@NWimby Do a comparison with fees for sewer, water and garbage added to property tax and you’ll get a different answer.”

To which I suggested:

“@redacted go for it! Love to see you do that!”

To which the commenter retorted:

“@NWimby It has already been done. NW is 2nd highest behind Maple Ridge but NW is 6squ. Miles and Maple Ridge is 103squ. Mile”

Since no actual data was proffered, I decided to do the analysis myself. Luckily, I had a few hours in an airport with WiFi to do the digging through City websites. The results were interesting, for me at least. For the rest of you, come back next week, I’ll rant about skateboards or bridges or something.

Much like Mil rates, it is sometimes tough to compare between municipalities, as different jurisdictions handle their utility accounts differently. I did my best to compare apple to apples.

Water utility rates are difficult to compare because some cities have water meters for residential users, some don’t, and for some meters are optional. Even the metered cities usually have a flat service charge with a metered rate on top. So to compare the typical annual water bill, I assumed that the house used the average amount of water for metered Canadian households, which is 25 cubic metres per month.

Sewer rates are also sometimes tied to metered water use, and in that case I made the same assumption about typical water use volume. Some cities have extra “drainage” levies or charges to deal with storm water costs, some include it in their sewer bill. I have added all sewer and storm drainage charges, metered or not, into the singe sewerage charge.

Garbage and recycling was the hardest to compare, as every city offers different services. Some have organics collection, some blue box, some co-mingled recycling. Some charge a lot less for “small” containers and really ding the big container users, others have less difference. So for the purposes of comparison, I assumed everyone used a 120L trash, green waste (if available) and blue bin.

I did the best I could collecting all of this data together (and if you find a flaw, please let me know!) I found nothing on-line for Pitt Meadows, and didn’t care to dig too much further. I am suspicious of Burnaby numbers, but that doesn’t affect my analysis too much. This table shows the “typical” household utility bill, per year, for each municipality:

Click to enlarge

Again, we see New Westminster is somewhere in the middle, 6th of the 14 municipalities for which I could find data. Our water rates are lower than most, our sewer rates higher than most, and our trash/recycling about typical.

So what happens when we add this to the annual tax bill for the typical detached home? This is what happens:

click to enlarge

New Westminster ends up right in the middle, 7th of 14 municipalities with utility data available.Maple Ridge isn’t the only Municipality more expensive than New West, as suggested by my Twitter friend – it is actually a relative bargain (except, of course, you are stuck in Maple Ridge).

What is a Mil worth?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

There were some recent letters in the Record, lamenting New Westminster’s out-of-scale property taxes. Some feel we have the highest property taxes in the region, one fellow last year even opined the second highest in Canada!

As I previously posted, there are many ways to measure taxes, and Mil Rates only tell part of the story. It gets even more complicated when you add utilities to the mix. Municipalities have different ways of paying for your water, sewer, and trash collection, and this impacts what your property tax bill looks like in June.

As part of my continued interest in calling a spade a shovel, I did a little on-line digging around, and here are the 2012 Mil Rates for the 15 Lower Mainland municipalities that publish this stuff on-line (or at least those who publish it in an easy enough way that I didn’t spend my weekend digging through Bylaw pages).

Richmond can claim the lowest Mil Rate at 1.15, with West Vancouver second at 1.81 and Vancouver a close third at 2.02. New Westminster is third highest at 3.54, with only Pitt Meadows (3.60) and Maple Ridge (3.71) higher.

However, many cities list their fire, police, storm sewerage, or other services and “levies” separately from their Mil Rate. These are not utilities (which are defined in the Local Government Act), but part of the regular City service. Also, there are senior government taxes applied to property taxes: School taxes (set by the Province), along with GVRD, TransLink, BC Assessment Office, Municipal Finance Authority. Add these all up, and you get a truer Mil Rate comparison:

You can click to make larger- tax free!

Now we see West Vancouver pull into its rightful place as the lowest Mil Rate Municipality, with Richmond and Vancouver neck-to-neck for second. New Westminster moves up to 12th, now that PoCo’s “levy” load is added on. The Gap to Places like Port Moody and Langley also tighten somewhat. Still, 12th of 15, with a Mill Rate 70% higher than the lowest in the region, is nothing to brag about, right?

Remember, that these Mil Rates are applied against the assessed value of your house. Since houses in New Westminster cost less than in Vancouver, and more than in Pitt Meadows, the amount of tax you pay doesn’t index all that well to Mil rates.You can use the BC Assessment Office data to figure out the “average” house price in each Municipality, but that does not really tell you what the “typical” house price. Medians and means are both overly influenced by outliers, and when looking at house prices from Maple Ridge to West Vancouver, there are a lot of outliers.

Luckily, the good people at the Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley Real Estate Boards have a better database of high, low, median, and ( this is most important) typical house value. And they break it up by detached, townhouse/rowhouse, and apartment. You can look at their methodology and explanation of why “typical” is better than median or mean here.

Here is the list of the values of the typical house, townhouse and apartment for the 15 municipalities:

Not surprisingly, New Westminster is in the middle-lower part of the list as far as property values go; generally higher than places south and east, lower than places west. Blame the prevailing winds.

The fun part is combining this table with the Mil Rates Table. I know Mil Rates are based on Assessed Value, not the selling prices that are used in the Real Estate Board stats, but can we agree that the assessment process is equally unrepresentative across the region, and that for the purposes of comparison, the data pile is fair, if not the individual data? Again, the result is accurate, if not very precise.

So here are tables of “typical” Property Tax Bills for the 15 municipalities, based on domicile type, not including seniors discounts, Grants, or the three big utilities (water, sewer, and trash – those will be another post, there is already too much math going on here).

New Westminster is, as might be expected, somewhere in the middle of the pack for most housing types. Not the highest-tax municipality in the region, not the lowest. Somewhere between the 5th and 7th highest, out of 15 municipalities.

This doesn’t comment on the comment that everyone across the region is paying too much tax, but it kind of takes the wind out of the specific examples many cite when saying City X pays way more than City Y. So next time someone suggests their “taxes doubled” since moving from Vancouver to New West, congratulate them on their new home, since they would have had to upgrade from a way-below typical $600,000 house in Vancouver to a somewhat-above-typical $850,000 place in New West (or proportionally similar increase). Which seems like a nice upgrade to me.

Jurisdictions

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

At a party this weekend, I was chatting up a striking lady (no worry, Ms.NWimby was right beside me), and I mentioned my interest in local transportation issues. She then started to complain about trains. This is not unusual in mixed company in New Westminster: she was sick and tired of the long whistles, the loud whistles, the middle of the night whistles. Why didn’t New Westminster do something about it?

At this point, I usually repart that there is an issue with jurisdictions: in Canada we have Local Government, who are below the Provincial Government, who are under the Federal Government, who are superseded by the Jedi Council. The Jedis answer to the Railways.

But this post isn’t about the railways, it’s about jurisdictions.

There has been a bit of chatter recently around homeless shelters, and the point that New Westminster has them, Burnaby doesn’t. Chris Bryan at the NewsLeaders (Burnaby and New Westminster) has called Burnaby out on the issue several times.

However, Burnaby’s Mayor Corrigan is resolute: homelessness is not the municipality’s jurisdiction, it is up to Senior Governments to provide these services. If the Province and Feds don’t deal with the issue, that is no business of his, and certainly not something he wants impacting his Property Tax rates! New Westminster’s Mayor Wright is just as resolute: it is the Senior Government’s responsibility, but if they drop the ball, the City cannot just sit and watch people die on the streets. So for both of them it is a matter of principle.

For me, it is pretty easy to see who is on the higher moral ground, and where the leadership is.

I gave New Westminster Council the gears a little more than a month ago over the Shark Fin Soup Ban. It was, in some ways, a similar issue (and no, I am not comparing homeless people to fish). The subject is well outside of Municipal jurisdiction, and contains a moral question that might compel action, real or symbolic, regardless of that jurisdictional nuance. However, unlike the Shark Fin Soup issue, the action taken by New Westminster on homelessness is not a symbolic one, but directly helps people living right here in our community, and comes with a real cost to New Westminster taxpayers. It might even be unpopular with some of the more, um, “frugal” taxpayers in the City. There is a potential political cost to making that decision, and it therefore requires some leadership.

There is a recent parallel issue where Mayors Corrigan and Wright apparently agreed: the supplemental funding of TransLink. Here they both agreed that no more municipal money was going to be used to maintain and grow the regional transportation system, and that new funding had to come from some Senior Government master plan. This despite the fact that they represent two of the Cities that benefit the most from TransLink operations and will be impacted the most bythrough-traffic increases that will undoubtedly results as TransLink is choked off from being able to provide better service to peripheral areas. So here the choice to not do what the senior governments should (in your opinion) be doing saves money for local taxpayers money, but costs your citizens and the region in livability. Tough choice.

I don’t want to live in a community where people freeze to death on the street for need of a safe place to sleep, and I am not the least bit concerned that some small portion of my property taxes go to providing basic emergency shelter needs. I wish we had a Provincial strategy to deal with homelessness and our social services were funded adequately by both senior levels of government so we don’t have homeless. I would even offer that my portion of the F-35 money would be better spent on this. But all the wishes I make are not going to help if no government shows leadership and steps in to deal with the problems. I could be talking homelessness or TransLink right now.

What I can’t countenance is Mayor Corrigan sitting on his hands and refusing to invest even a small portion of City land or any local resources to help homeless people in his City, and hiding behind jurisdictional issues. He may feel like he is on high moral ground on this issue, but I don’t see any leadership coming from up there.

On Assessments and Mil Rates

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 6 Comments.

Regular readers (Hi Mom!) know I like to define my terms. Almost to a fault. That is how a 300-word missive on the latest outrage can expand into a 1500-word explanation of some nuanced difference in language.

Here we go again.

With the BC Assessment Office returning this year’s assessment reports, and everyone able to look up their own house (and that of their neighbour) using the on-line tool, the Cities will now be able to set their “Mil rates” (or less correctly but more commonly, “Mill Rates”) and the Cities can all brag or their citizens can lament about being the highest or lowest taxes municipalities. Ironically, West Vancouver can claim both titles, and here is where defining our terms is so important.

Property taxes are calculated using a slightly complicated formula, based on three factors: the value of your property, the value of the other properties in your tax area (that is, across your municipality), and the Mil Rate established by the Municipal government. There are some other complicating factors, such as the multipliers used for non-residential properties (Commercial and Industrial properties pay 3-10x as much as residential properties for the same assessed value), and the Homeowners Grant which reduces the effective tax rate for lower-value properties, but really, it all circles around the Mil Rate.

How the Mil Rate is calculated is rather simple. The Municipality figures out in its annual budget how much money it needs from property taxes to operate over the upcoming year, we’ll call that “Taxation Income”. It is then told by the BC Assessment Authority what the “Total Assessed Value” is of all taxable properties in the City. The first number is divided by the second, multiplied by 1000 (hence the “Mil”) and the result is the Mil rate.

So if we imagine a City where there are 100 houses all worth $100,000, their Total Assessed Value is $10,000,000. If the City needs $30,000 to operate, the Mil rate will be 3. We can easily calculate from this that every homeowner will pay $300 in property tax ($30,000 / 100), or $3 per every $1000 of house value.

Now imagine a City where there are 100 houses, but 9 of them are worth $500,000, one of them is worth $100,000, and the remaining 90 are worth $60,000 each. Same number of houses, and the same cost to run the City, so the Mil rate will stay at 3. The Lucky Duckies in the mansions will pay $1500, the guy in the $100,000 house pays the same $300, but the median homeowner will pay $180. Mil rate is the same, the average tax is the same, but the median tax is lower.

Back to the first City. If the Council decided it needs to raise property taxes by 5% to maintain services demanded by its residents, they now need $31,500 in tax revenue. If no-one’s house value increases, the mill rate is 3.15, and they all pay $315. If their properties all go up in value by the same 5%, then they all have $105,000 properties, the Mil rate stays at 3, and they all pay $315.

Just for the fun of it, imagine a City that is similar to the first one, but due to a freak of geography, every house has a spectacular view of the sun setting over the ocean and cold beer springs from the back yard fountains. Because of this, all of the properties have values of $200,000. However, the sea-air and beer runoff erodes the roads, and the City needs $36,000 per year to operate. The mill rate would need to be 1.8, and each homeowner would pay $360. So does that City have higher or lower taxes than the first City?

These examples are ridiculously simple, of course, but they demonstrate the point, when comparing taxes between cities you need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.

The Mil Rate for residential property in New Westminster in 2012 was 3.5441. This compares to other municipalities across the Lower Mainland from 1.81 (West Vancouver) to 4.73 (Abbotsford ). Vancouver was 2.02. Across-the-board comparisons show New Westminster’s Mil Rate is higher than most, but certainly not the highest in the Lower Mainland.

But how do our actual taxes compare?

The average assessed value for residential property in West Vancouver is just under $2 Million. The average assessed value for property in New Westminster is about $550,000, so for the average homeowner, West Van taxes are $3,620; in New Westminster the same calculation is $1,949. Not even close.

Another way to estimate is to compare BC Assessment numbers with 2011 Canada Census data (different ways of counting and different estimates mean different numbers, but the trend/scale is the same):

New West:
Total value: $13 Billion,
Mil Rate: 3.5441
Tax Collected: ~$46 Million (not counting commercial/industrial).
Households: 30,585
Population: 65,976
Tax per Household: ~$1,500
Tax per Person: ~$700.

West Vancouver:
Total value: $30 Billion,
Mil Rate: 1.81
Tax Collected: ~$54 Million (not counting commercial/industrial).
Households: 17,070
Population: 42,694
Tax per Household: ~$3,160
Tax per Person: ~$1,250.

No matter how you cut it, West Vancouver people pay more in property taxes, despite their lowest-in-the-region Mil Rate.

For the City of Vancouver, their ~$1Million average assessed value and 2.02 Mill rate puts them somewhere between New West and West Van.

A friend recently asked me why they pay more for taxes on a $650,000 house in New West than their friends pay for their $900,000 house in East Van. This is a good question, and probably the real cause for the common (incorrect) complaint that New Westminster taxes are higher than anywhere else. The simple solution turns out to be a little complex. Again, let’s use the West Vancouver comparison. From Canada Census data, here is the distribution of housing types:

New West:
Single/ Semi detached (18.6%)
Townhouse (4.1%)
Highrise Apartment (30.5%)
Lowrise apartment (46.6%)

West Vancouver:
Single/Semi detached (61.0%)
Townhouse (2.1%)
Highrise Apartment (20.2%)
Lowrise apartment (16.8%)

Note the highlighted lines: almost half of New Westminster households are in apartments of less than 5 stories: the majority of them in those three-story walk-ups that pepper the Downtown and Brow of the Hill Neighbourhoods. Less than 20% of households are in single detached homes. Compare that to West Vancouver, where the vast majority are single detached.

Yet the things Cities pay for: roads, sidewalks, police, fire, parks, recreation, infrastructure, etc. are needed by all, whether they live in a two-bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor or a 5,000 square foot house on an acre lot. Those costs index to population, not property value. So in New West, we have more people in lower-value housing, and consequently paying less tax.

So my friend has a $650,000 house in Glenbrook North that may be similar to her friend’s $900,000 house on Renfrew Street, but the relative value of her house ($100,000 higher than the community average) is much higher than her friend’s ($100,000 below the community average), and therefore she carries more of the tax burden for the community.

It might not seem fair, but I cannot imagine the alternative. We could cut Property Taxes in New Westminster to the same Mil Rate as Vancouver, but that would reduce our City budget by more than a third, resulting in a catastrophic reduction in services and infrastructure, which would reduce our property values more, widening the Property Value gap between us and Vancouver, and further choking City Hall of money. That seems a vicious cycle to enter.

Another way to look at the problem, of course, is to recognize that you pay $650,000 for a house in Glenbrook North that would cost you $900,000 off of Renfrew. That $250,000 savings is about 200x the annual increase in taxes you pay in New Westminster, not to mention the savings in borrowing costs for the much less onerous mortgage required.

So do we pay too much property Tax in New Westminster? We don’t pay the most in the Lower Mainland (by any measure) or the least (by any measure). And you can always move to West Vancouver and enjoy paying both the lowest and highest property taxes in the region.

The second debate that happens this time of year is the “fairness” of the assessment process. When Real Estate sales are dropping off and everyone is confidently predicting the long-predicted bursting of the housing bubble- how is it possible that the Assessment Office calculated a modest rise in real estate value for New West?

For the fun of it, I entered my address into the BC Assessment search engine, and asked for all local “sales” in the previous year. It returned the 100 nearest properties (all detached homes) that sold in 2012, ranging from $383,000 to $2,500,000 in sale price. I don’t know how “local” they were, but they were all in New Westminster. Then I compared their sale price to the assessed value. The results were interesting.

NOTE: First off, I tossed one property out of the dataset, as it was both the most expensive sale ($2,550,000) and it sold for a shocking 56% premium over its assessed value ($1,631,700). This was a large property in Ewan Ave in Queensborough, with its single home no doubt about to be torn down and replaced with row-houses or an apartment building. It was so anomalous, I needed to remove it to fit the graph below.

For the remaining 99 properties, I plotted the assessed value on the x axis, and the percentage difference between the sale price and the assessed value on the y axis, and the result is informative, if not interesting, in that there is basically no pattern:

If the assessment authority was systematically underestimating property value, the cluster would be predominantly below the 0% line; if it was overestimating, the cluster would be above the 0% line. In reality, the centre of that cluster is just below the line- the Assessment Authority undervalues all property near my house (relative to the resale market) by about 1.4%. (I’m assuming this has to do with my playing Tom Waits loudly all hours of the day and night). Overall, there are 62 properties undervalued, 36 overvalued, and one exactly valued. However, the majority of properties are assessed within 4% of their market value.

Note, there is not much “slope” to the cluster, the authority does not unfairly value expensive properties relative to inexpensive values in any significant way. The average assessed value of every property below the line is $685,000, and the average assessed value of those above the line is $665,000. So although it is not visible in the data, there is a slight(1.5%) shift of assessed value from expensive homes to less-expensive ones.

All that said:  if I was to characterize the cluster, I would call it high accuracy, low precision. There are more than 20% of properties that are off (plus or minus side) by more than 10%. That means a large number of people are paying $200 a year more – or less – than they “should”. However, you should rest assured that you are more likely (ever so slightly) to be paying less in taxes than your share according to the BC Assessment Office.

Annus horribilis

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

It is the time of year when the media take their annual look back at the year in review. As I am enjoying a short vacation (notably in a place a healthy distance south of New Westminster), I am less immersed in every day life and find myself looking back as well, but I’m afraid looking back doesn’t fill me with joy. Instead, I find myself thinking of 2012 as annus horribilis for the issue I am most concerned about: environmental sustainability.

Nationally, that began with Bill C-38. The least open and accountable government in Canadian History (and that is saying something coming out of the Chretien years) created a 425 page “Budget Bill” that featured a dozen pages on budget issues wrapped in a lengthy, complicated, and harmful disassembly of decades of environmental law.

How bad was it?

They ripped the bottom out of the Fisheries Act: the single strongest piece of environmental protection law the country had. This is (was) the law around which all other laws protecting the quality of Canada’s water were structured. The CCME Water Quality Guidelines, the Provincial Fish Protection Act, the Provincial Environmental Management Act, Municipal Riparian Areas Regulations, (and more) are all structured around the basic protections of water quality and habitat protection afforded by the Fisheries Act. The Harper Government(tm) ripped this fundamental law apart so suddenly and inexplicably that even the Government’s own scientists have yet to understand what the loss of habitat protection means. They left the professionals tasked with applying the laws completely in the dark about what the changes mean, while concurrently firing all of the Government staff who might provide the guidance. They did this just before the report from the Cohen Commission was released, knowing full well it was going to suggest that the Fisheries Act needed to strengthen, not weaken, fish protection.

That was bad enough, but they did the same thing (again completely without consulting the public, their own scientists, or the practicing professionals working with the regulations) with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (reducing by 90% the number of major projects requiring any environmental planning at all). They scuppered the law that made it illegal for them to break an international agreement (The Kyoto Protocol); they opened up the coincidently ice-free arctic to oil and gas drilling while giving the National Energy Board the only power of oversight over this monumental policy change and not actually asking any of the locals; they also gave the National Energy Board the power to deem which species qualify for protection under the Species at Risk Act; disbanded the National Roundtable on Environment and the Economy (because god forbid we have a rational discussion between environmental professionals and industry about developing business responsibly); specifically exempted pipelines from the Navigable Waters Protections Act; along with several other goodies.

All this under the guise of a “Budget”, and all without any public discussion. One might argue the Act went to committee and there was discussion in Parliament before it was passed, and that constitutes “discussion”. However, not a single amendment was made to the original bill as written – 425 pages modifying a dozen other pieces of legislation that fundamentally changed how the environment is protected across the nation, and it was apparently perfect on the first draft, at least according to the Harper Government(tm).

Then, after all the negative press (even the National Post, the Conservative house paper, called the Omnibus Bill “Illegitimate” and spoke of “fundamental issues of Parliamentary government”), after the outcry from the opposition, former Parliamentarians from both sides of the aisle, and the public, the Harper Government(tm) doubled down with Bill C-45, which further reduced protection of lakes and rivers in Canada, causing the government to shirk it’s constitutionally-mandated responsibility (in other words, Provinces cannot even legallly step in an provide the protection the Feds have stripped).

Aside from Omnibus nuke-the-environment bills, the Federal government has also made some dubious decisions regarding our nation’s ability to protectant exploit its non-renewable resources. They continue to float the idea of signing a free trade agreement with China which doesn’t specifically permit Chinese-owned companies to operate in Canada without following Canadian environmental laws, but it may allow them to sue the Canadian Taxpayers for lost profit caused by following those laws. The race to the bottom has never been so clear.

I’m not as concerned as some about the Nexen takeover by CNOOC, but when you combine that takeover with the increasing interest in Canadian hydrocarbons from state-owned oil companies from Japan to Korea to Malaysia, one has to wonder if Canada is the only nation that is specifically exempt from owning Canadian Oil and Gas. Yes, I am going there: It is time for National Energy Program 2. If all of our customer countries are doing it on our own soil, it is getting tough to argue it will make us uncompetitive…

However, the Harper Government(tm) doesn’t want to openly discuss these important issues any more than they want to discuss changes in the Fisheries Act.

“In spite of all the very important deals and the billions of dollars of contracts we signed this week, more people in Canada will notice the pandas than anything else.” —Stephen Harper to Bo Xilai during a trip to China.

The 2012 story was not much better locally in New Westminster.

The opening of the replacement Port Mann Bridge produced the centre-piece for the $5 Billion subsidy to unsustainable urban planning that is the Gateway Program. Assuring that car-oriented development, traffic quagmires, air pollution, and erosion of livability will continue South of the Fraser of another generation. The minor damage done to a couple of dozen cars by falling ice is an irrelevant distraction compared to the long-term damage that bridge will do to our City.

Especially when put into the context of the ongoing standoff over TransLink funding, where our idiotic-looking Provincial Government is battling the moronic-acting Mayors’ Council over 0.6% of that amount of money to keep our Regional Transit System operating at it’s current level of service. The idea of growing the Transit System to meet the needs of the growing community, and the growing number of people actually using the already inadequate system, is apparently off the table for now. Instead of addressing this issue, the Mayors of our biggest communities bitch and grumble over which rapid transit line should be built next, while ignoring the fact that the one promised to the Northeast Sector almost 20 years ago has still not been built! We can build three freeways at the same time in BC, but ask the same people to build two transit lines at the same time, and that is apparently beyond our engineering capacity.

Meanwhile, the Left Coast of Canada is quickly becoming the new Persian Gulf, as the only industry our Governments deem worthy of investment is the putting of hydrocarbons (be they coal, bitumen, or methane) onto boats to ply the stormy seas of volatile international energy markets. Considering what our planned contributions to Greenhouse Gas Emissions are from these projects alone, I hope they’re building those ports well up the hill from today’s tidewater.

Cazart.

Despite all of this, there was some good news. Despite the Harper Government(tm) attempts to derail all environmental oversight, the push-back over the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan Pipelines are aligning disparate citizens’ groups toward a common cause: assuring their is environmental oversight and public discussion of major projects, even if the Government doesn’t want it. As a result, the ongoing coordinated media blitz between the Oil and Gas Industry, the Provincial and Federal Governments, is being seen for what it is: a cheap sales job paid for by taxpayers to sell them an idea that might be a bad one for them (even if it is a good one for the oil companies eking the last bit of profit out of their 20th Century business models).

These projects, and the failure of the Federal Government in its constitutional responsibilities, are leading to what may turn out to be the most important national political action by First Nations since Elijah Harper held a feather up to Meech Lake. The epicentre may be Attawapiskat, but the real battle will be in Ottawa and Kitimat, and it refreshes me to know that the one group in Canada that has so consistently been marginalized by official proclamation will be Idle No More.

Locally, things are also looking up. TransLink’s rush to expand the Pattullo Bridge has slowed down as they seek more consultation from New Westminster and Surrey, and they re-assess their budget and the alleged need for more bridge capacity connecting King George to McBride. Meanwhile, New Westminster’s Master Transportation Plan consultations showed the people in New Westminster want the City to set aggressive goals towards reducing traffic load on our City, and with EnVision2032, City Hall is taking steps to integrate Sustainability into all future City planning and activities.

however, if There was one dominant “Good News” story for the Environment in this annus horribilis, it was the emergence of Elizabeth May, Parliamentarian. Every day she was in the House (and she was there every day it sat), she demonstrated what a Member in a parliamentary representative democracy should be. She proved that a lone member from a fringe party can represent, and that perhaps it is time for us to stop relying on the “established” parties to represent us, when they really only represent their party, when instead we should be choosing the individual who will fight the good fight in the House.

You should read the speech excerpted in that link above. It is a compelling plea for democracy and the traditions of parliament that once made Canada a model for the world, a place where rule of law, honest discussion and diplomacy was the way to solve problems. Where people didn’t need to fight for our freedoms, but negotiated them like civilized people. People often forget our nation confederated over a table, we didn’t fight a bloody revolution. We did all of our fighting for freedoms in other countries, like France and the Netherlands and Korea and Cyprus and Bosnia, hoping that others would enjoy the freedoms we won through peaceful negotiation. Here at home, compromise and understanding were not evils to be avoided, but were the way we got things done. And I’m proud of the country that approach built…

…but I may be getting ahead of myself a bit here. We lost some things in 2012, I’m not sure if we will know their impact for years to come, but Canada is still here, and BC is still here, and New Westminster is still here, and they are still the best places to live (in my sometimes-humble opinion).

So for the environment, 2012 was annus horribilis. As a proud Canadian, that only renews my energy and drive to do better in 2013.

Happy New Year.

Smoke on the Plaza

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

You know what’s gross? Smoking.

This will shock many of my readers (but not one: hi Mom!) who think “NWimby” and “Clean Living” are synonymous, but I was once a smoker, Off and on for most of my teenage years and early 20s. I started in High School, the same as my siblings and my parents. Strangely, I would quit during the summer to bike race, start again in the winter. I did this pretty much until I met a girl who meant more to me than the MacDonald Lassie; a few years after high school.

I was lucky, in that I just don’t have addictive tendencies. It was just as easy for me to quit cold turkey as it was to pick up a pack of smokes and start again. Once I got old enough and smart enough to think about it, smoking was a bad idea- socially, economically, health-wise. I just stopped, and it was easy for me to do. I was lucky.

So, like many former smokers, I am a bit of a militant anti-smoker. The stuff isn’t good for you, and it really stinks up any environment where it is introduced. Funny how I used to sit in a car and smoke, now I am offended if the guy in front of me in traffic smokes and I have to smell that distant scent from the little bit that works its way to my car’s vents. I’m like a bloodhound for the stuff.

Then there’s the trash. We are, in British Columbia, in 2012, pretty much a post-litter society. Someone opening up a candy wrapper and tossing it on the ground is a rare enough event that it would turn heads and elicit comment from adjacent people. We don’t throw our used fast food containers out the window of our car. But it is still normal to see someone take that last, satisfying puff of a cancer stick, and flick it to the ground on the sidewalk, or toss it from the car window, like it is someone else’s problem to clean up.

The Shoreline Cleanups count cigarette butts as the single most common piece of litter, by far. There were no less than three fires last summer along Stewardson Way related to discarded butts, and all you need to do is look in any storm drain or along any poorly maintained roadside, and you will see that 90% of the gunk accumulating along the curb is cigarette filters.Gross.

Stricken from restaurants and bars, from pubic buildings and most homes, smokers are stuck on the street, smoking outside doorways (but not within 3 m!). I can only think of two bars in New West that still have a place where you can sit (outside), have a beer and a smoke. And I sit inside whenever I am at either of them. But you can’t escape the smell. There has been much Twitter space complaining about the smokers in the underground bus mall at Plaza88 The Shops at New Westminster Station (I have seen the bus loop referred to as the most expensive and dankest smoking lounge in the City).

And then there is the gauntlet of smokers you need to run to get into the London Drugs in Uptown New West.

There was a recent letter to the editor of the Record suggesting BC is the only province that still allows the sale of cigarettes in Pharmacies, and this should change. The thinking is that Pharmacies are “health care businesses”, and the sales of cigarettes are a violation of whatever the Pharmacy version of the Hippocratic Oath is.

Even the Premier was asked about this by The Tyee in a recent interview. And I have to give Premier McSparklestm credit: she makes a good point regarding the role of Pharmacies as some special type of retailer in the world of the London Drugs Electronics section and Walmart prescription counters.

That said, I would argue the exact opposite of the letter writer. I am starting to think Pharmacies are the only place that should sell cigarettes. The entire purpose of the Pharmacist is to distribute potentially-harmful drugs in a regulated way to prevent their misapplication, misuse or abuse. I offer the opinion that cigarettes are little more than harmful drug delivery systems. Nicotine is a powerful, addictive neurotoxin. For the vast majority, smoking is not a habit, it is a chemical addiction, little different than alcoholism or heroin. Perhaps we can start treating it like an addiction.

The BCLiberals, again to their credit, have made a few positive steps in this direction: the Province supports smoking cessation programs as part of its health plan, which is a pretty progressive position to take. This seems a rational approach to health-care policy, which I suspect has a strong business case behind it (lung cancer and emphysema are really expensive to manage, and cost the health care system a lot of money).

The next logical step may be to start selling cigarettes over the counter like other lethal drugs. No prescription needed, but only sold to adults, up to a carton at a time, and every package includes smoking cessation information and important information about use and contra-indications, just like any dangerous and addictive drug. It is part of moving smoking further from the mainstream, and more like the fringe activity it really has become.

In the meantime, back to London Drugs in Uptown; the one you cannot currently get into without second-hand smoking a Dunhill or two. I was at an open house a couple of weeks ago put on the Uptown Property Group. They were showing plans to re-invent that plaza space at 555 Sixth Street. Apparently, the owners of the complex recognize the loitering smoker problem there, the impact on their customers, and have not been able to fix it.

They have put up No Smoking signs (ignored), have their own security guys go out there regularly (similarly ignored). As this a problem impacting is both private and public property, they have found no relief from Bylaw Officers or the Police (unfortunately, Provincial smoking laws are enforced by the Health Department- when’s the last time you met a Health Department cop?) It seems an unmanageable situation.

So UPG decided to apply some CPTED principles, and do a re-design of the plaza. Looking over the drawings included with the Report to Council (the same drawings were shown at the Open House), the plan is to remove the planters and seating under cover in front of the entrance of London Drugs, and retain seating only on the patio in front of Starbucks – and that only accessible from within the Starbucks (making the non-smoking rule much more likely to be respected). Besides opening up the court yard, they wanted to expand the surface out towards the street and add some feature lighting, a couple of trees, and tile designs in order to make it a nice open space.

The Plan from the Council Report (click to zoom)

I thought of comparisons to Plaza88 The Shops at New Westminster Station. The proposed patio is like the new north entrance to Plaza88 TS@NWS between the Tim Horton’s and the Old Spaghetti Factory. I can only hope the newly-fenced-in Starbucks seating will not look like the Plaza88 TS@NWS Safeway Starbucks, which is currently the best-defended deck space in the City. Plans for the opened-up space include introduction of public art, with the bonus that it would provide another stage space for Uptown Live and the Hyack Parade. It would be a half-covered, open, well-lit, modern and inviting space for humans, without being the unofficial smoking zone it is now.

I was surprised to hear Council discussing this at Committee in the Whole last week, and watching the video of the exchange, the surprise began to turn to dismay when it was clear how negative the reaction was from Council (why weren’t UPG there to defend their reasoning?). You can see the video here, by choosing the December 10 Committee of the Whole meeting. The conversation on this topic starts at 1:00:50.

I want to make a couple of points based on that discussion:

• Parking spots? We are worried about 3 parking spots? Look at the picture on Page 2 of the report to Council I linked to above – does that look like a spot where the loss of three (3) parking spots is going to hurt business? There are a thousand parking spots insdie and out within a block. Not ot mention it is, after all, the most prominent business looking to remove them;

• The topic of the length of the bus stop across the street is not relevant to the discussion. Whether this project happens or not has no effect on the bus stops across the street;

• Opening up and modernizing a public plaza is not an assault on the poor. People “having a cup of coffee smoking a cigarette, whatever they are doing” is NOT  “entirely appropriate” when they are sitting in front a no smoking sign two metres from the entrance to a business. It is illegal, and does not make the space more livable;

• Assuming that the City’s “progressive laws” will fix the problems at the site ignores that those same laws have not yet solved the issues at the site, nor are they solving the problem at the Plaza88 bus loop or other places where smokers are impacting people. If panhandling is an issue here, if smokers ignore the signs, the business requests to butt out, then how does that square with the need for our “aging population” to feel safe?

• This is not public space being turned over to a private owner, and it clearly is NOT a “private benefit” by any reasonable definition. We are talking about converting space dedicated to public parking into space dedicated to public walking and standing… how does that make it a private benefit? Is every parking space, bicycle rack, bus stop in front of a business a private benefit?

• There is no “pedestrian safety” concern at the crosswalk at the location. If cars are sometimes forced to wait for people to cross the street, sometimes for tens of seconds, that is not a “safety issue”. To me, it is effective use of pedestrian space, and one of the safest crosswalks in the City. The only safety issue is the parking spot across the street that is clearly a violation of section 400.13 of the City’s Street Traffic Bylaw 6027 (go ahead, look it up!)

As usual, I offer my usual caveat that I am working from public info and a short conversation with UPG coming out of the Open House, and maybe there is stuff going on here behind the scenes of which I am not aware, but I take what people say at face value. I was initially hoping that UPG would come to Council and provide a little more guidance towards their thinking here, and how these changes will address a real problem, while adding a public asset. However, talk around the knitting circle suggests the plans have been withdrawn due to resistance from Council. It seems to be there is a lost opportunity here. UPG may do some similar improvements on their own property (the City may bit be able to stop them), but any plans to make the 500 Block of 6th Street a more open, public, friendly and open space, without the need for non-smokers to hold their breath through it.

Alas, before they take the smokes out of the Pharmacy, they can find a way to get the Pharmacy out from behind a wall of smoke, and that’s really all I want.

3 shorts: Traffic, Coal, and Anvils.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I am crazy busy these days, and I’m not feeling that good right now. Work and other life-like things are causing me a little bit of stress at this moment, and I am about to take off for a little vacation, before which I need to get a lot of things done. Also, there is apparently some sort of holiday coming up which requires preparation and such. So blogging will be a little light this December. I need to concentrate on real life, Ms.NWimby, and trying to get a little exercise and reading (for sanity preservation), so my writing time is something that might have to give a bit for a short while.

To hold you, my dedicated readers (Hi Mom!), here are some short takes on the local news stories that seem to matter right now, and yes, I’ll keep them short:

1) Pattullo Traffic resulting from Port Mann tolls: It is too early to tell anything. At this point we have anecdotes, and the plural of anecdote is not data. We will all have inkling feelings traffic is a little better or a little worse, but the true impacts will not be known until well into the new year, when we get some data from the City and/or TransLink. Good to see New West and Surrey are having Council-to-Council discussions about the fate of the Pattullo though. My only question is what too so long.

2) The proposed coal terminal in Surrey: The alleged dust concerns bother me none: worse stuff than a little coal dust will enter our airshead from the BunkerC and diesel burned by the boats and trains transporting the stuff, and the facility will not be used for storage, but just for direct transfer from the trains to the barges. Still, the stuff is kind of nasty as far as any spills into the River, and the idea that we are happily shipping lower-grade thermal coal to be burned in far east power plants seems to thumb a nose at the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Profiteering from Climate Change while saying it is a problem and “someone else should address it” is a bit, I don’t know, unethical, isn’t it?

3) The latest revelations about the MUCF deal going sour. Apologies to Chris Bryan and all the Twitteratti who have been all over this, but this (seems to me) much ado about very little. Admittedly, I have only given a quick read to the heavily-redacted document attained by FOI and posted by the NewsLeader, but it appears to outline the pre-Memorandum-of-Understanding phase of the negotiations between UPG and the City. Seems the developer made an initial offer to build the entire building and then give the semi-finished MUCF Anchor Centre over to the City, at a cost to the City close to the $35 Million earmarked for the project in the DAC funds.

At first pass, this sounds like a much better deal than the $94 Million the City is currently estimating the complete building will cost. $35 Million is definitely less than $94 Million. But we are not comparing apples to apples here.

Remember this drawing? The MUCF sandwich: this is what the City is budgeting: $12.5M for a three-level car garage, $41.5M for the completed MUCF Anchor Centre, $33M for the Office Tower, and $7M for “fitting out” the tower once a client is found. The City now has complete say over all aspects of design and layout, and once built, the City will own all of it – the $94 Million building, the land it sits upon and the air it sits within. Much of that will be a sale-able asset, or will return a revenue stream.

Although much of the financial detail is redacted, we can develop a pretty good picture of what the deal offered by UPG looked like from the document in the story.

The City gives UPG some undisclosed amount of money, which is apparently close to the $35 Million available from DAC Funds (7th bullet point, Executive Summary). For that, the City gets the shell of the MUCF Anchor Centre.  Even the fit-out and appointment of the MUCF Anchor Centre is at the cost and risk of the City (see third paragraph, page 23), and not part of the guaranteed cost. The City does not get the two-level parking lot: it belongs to UPG, and if the City wants their own level of parking they need to pitch in another $7 Million. (see note 5 on page 22). The City cannot even dictate the parking rates in its own MUCF Anchor Centre.  The City would still own the land under the MUCF Anchor Centre, but not any of the air parcels for the two levels of parking or the tower. Actually, they were bound to leasing some of that air space for the exclusive use of the Office Tenants for $1 a year, for perpetuity (Point 7, Page 27) and keeping the rest of the airspace free for perpetuity to protect the views of the tenants, for no compensation. The City would need to pay for the demolition of the existing structures and takes all of the demolition/ excavation/ contamination risk; Even the risk of changes in construction costs or delays in schedule fall on the City, not UPG (See note 8, page 25)

Another way to look at this deal: UPG gets to build and outfit a $40 Million office tower building, $5 Million worth of parking spaces, and two retail outlets (the restaurant and coffee shop) on land they are given for free in the centre of an urban downtown adjacent to a busy crossroads and a SkyTrain Station. Their timing, construction and marketing risk are externalized, to the point where they even get final approval on what is built across the street (point 8, page 27) while they maintain the right to make all of the contracting decisions. For this, they have to build the City a $35 Million building, but the City is going to pay them the $35 million for that building! So their first sale is guaranteed by the City!

Yikes. With all due respect to everyone involved, suddenly I’m not surprised the subsequent attempts by the City and the UPG to complete a deal based on this proposal didn’t work out. I cannot imagine what the critics of the failed deal would have said if they saw this deal signed by the City.

Actually, I can imagine. I just imagine it being very similar to what they are saying now.

Our New Motto?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

There has been a little recent on-line and print chatter about the “Royal City” moniker. It seems to stem from an off-hand comment by noted New Westminster philanthropist and style maven Bob Rennie, who suggested if we want to sell more condominiums, we should update our image. Lose the “Royal City” and the Crown motif, and start fresh.

Our Mayor, never one to lack vision, suggested off-the-cuff that to some people in New Westminster, the idea of losing the “Royal City” might be considered blasphemy. And we are off to the races.

There have been letters to the editor, lots of on-line chatter, both sides of the issue have been discussed. The subsequent announcement of the Anvil Centre naming, a name that nods deeply to traditions, mixed with its appropriately-modern NFL-Helmet-ready swoopy logo only added fuel to the low smoulder. Fanned again by Councillor Cote’s recent post on a much better local blog than this one admitting to mixed feelings about the return of “swag lights” to Downtown New Westminster. Do these lights demonstrate an excitement and sense of place, or do they just evoke a historic time that ain’t coming back, and perhaps the money could be invested better elsewhere?

I was, up to now, a little ambivalent about these ideas. I like the “Royal City” moniker, although I am anything but a royalist. There is a tradition there worth preserving, and there are (to quote myself) ways that a clever marketer can bring excitement to the Royal City motto without evoking paisley wallpaper and tea sets. I don’t think it looks like Snoop Dog’s jewel-encrusted crown or Kate’s foetus, but I honestly don’t know what it looks like. Hey, I’m a scientist, not a marketing guy.

However, it occurred to me reading this week’s paper that our solution may be at hand. Our good friends at the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure have already provided us a handy new motto, and they are already splattering the new logo all over the roads South of the Fraser:

Artist’s rendition – I haven’t seen the actual signs.

Goodbye “Royal City”. Hello “Toll-Free Alternative”.

That’s right, we think of New Westminster as a community where we live, work and play, where we raise our kids, do our shopping, go to the park, and spend our idle time polishing our crown motifs and complaining about the Socialists. The Ministry of Transportation sees New Westminster as a place where drivers who don’t wish to pay for use of the $3.3 Billion bridge they were all clamoring for can instead zoom along surface streets, past our residential driveways and through our school zones! We have arrived! .

Think of all the tag lines opportunities:

“400,000 drivers a day can’t be wrong!”
“Stay for the stop lights – then please move along”
“Our pedestrians may be slow, but at least they’re soft!”
“Don’t have $3 for a toll? We have dollar stores!”
“If you lived here, you’d enjoy this traffic all day!”
“We put the ‘rough’ in Thoroughfare!”

Again… maybe I just don’t get marketing.

UPDATE: Astute reader and man-about-town Jeremy pointed out to me that “Royal City” isn’t really a motto, it is more of a nickname. You should take all of those times above where I misuse “motto” and stick in “moniker” or “nickname” or some such word. I would do it, but I’m lazy, and busy, and tired from a hard curling weekend.  

This is vitally important because the City already has an official big-M Motto right there on its Wikipedia page: “In God we Trust”. And there’s nothing dated or old fashioned about that!  

Defining your terms

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.
I’m going a little more philosophical than I usually do here, but I have been attending some, for lack of a better term, “political” events recently, and they got me to thinking.
I am (I think) in a fortunate position that I don’t belong to a political party and don’t have strong political allegiances. I like the work that is done by our two local MPs, and I think they represent our community well, but that has little to do with the Party they belong to. I suspect Diana Dilworth would have also been a great representative, given the opportunity to do that. I also think we have two (sorry Mr. Forseth) very good candidates for MLA in the upcoming elections here in New West (although I have yet to challenge each of them on their weaknesses… and that’s between me and them and the ballot).
I have said it before, the issues I care the most about right now (environmental sustainability, municipal infrastructure and transportation, social responsibility, science-based policy development) are issues that every party should address in their platforms, and issues no single party “owns”. I also believe in pre-Chrétien/Harper representative democracy, where the local elected official represents the region to the  House of Commons, not where the local official stands only to bring missives from the PMO to their electorate. So I am kind of a socially-progressive, economically-moderate, environmentalist, policy-wonk rationalist Preston Manning style democrat, if that makes any sense.
With that extended caveat, I want to address two terms I have been hearing a lot recently. They were prominent during the recent USelection, and seem to be featured in assigned talking points for the upcoming BC Election. Both are so poorly defined as to be meaningless, and I cringe whenever I hear them used in discussion. So I am going to throw them out there right now and now you will hear them in every speech you hear between now and May. I may set up a drinking game around them.
They are “Free Enterprise” and “Socialism”.
Some people would have you believe that these are two separate things: two ends of a spectrum so far distant that we must choose which we to abolish and which we must embrace to summon forth a new land of prosperity. I call bullshit on the whole lot of it, starting with the lack of definition of the terms.
They both have definitions, of course, but the definitions you might find in the dictionary are far from the way they are bring applied in rhetoric in 2012.
As the BC Liberals and BC Conservatives clamour over each other to prove themselves the more “Free Enterprise” party, I’m not even sure what that means, and who (other than the Marxist-Leninist Party, I guess) is against “Free Enterprise”. We all believe that businesses should be free to operate within a fair and accountable regulatory regime. We also agree that business operates best when there are regulations around how they operate. As an extreme example, no-one wants a “Heroin-R-Us” store to open up next door, or for weapons to be sold in unregulated booths on street corners. Less extreme examples are the (relatively tight) regulations that protected Canada’s banks from making the risky bets that caused the recent global economic collapse.
“Free Enterprise” does not mean a complete lack or regulations. Actually, there can be no such thing as business unless there is something called “property”, and “property” is defined by the law – we need laws for business to prosper. What we don’t need are unfair or non-transparent laws.
Every Party (again, I might except the Marxist-Leninists and their pals the Libertarians) wants to have well regulated business regime where entrepreneurs can prosper and employ people. To not want that is not rational. We only differ about the process to get there.
“Socialist” has the opposite problem: every Party (again, possibly excepting Libertarians, who limit their socialist leanings to the armed forces) is socialist. I look out at that shiny new $3.3 Billion Port Mann bridge, at the $2 Billion South Fraser Perimeter Road under it, at every single school I pass on my bike ride to work, at the bike lane I ride that bike on, the cop pulling me over for running a stop sign on my bike and the court system where I could defend myself and I see socialism. They are all examples of citizens being forced through law and taxation to pool their “heard earned” money to set up a state-run enterprise for the greater good.
There is no front-line party now arguing that socialism will end under their rule: none are talking about dismantling the public school system, ending the collecting of royalties for natural resource extraction, privatizing the hospitals and fire departments, or turning the police department and the armed forces over to Haliburton. If someone runs “against the socialists” that is someone you should fear – they want to disassemble the very structure of society that separates Canadafrom place without a functioning government, like (alas) Mali.
But that’s not what they mean. They define “socialism” as some sort of vague combination of taxes and labour unions. I know that “Special interests groups” are involved as well, but I’m not sure if that includes the Chamber of Commerce.
Or maybe I just don’t get politics.

So as we enter the election season, (yes, it will be a painfully long campaign leading up to May 2013, such if fixed election dates) I hope that more people, when a candidate uses a term like “Free Enterprise”, “Socialist”, or even “Special Interest Group” or “Big Business”, you ask them to define their terms*. You might be thinking something different than they are.

*My favourite retort when someone asks “Do you believe in God?” is “You will have to define at least two of those words”. It usually allows me to avoid a conversation that will satisfy no-one. .    

on the Shark Fin Soup Bylaw

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

This Monday New Westminster City Council is going to attack one of the great environmental issues of the day: the unsustainable harvesting of sharks for their fins.

These fins, when boiled long enough to get the urea stink out, dried, powdered, and added to soup, provide a certain gelatinous texture that apparently proves your wealth and success in some cultures. Their harvest from depleted shark populations is one of those long-standing environmental concerns that has only come to popular knowledge due to recent video-recorded cruelty to charismatic megafauna, and it is a certain cause celebre these days. I really have no problem with that.

One only has to look at the long list of animals endangered or made extinct because someone claimed eating bits of them will give you an erection to see just how asinine humans are in the collective, and how easy it is for a protected cultural belief to result in the decimation of an ecosystem. Sharks are important animals in the ocean, and just as banning the global ivory trade is an important step in protecting the elephants, banning shark fin may play a role in protecting endangered sharks. So ending the popularity of shark fin soup is probably a good thing.

In fact, a professional organization I work with, the Environmental Managers Association of BC awarded a grant a few months ago to a grass-roots organization called SharkTruth, who work to raise awareness at the consumer level about shark fin soup and the associated unsustainable harvesting of sharks. I fully supported this choice for a grant recipient, because I agree with their cause and the approach that group takes (if you care about this issue, please think about helping them out!).

So why am I against a Shark Fin Bylaw?

Ultimately, it is the Federal Government who (through a document called the Constitution Act of 1982) has the mandate and the responsibility to protect the oceans around Canada and the fishes within. It is also the sole level of government empowered to negotiate and sign international agreements like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna. It is also empowered to prevent the import and sale of things like ivory, rhino horn, tiger gall bladders, or whatever is getting sick old men up these days.

This is not a job that municipalities should, or even can, do. Do we imagine Bylaw officers inspecting the backs of restaurants for signs of shark fin? De we expect that offending soup is confiscated by a Bylaw officer, taken to a lab for analysis to determine if it indeed contained shark fin and not the much cheaper alternative (gelatin, which is kind of gross when you know what it is, but at least it is a by-product of meat possessing and can be sourced sustainably), then spend 6 months putting the case together to take the Restaurant Owner to court to recover a $1000 fine? Is this how you want your property tax dollars spent?

Of course it will never happen. The Restaurants will take Shark Fin off their menu (talk on the street is that the Starlight Casino hosts the only restaurant in town that sells shark fin soup) and, if they are unscrupulous, will continue to sell it in a hush-hush kind of way for special events only, and no money will be spent on enforcement at all.

So what purpose the Bylaw? To “shame” the restaurants into hiding their shark fins? To show support for a noble cause? I hate to be the guy who says this: but doesn’t the City have bigger environmental responsibility fights to put their energy into – ones they actually have the jurisdiction to do something about?

It has taken only a couple of months for this idea to come to the City, and for a Bylaw to see third reading. Meanwhile, it has been 18 months – a year and a half- since I went to Council to remind them that we are one of the few municipalities in the Lower Mainland that does not have a Tree Protection Bylaw. In June of 2011, Council resolved the following:

“WHEREAS trees are essential to air quality, esthetics and quality of life;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT New Westminster develop a Tree Retention / Removal Bylaw for both public and private property.”

…and we have not had a single update on progress towards that Bylaw in a year anda half.

Protecting the trees in our neighbourhoods is something our City Council has the power and the jurisdiction to do. Saving sharks in the East China Sea is both outside of their jurisdiction and beyond their powers. So, why is there a rush to do the second and no interest in doing the first?

Yes, the worldwide decimation of shark populations and the trade in shark fins is a legitimate concern. The City can (without a Bylaw) express their support for the banning of shark fin imports- it can even choose to publicly shame businesses that choose to serve it, or refuse them a business licence (as they threatened to do recently with a legal medical marijuana dispensary). But to what end?
For the Feds to deal with this issue domestically, it would only require an update of the Species List under the CITES Act to include those species of sharks that are used for fin trade: it wouldn’t even require a new piece of legislation. No debate, no committee work, just a feat of Ministerial signature would get it done. The necessary inspection and enforcement procedures are already in place, and it would allow Canada to be one of the leaders internationally in the protection of sharks in the world’s oceans (wouldn’t it be nice to once again be the leader in something positive?).

My MP has already been outspoken on this issue, the Minister of Fisheries isn’t really interested in dealing with the issue, nor is the Federal Minister of (cough) Environment. This, however, is the only place where useful action on this issue can happen. Supporting Fin Donnelly to get action at the Federal Level and, in turn, the International Level is the appropriate way to address this issue under the Constitution of Canada.

Then City Council and Staff can stop wasting their time, and get on with that 18-month old resolution to start protecting trees in the City.