Roughly one-in-10 households that rent in B.C. say they were forced to move during a recent five-year period, a significantly higher eviction rate than any other region in Canada, says a new University of B.C. report.
This province is an outlier in the national data for another reason revealed for the first time: The vast majority of evictions in B.C. — 85 per cent — are deemed to be at “no fault” of the tenants, and that rate is far greater than the national average of 65 per cent.
Canada’s federal housing advocate told a House of Commons committee on May 9 that the profit-driven housing market is “harming people” and should be regulated. She said that only regulations will lower prices and that the market-driven housing industry is not working well.
Marie-Josée Houle, who was appointed in February 2022 to the position under the National Housing Strategy Act, said her job is to be a “watchdog for housing and homelessness in Canada.”
The Supreme Court of British Columbia has granted the provincial government an injunction to stop persistent demonstrators’ months-long display of “hateful” anti-trans and COVID-19 denial signs on a North Vancouver highway overpass.
The court order came on Thursday after the group of about 20 demonstrators ignored multiple RCMP and Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure requests to stop displaying signs on the Mountain Highway Overpass over Highway 1.
Nothing hateful about that banner at all.
A parent is either a mother or a father. Happy mother’s day! pic.twitter.com/jRXHcjMQWX
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 14, 2023
‘The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.’
Or so wrote the French author Michel Houellebecq in his 2019 novel, Serotonin.
The media upstarts grew up — and went bankrupt
Last week I was at a writers’ party in Miami, a city at the cutting edge of tech, finance, the creator economy and nightlife. Naturally the writers were talking about themselves. I asked someone what he would do if he didn’t have to worry about pageviews or proprietors or the other pressing concerns of the modern media. “Think VICE, when it was good,” he replied.
María Zapata Escamilla woke to the sound of shattering glass. Armed men in military fatigues had burst into her home: they dragged her disabled husband outside, along with her 14-year-old son, still in his pyjamas. Then they drove away into the night.
Two weeks later, her husband’s brutalized body turned up, along with nine others. But after more than a year, her son remains missing.
“I was left navigating alone,” she said through tears. “If they told me, ‘Give up your life in exchange for your son,’ I would give it.”
How progressives manufactured hysteria at public schools in Bucks County, Pennsylvania
The enthusiasm of gender-ideology activists for their cause cannot be doubted, but their regard for the truth can. That’s the lesson to be drawn from a Philadelphia-area law firm’s investigation into accusations that the Central Bucks School District’s conservative school board fosters unchecked harassment of transgender students.
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Western governments, international organizations, media and human rights groups quite rightly rallied round without hesitation, recognising the need to give unreserved moral support to a nation defending itself from violent attack.
We see a very different picture today as Israel is assaulted by aggressors in Gaza, to all intents and purposes a foreign country.
There is some commonality between the two conflicts, although they are on an altogether different scale. Russia and Gaza’s Islamic Jihad both believe the countries they are attacking are illegitimate, have no right to exist and need to be destroyed in their current forms by violence. Neither Ukraine nor Israel has any territorial ambitions or aggressive intent against their attackers — both Ukraine and Israel are fighting purely defensive wars to protect their civilian populations.
Joe Biden is a born political panderer. It’s how he won the Democratic Party nomination, and it played a large role in his victory over Donald Trump.
Telling people what they want to hear is a political skill that most politicians possess. But there may never have been a politician as adept and skilled as Joe Biden in pandering to voters based on their race, their gender, their sexual identity, or any other aspect of their personhood that can be sliced, diced, and pureed to create a message tailor-made for a particular Democratic constituency.
NextStar battery plant will be built: Kusmierczyk
Discussions on Stellantis’ ominous statement on negotiations concerning the $5-billion NextStar Energy battery plant under construction in Windsor involve Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Doug Ford, said Windsor-Tecumseh MP Irek Kusmierczyk (Lib) Saturday.
“It’s so important to this community, it’s so important to the thousands of workers that will have good-paying jobs here for generations to come. I know that we will get an agreement done and I know that this battery plant will be built,” said Kusmierczyk.
It just keeps getting worse. We get to pay for the batteries powering EV’s we’ll likely never be allowed to own.
… In a “nobody saw that coming” moment, a Toronto cafe that describes itself as an “anti-capitalist, anti-colonial cafe, shop and radical community space on stolen land,” announced that it would be shutting down permanently by the end of the month.
The Toronto mayoral by-election may either be the best thing to happen to the city in ages, or the worst. The city appears to be at a crossroads and in desperate need of a change in direction.
Decades of steady growth and improvements in nearly all areas launched Toronto into a rarefied tier of world cities. Then, the pandemic. Toronto came out the other side not just worse for wear, but in a cacophony of crises: housing affordability, transit, a downtown core in economic decline.
It doesn’t help that Ford is “not endorsing” a candidate few seem to want:
After pledging to stay out of Toronto mayor election, Doug Ford jumps in (again)
Premier Doug Ford has yet again weighed in on the Toronto mayoral race, despite previously saying he was staying out of the election.
Ford delivered his most pointed endorsement to date for the candidacy of Mark Saunders, the former Toronto police chief and failed 2022 provincial Progressive Conservative candidate.
“We need someone that has experience dealing with crime,” Ford said Friday when asked about the city’s mayoral byelection during an unrelated news conference in Oshawa.
Prigozhin, standing in the darkness next to a row of bloodied dead bodies, was shouting obscenities. With his yellowish, unnaturally hairless face contorted in primordial hatred, there was something about his appearance that seemed decidedly horrific.
The look goes with his reputation. The head of the notorious Wagner (which cut its teeth as a mercenary force in Africa and the Middle East), Prigozhin is known for his untamed brutality and deep cynicism, and for his ability and willingness to get his hands dirty, or bloody. Perhaps that was why he volunteered to use his mercenaries – many of whom were recruited straight out of Russia’s prisons – for what he called the ‘Bakhmut meatgrinder’, the months-long assault on the Ukrainian town where thousands have been killed in intense urban warfare.
