Six Things to Know about the BC Liberal Leadership Race

Here are six things you need to know about the race to replace Christy Clark, based on the rules the BC Liberal Party released Tuesday.

First, you better have money or some rich supporters if you even want to try for the job. It will cost you $50,000, payable to the party, to become a candidate. (Plus $10,000 that you’ll get back if the party doesn’t levy any fines for bad behaviour during the campaign.)

Second, it’s going to cost a lot more to win. The spending limit for candidates — on top of the entry fees — is $600,000. That’s a 33-per-cent increase from 2011 when Christy Clark won the leadership, and 71 per cent higher than the spending limit in the 2014 NDP leadership race. Candidates who jump into the race and raise enough money will be able to spend about $120,000 a month on their leadership campaigns. (Money, of course, does not guarantee success, as the BC Liberals proved in the May election. They spent $13.6 million compared to the NDP’s $7.9 million, and got just 1,566 more votes.)

Third, and further confirming the Liberals’ blindness to the public concern about its support for Wild West political fundraising, there are no limits on donations. If a developer or union or even foreign government wants to write a $500,000 cheque to try and get a friendly candidate elected, that’s OK with the Liberal party. The donation will eventually be disclosed — but not until 90 days after party members have voted to elect their new leader.

This free-for-all comes, remember, six months after the Liberals’ deathbed repentance Throne Speech pledged to ban corporate and union political donations and limit individual donations.

You can read the rest of the column at The Tyee.

Where are those Public Accounts? Delay should worry Liberals

The Liberals should be getting nervous about the long delay in releasing the Public Accounts and the Auditor General's review of government finances.

As part of the Liberals' self-destructive bid to hang on to power, then finance minister Mike de Jong broke precedent by releasing unofficial results for the fiscal year ending March 31. He claimed a $2.8 billion surplus, $1.3 billion higher than budgeted. (Showing the Liberals mean-spirited election platform was a matter of ideology, not economics.)

De Jong defended the unorthodox media event days before the government was set to lose a confidence vote, saying the real, certified numbers would be available in a matter of days. "The auditor general's office is advising they'll be in a position to issue the certificate next week," he said.

More than five weeks later, the Public Accounts still haven't been released; most years, they're public by mid-July. (Last year it was July 21.)

The province's auditor general has issued "qualified" approvals for the Liberal government's financial statements repeatedly, finding that they was not following proper Canadian accounting practices.

The delay could indicate that the Auditor General has found a more sympathetic ear in the new government or that the NDP has its own questions about Liberal financial practices and the claimed surplus.

Which would not be good news for a Liberal party that lost its way with a throne speech that abandoned any claimed principles and now may face questions about its financial competence.

Postmedia hits the wall

Last week's quarterly report from Postmedia was predictably grim.

Canada's largest newspaper company reported revenues had fallen 13.4 per cent from a year earlier. Plunging revenues have been a hallmark of Postmedia's six-year existence.

The corporation has slashed costs, but not enough to keep up with revenue losses. Postmedia took in $181 million in the quarter, $28 million less than the previous year. It cut operating costs by $21 million.

Operating income - the actual performance of the business - fell from $13 million to $6 million.

There are two key lessons from these numbers.

First, expect deeper cuts. What's happened so far hasn't been enough to keep up with falling revenues. And, or course, the cuts will lead to further revenue losses.

And second, note that for the first time - even after last year's debt restructuring - Postmedia's operating income of $6 million was less than its interest payments of $8 million.

In the short term, Postmedia can free up some cash to pay the interest. But the fundamentals, as they say, are dismal.

And the end, according to one-time newspaper baron Conrad Black, is clear.

"The bond holders control the company and are content to bleed it dry with the complicity of management. Bankruptcy is next," he said on Twitter.

Which Christy Clark response on the health firings is to be believed?

“I did ask a lot of questions at the time. The assurances that we all received was that these were absolutely justified and the right thing to do.”

- Premier Christy Clark, responding Friday to reporters' questions on the health firings.

"Premier Clark did not recall ever being briefed about the decision to terminate the employees."

- Ombudsperson Jay Chalke on Clark's evidence, under oath, taken as part of his inquiry.

So when, exactly, did Clark ask all these questions on firings she can't recall ever being briefed on? Who did she ask, and who provided these assurances?

And what should voters make of the conflict between her public claims and testimony under oath?

Is Vancouver the Jalisco Cartel's 'drug portal to the Pacific'?

Vancouver is making its mark as a major export centre in at least one area — international drug trafficking.

‘Drug Portal to the Pacific,’ an InSight Crime report on the rise of the Jalisco Cartel called the city. 

Cartel's 2015 ambush that killed 15 police officers

“The key to their rapid expansion has been the strategic presence of operations on the southeast border of the United States, next to Tijuana, and the northeast border, next to Vancouver, Canada,” the report said.

The role of Mexican Cartels in Canada isn’t new. In 2015 the Vancouver Sun’s Kim Bolan wrote  about the cartels’ increasing shift to having their own people on the ground in Canada, rather than dealing with Canadian intermediaries.

But the new report by Luis Alonso Pérez (originally done for Animal Politico a Mexican online publication) sets out how important Vancouver has been allowing the once-small Jalisco Cartel become “one of the most prolific and violent drug trafficking organizations in the world.”

It’s not just that Vancouver is a good place to land drugs destined for the U.S. and Canada. It’s become the transshipment point for drugs bound for the Pacific Rim, the article says.

The Jalisco ‘New Generation’ Cartel is a formidable player — combining business smarts, bribery and intimidation - it shot down a military helicopter -  and over-the-top violence, including mass murders. Last month, police blamed the cartel for 12 murders in Manzanillo, including seven people found decapitated in a taxi.

I started following InSight Crime after we moved to Honduras. It was almost the equivalent of a newspaper’s business pages in shedding light on the economy and politics of that country and its neighbours. I’ve found it consistently credible and useful over the last five years.

It’s also a journalistic success story. In 2010, two journalists launched the project with foundation funding. The focus was on crime in Latin America, from drugs to urban gangs to corruption and impunity. It’s going strong, in English and Spanish, with a broad funding base — including the Canadian government.

Donald Trump's stupid wall and Central America

There is no wall tall enough.

Even if you can leave aside the racism and the attempt to exploit and worsen fears and prejudices, Donald Trump's plan to build a wall along the Mexican border is remarkably stupid.

Early in our stay in in Honduras, I started hearing about the huge number of people who went to the United States. It was an incredibly difficult, dangerous and expensive effort. People set out with almost no money to make a 3,100-kilometre journey through Guatemala and Mexico and across the already difficult U.S. border. They risked robbery, kidnapping, rape, extortion and a lonely death in the desert. Many travelled on La Bestia, a Mexican freight train that carried hundreds of migrants.

I wrote about the journey here and here. The idea that a wall would deter people willing to risk death and sacrifice everything they had for a chance to spend a few years in the U.S. is idiotic.

As is Trump's failure to recognize the risk to U.S. interests created by his $15-billion wall plan.

Hondurans, for the most part, didn't want to move to the U.S. They wanted to spend three or four years working at the jobs no one wanted and sending money home, to pay for a better education for their children, a plot of land to farm or to start a small business. (In countries where employment is scarce and precarious, even a tiny business offers some security.)

Remittances - money sent back by Hondurans working in other countries - equals about 18 per cent of the GDP of Honduras, according to the World Bank. It's about 17 per cent for El Salvador, 10 per cent for Guatemala and nine per cent for Nicaragua (although much of that country's remittances come from people working in Costa Rica).

For comparison, the natural resource and sectors combined contribute 16 per cent of British Columbia's GDP.

The U.S. has fretted about security risks in Central America since the 1890s. And now Trump proposes a wall that, to the extent that it works, will destabilize economies and governments in the northern triangle — an already troubled region.

An unlikely buyer's arsenal of restricted weapons, and their journey to criminals' hands

My piece from The Tyee

Canada is supposed to have tough gun laws. So how did a struggling Courtenay man with affiliations to organized crime legally accumulate 49 restricted firearms?

And how did some of his weapons end up in the hands of criminals?

Bryce McDonald was sent to jail for three years and four months in November. The sentencing decisionwas posted on the BC Supreme Court website this month.

And Justice Robin Baird was puzzled by McDonald’s ability to get permits to buy so many weapons that are supposedly tightly controlled.

Especially as McDonald had first applied for a permit to buy a restricted weapon in 2006 and the federal firearms officer repeatedly rejected his applications over the next three years.

Not too surprisingly. McDonald was 24 then. He had been hit by a car when he was 19, and badly injured — fractured skull, broken bones. When he came to in hospital he remembered nothing about his life. He had to learn everything again — how to walk, talk, eat, care for himself. He suffered from chronic pain and the effects of his head injury, and lived on a “modest disability pension.” He had a dated conviction for uttering threats. And the firearms officer was troubled that McDonald had a medical marijuana grow licence. Restricted weapons and a grow op, even a legal one, were a bad combination, he thought.

But “for reasons which I have yet to grasp,” Baird said, in late 2009 the firearms officer changed his mind. He accepted McDonald’s argument that he was keen on the challenge of learning how to shoot a variety of guns on a range. McDonald got permission to buy restricted weapons, but was required to store them somewhere other than his home.

Restricted weapons are supposed to be hard to get. But McDonald, an unlikely candidate, seemed to have no problem building a formidable arsenal.

Canada has three classes of firearms. Non-restricted are the basic rifles and shotguns used for hunting or target practice or killing sick livestock on a farm. They are easy to get — a little safety training, a background check and four-week waiting period and you’re good to go.

Prohibited are automatic weapons, sawed off shotguns and easily concealed handguns, the kind of weapons criminals want. You can’t legally acquire them, though many owners were allowed to keep them under “grandfathering” provisions that covered existing weapons when gun laws were tightened in 1998.

And restricted weapons — most handguns, semi-automatic rifles, short-barrel shotguns, assault-style weapons — fall in between. You need a special permit to own them, and a reason — target shooting, gun collecting, your job or, rarely, protection. You have to take a course and undergo a more detailed background check, and there are rules about where you can store the weapons. McDonald was barred from keeping them in his home; he had to store them at a separate location.

But McDonald somehow passed all those hurdles. In 2009, according to evidence at his trial, he bought his first restricted weapon, a Springfield Armory XD45 Tactical Semi-Auto Pistol described in ads as “meant for law enforcement, home defence, field carry and tactical deployments.”

In 2010, he added three new guns to his collection, including a , described as “ideal for law enforcement, home defence or concealed carry.” It comes with a laser sight; just tag your target with the red dot and squeeze the trigger.

He bought nine more restricted weapons in 2011 and five in 2012. And in 2013, he bought 31 — 19 in three months, five handguns in one day on Sept. 9, 2013. No one checked to see why he was stockpiling so many guns, or if he still had them. (McDonald had said he wanted the restricted weapons because he liked the challenge of mastering different guns on the shooting range. The judge noted that the purchase of 10 Glock handguns — many the same or similar — hardly seemed consistent with that claim.)

Eight days after the five-gun purchase, things started to unravel. A Lower Mainland homicide squad got a tip about a bag of guns dumped in Surrey. A rifle turned out to be one of McDonald’s restricted weapons; he had never reported it missing, as required under the law.

Three months later — a period in which McDonald bought 13 more restricted weapons — police finally arrested him. They searched the designated storage location, and there were no guns. In his house, police found seven weapons. The other 42 weapons were missing — a “curious and sobering thing,” Justice Baird said. (In fact, the Canadian Firearms Centre had concerns about McDonald as early as March; their only response was to call him and accept his assurances that he was following the rules.)

McDonald suggested police must have taken them, or didn’t see them when they searched and left the doors of his house open and someone else stole them.

Then the guns started turning up at crime scenes — “more or less inevitably,” Baird noted.

On June 16, 2014, RCMP responded to a Burnaby home invasion. The suspects fled, but police found their vehicle — and a loaded Sturm Ruger semi-automatic handgun registered to McDonald. On June 21, the RCMP responded to shooting at Brentwood Mall in Burnaby. Weeks later a suspect turned himself in and handed over the gun he had used, another handgun from McDonald’s armoury.

In January 2015, Vancouver police arrested a man for shoplifting and found he was packing three Glocks, two from McDonald’s arsenal. In June a man was arrested driving a stolen vehicle in Vancouver. The suspect had two Glocks in a bag. They weren’t McDonald’s, but a search of the suspect’s home found a Beretta 96A1 handgun — offering “Ultimate Tactical Power,”according to the company — that he had purchased.

And in February this year, Calgary police investigating a violent home invasion found the suspects had another Glock from McDonald’s Courtenay collection.

All of which raises the question of just how restricted these weapons are if someone like McDonald can buy several dozens of them, ignore his permit requirements and come up with no explanation when they started showing up at crime scenes.

There are a lot of them out there. There were 796,000 restricted weapons in Canadian communities in 2015, according to the RCMP, 145,000 in British Columbia. (Plus 183,000 prohibited weapons.)

And the number of restricted weapons has increased dramatically — doubling from 399,000 in 2005. (There were 7.7 million legal guns in Canada in 2010.)

People who think it’s a bad thing to have twice as many restricted weapons in their neighbourhoods — whether in the hands of McDonald or some more responsible gun buff — tend to blame Stephen Harper. And the Conservative government did make it easier to own guns, including restricted weapons. It killed the long gun registry in 2012, and Bill C-42, passed in 2015, reduced the regulations on owning and transporting restricted weapons and reduced the ability of provincial firearms officers to control access.

And the Liberals so far have failed to deliver on their 2015 campaign promise to “take action to get handguns and assault weapons off our streets.” They pledged to repeal sections of C-42 that reduced regulations around transporting restricted and prohibited weapons, require enhanced background checks for people buying restricted weapons and implement regulations requiring dealers to mark guns so they were easier to trace.

So far, none of that has happened.

McDonald was sentenced to 40 months in penitentiary for failing to store his weapons properly. (He also was convicted for possessing brass knuckles and cocaine possession.)

But his guns are still out there. And so, presumably, are other people stockpiling arsenals of weapons that are supposed to be hard to get.

OK everybody, that sucked. Now, back to work

I confess to despair watching the U.S. election results last night. I turned off the television before 9:30 p.m., knowing Donald Trump would win but thinking I'd sleep better if there was the faint hope of a different outcome. (I didn't.) My partner refused to watch any of the coverage, choosing to work and play accordion while instructing me not to share any information.

I'm not usually deeply invested in election results, beyond a desire to see governments punished for bad, corrupt or insulting behaviour. There are important differences between parties but, broadly, the country or province won't generally be dramatically transformed in four years no matter who governs.

The U.S. election was different. And the results were profoundly troubling. Especially as I've spent a long time working as a journalist based on the belief that people, given good information, would make good decisions. That didn't happen.

I reflect on all that in my Tyee piece here.

Sorry, have we met? Adventures in face blindness

Have we met? You look familiar

The New Yorker ran a fascinating story about “super-recognizers,” focusing on a small Scotland Yard team whose skills let them identify suspects among hundreds of faces in the murkiest surveillance videos.

And it included a link to the Cambridge Face Memory Test, one of the tools used to assess officers’ ability to recognize faces. 

The test is about 20 minutes. At the end, you get your result, and this message. “The average score on this test is around 80 per cent correct responses for adult participants. A score of 60 per cent or below may indicate face blindness."

I scored 57 per cent. 

That’s hardly a surprise. I once spotted an acquaintance, a movie reviewer, at a repertory cinema. “Surprising to find you here in the evening, when it’s so similar to your work.” I said. “At least you won’t have to write about it.” I asked about the movie, him being an expert and all, and the entire conversation was based on his work and knowledge of film.

Except he wasn’t the movie critic, but one of his co-workers who looked vaguely like him and and must have struggled tremendously to follow my misdirected comments.

Bumping into another acquaintance at an art opening, I exchanged pleasantries while wondering why he seemed to be cowering in fear. My partner reminded me that I had berated him — with uncharacteristic venom — for an ethical failing a few months earlier. 

And too many times, in my corporate days, I introduced myself to someone at a schmoozing event, only to have him say “yes, I know, you introduced yourself to me 10 minutes ago.”

And those ignore the countless social blunders I never even recognized, and the ones too embarrassing to share.

I was relieved to learn six years ago that I wasn’t just inattentive or indifferent to others when Oliver Sacks wrote about his much more extreme case of prosopagnosia, as it is called, also in the New Yorker.

And it was useful to know that my earlier efforts to learn how to become better at remembering people’s names were doomed. If you don’t remember faces, you certainly can’t put names to them.

I can recognize people if they are part of my life, of course. Context helps tremendously, and so does distinctive appearance or clues like clothing or voices.

And name tags. I wish everyone had to wear name tags, or even better have their names tattooed on their foreheads. That would be a double win, as I could pretend to make eye contact while figuring out who they are.

On the positive side, I’m friendly. When introduced to someone with the common “Do you two know each other?,” I always nod enthusiastically, just in case. I smile at strangers, because they generally look vaguely familiar and might be someone I know. (And because I do believe greeting everyone cheerfully - common in Central America - is preferable to Victorians’ fierce determination to avoid all contact with anyone they encounter. My cheery greetings while walking just seem to alarm people here.)

Some cases of prosopagnosia, following a brain injury or stroke, are fairly easily understood. But the much more common developmental form continues to be mostly a mystery.

It’s hardly a giant disability, especially if you can develop skills to cope.

But our world does value social relationships, those networks of acquaintances and business associates and friends that ease the way through life. And people who can’t recognize people have a much harder time maintaining those loose relationships. And their - our - inability to recognize an acquaintance can seem rude or arrogant.

Sacks notes that up to 10 per cent of people are affected to some degree by face blindness, a rate similar to dyslexia. But, he adds, while we’re aware of the challenges facing dyslexic children, and their strengths, and providing supports, the problems of people with prosopagnosia are ignored.  

It’s not that a big deal for me. (Though, as the researchers note, I have no idea how other people see faces, so maybe it is and I just don't know it.) 

But I’m pretty smart and educated. I had the chance to develop all sorts of coping skills. I’ve figured out how to pretend I recognize people who seem entirely unfamiliar, and decipher identity clues. 

What about people without those advantages? Are they just bewildered and weirdly awkward, with all of the consequences that brings?

Maybe we can talk about this when next we meet. If I recognize you.

Postmedia's strange $50-million bet on Mogo

I wrote about information inequality for The Tyee this week, looking at what's happening as traditional news media fade to black and new business models emerge based on providing high-value information to people and organizations that can pay high prices.

You can read it here.

As part of the research I went through Postmedia's financial report on the last fiscal year, released last week.

It was grim, which is unsurprising given Postmedia's five years of failure to find a solution to the collapse of its business. Revenue down, no positive news and a strategy based on "aggressive and accelerated cost-cutting" and transforming the business model from "selling audience to selling performance marketing solutions and outcomes."

Which could apply to thousands of businesses, from one-person marketing firms to giant media companies, in all sorts of fields.

Postmedia's deal this year with Mogo Finance Technology represents an early attempt to sell "outcomes." In January, Postmedia announced it would provide $50 million worth of "media value" to Mogo over three years — $15 million this year. That's a big boost for a company that spent less than $11 million on marketing last year, but has dreams of becoming the Uber of consumer loans and personal finance.

If the ads and marketing works, Postmedia hopes to benefit from a revenue-sharing deal and a chance to buy Mogo shares at a fixed price.

But the revenue sharing, based on the information available, is likely to provide about $3.5 million to Postmedia this year — less than one-quarter of the value of the services it's providing to Mogo.

And any chance to cash in on an increase in the value of Mogo shares looks remote. Postmedia negotiated a deal that gave it the right to purchase 1.2 million Mogo shares at a price of $2.96, their value at the time of the deal.

Since then, Mogo's share price has fallen by more than 50 per cent, to $1.36. Postmedia's share options are worthless.

On one hand, at least Postmedia is trying something new.

But it is a little puzzling that a company that couldn't figure out its own business has decided it has the expertise to pick winners in entirely unrelated fields.

And while there is no cash at risk, Postmedia's commitment of $50 million in ads and services does involve both real costs and its reputation.

Combine Mogo's ad budget and the contribution from Postmedia and the small company has a marketing budget equal to BC Lotteries, which spent $26 million on advertising and marketing last year. That was enough to encourage British Columbians to lose $2.4 billion - $6.6 million a day - gambling.

If Postmedia's giant marketing contribution doesn't produce results — if you haven't heard of Mogo by now, for example — that undermines the corporation's claims of effectiveness.

Postmedia has already been slashing print advertising rates, down 16 per cent in the last two years, reflecting both its falling circulation and fierce competition from giants like Facebook and Google. If the $50-million boost for Mogo doesn't produce real results, it will be even harder to convince other companies Postmedia should be part of their marketing budget.

But what do I know? Postmedia's board extended CEO Paul Godfrey's contract Tuesday. It was to expire in 2018; now he's to stay on to the end of 2020. Despite five years of decline, an inability to deliver on plans to revitalize the business and massive losses in shareholder value, somebody thinks Godfrey remains the person to lead Postmedia into what is likely its brief future.

Coca in Peru and Colombia, and the stupidity of the war on drugs

"Why are Peru, Colombia Coca Numbers Going in Opposite Directions?"
That was the headline on a recent Insight Crime report. I am a fan of the site, which focuses on organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean, offering valuable reporting and analysis.
But the answer to the question posed in that headline seems obvious.
Cocaine demand isn't going down. Market forces mean suppliers will find ways to meet the demand.
So if Peru is producing less coca, the leaves that end up as cocaine, Colombia or some other country will be producing more.
And Peru is producing less, thanks to government eradication campaigns. "Peru has reduced coca cultivation by almost one-third in the last five years, according to figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and in 2015 the country registered the lowest amount of coca sown in the last 15 years," the website reports.
But across the border in Colombia, things are different. Colombia went through its own eradication campaigns, cutting coca cultivation in half between 2007 and 2012.
The graph with the article shows the result. As Peru's cultivation went down, Colombia's increased to help meet the global demand for cocaine.
In 2011, the two countries had about the same number of hectares under coca cultivation, for a combined total of 126,200.
Last year, Peru's cultivation had been reduced by about 22,000 hectares and Colombia's had increased by 32,000 hectares. The combined total was 136,300.
The article offers some explanations for the trends, including community resistance to eradication efforts in Colombia and the involvement of FARC's left-wing guerrillas in production.
But the underlying reality has been established through almost a century of failed, wildly expensive efforts to deal with drug issues by limiting supply.
Cut production in one area, and another country will increase production to fill the gap. Make it harder to get heroin, and users will turn to prescription opiates. Crack down on the availability of those drugs, and fentanyl emerges as a more deadly alternative.
Attacking the supply side of the drug equation didn't work when the U.S. introduced Prohibition to end alcohol sales in 1920. It hasn't worked in the 45 years since U.S. president Richard Nixon announced a war on drugs.
Yet governments, including Canada, continue the costly, futile and ultimately destructive efforts, ignoring the obvious evidence of their failure, and the terrible damage that has been done.

The sad story of the little railway that couldn't

I wrote about the Island Corridor Foundation and the E&N rail line for The Tyee.
You can read the piece here.

Letter from Managua: The working life

Our house has a room for a servant.

Well, not a room really. More like a cell. Nine feet long, less than six feet wide. There’s a single bed and sink, toilet and shower. A small window high up on one wall, three hooks to hang clothes.

We don’t have a ‘chica,’ the term generally used for the woman - usually young - who cleans the house, cooks meals and looks after the children.

Better a bad job than no job

In Honduras, Rosa came once a week to clean. Often, she brought her children. On cleaning days, I tidied the house before they got there and then went to buy soft drinks for her and any children who showed up. (I’m not using her real name.)

We didn’t need anyone to clean our small house. But Rosa was a single mom. Her husband, her charming nine-year-old daughter told me soon after we met, drank too many beers, dove into the river near their tiny house, hit his head on a rock and died. We visited their house just before we left - two rooms, dirt floor, concrete block walls, wood cooking fire, water from a tap just down the hill, broken treadle sewing machine out the back. Rosa had taken a sewing course and invited us to her graduation, where she wore a pale blue satin dress she had made. 

Here in Nicaragua, house cleaners are entitled to a minimum wage of $235 a month Canadian. That’s for a six-day work week, 12 hours a day. About 75 cents an hour. And employers can deduct up to 50 per cent for room and board.

We don’t need, or want a cleaner. I’d feel guilty about paying too little, foolish paying too much for a service I didn’t even want and hate the idea of sharing our house. But I know the job, poorly paid or not, would have been welcomed by someone.

A Cuso International placement plunks you into the middle of life in another country. You move beyond the statistics about GDP per capita ($42,000 in Canada and $4,500 here) and begin to understand what it means to live in a poor country. 

The Nicaraguan government sets minimum wages for different types of jobs. They increased eight or nine per cent this year, a jump that met the business community’s desire to avoid double-digit raises, but reflected the need to increase incomes, a six-per-cent inflation rate and the fact this is an election year.

The highest paid category - people who work in construction or financial institutions - has a minimum salary of $335 a month. Agricultural workers have a minimum wage of $150, government workers about $190. 

Some people are paid above the minimum wage, of course. But most are paid less. About 70 per cent of Nicaraguans work in the informal economy and minimum wages and other labour rules don’t apply. 

It’s a poor country. Second poorest in the hemisphere, according to the World Bank, ahead of perpetually lowest-ranked Haiti. And I have seen really poor people, living in houses of sticks and mud, sometimes worse.

But there are people with money here. We can walk to a mall and see a movie in a theatre nicer than any in Victoria. People line up for $4 lattes, and restaurants with prices in American dollars do well. Another mall has just completed a $36 million expansion with some flashy clothes stores. I’m going to buy a few shirts from Pull and Bear before we head to Canada. 

Partly, the issue is inequality. In Canada, the people in the top 20 per cent have an average income about six times as great as the people in the bottom 20 per cent. In Nicaragua, they have an average income 11 times higher. 

All of which makes development work interesting. A focus on getting people into the labour market isn’t necessarily productive, given low wages and limited opportunity. CATIE, my organization, is working on increasing incomes and food security for rural agricultural families. That makes sense.

More than one-third of Nicaraguans have a different solution in mind. A survey last month found 36 per cent of Nicaraguans were interested in emigrating. (Down from 52 per cent a year ago.) But they don’t want to stay away - more than 60 per cent of those interested in emigrating saw it as a way to make enough money to come home and start a business (38 per cent), pay debts or buy a house, or as an opportunity to study and improve their skills before returning to Nicaragua.

Which suggests Canada’s biggest development contribution could be opening the door a bit wider for people just looking for a chance to get ahead.

All in all, I'd rather have cheap, bad buses

I've begun to treat my bus ride to work as a sign of how the day is going to go.
If I have an OK seat, not too crunched, and arrive not limping, I bounce away from the bus singing. Nod cheerily to the man with the wire cages full of puppies and the two guys who spend their days turning pallets into furniture by the side of the road.
It's an easy commute. I walk about 10 minutes to the Carreterra Masaya, the main road south out of Managua. Cross to a bus stop and wait.
A lot of buses are going my way, heading to towns in the south and passing my office about five km down the road. I rarely wait more than five minutes.
About a quarter of the time I'm on "la famosa banquita," as a newspaper described the little bench on the right in the photo above. It's less than ideal. The roof is often so low my chin is resting on my chest, and we passengers intertwine knees in an intimate way.
Those little benches are apparently illegal, the newspaper revealed this week.
The real surprise to me was that there are are rules. I thought it was a free-for-all. Buses cram in as many people as they can, stack freight on the roof or in the aisle. Seats are always ripped out and replaced with smaller versions, closer together. In Canada, I'm average size. On the buses, I am Andre the Giant. And the only gringo.
La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario reported this week that bus drivers in the north are angry they are being fined for having passengers standing in the aisle or sitting on that little bench, and for carrying too much freight or speeding.
I had no idea standing was prohibited. I can choose between three bus types most days. Minivans of varying sizes. Aged school buses. And those airport-shuttle-sized minibuses.
The shuttle buses are the worst. The aisles are about 10 inches wide, literally, and the ayudantes - the conductors who collect the money and encourage people into the bus at each stop - cram them with people. The process of fighting my way off, brushing bums and stepping on feet, begins to worry me long before my stop.
The minivans, if you wait for one with some space, are fine. Less so if people, doubled over under the low roof, are standing in every available spaces.
The aged school buses are slow and wrecked, but cheaper - 35 cents compared to 50 cents for the other two options - and they aren't crowded. A status thing, I think. Though they too have been reworked, seats replaced to allow more rows.
None of them have ever seemed to operate under any rules. People are jammed in relentlessly and even if you have a seat someone's sweaty stomach - or worse - will be resting on you shoulder, a baby balanced on your head, a satchel in your face.
In Belize, a somewhat more orderly country with rules against standing passengers, we were on a bus approaching a police checkpoint. The driver called out "Down." Everyone standing in the aisle crouched in a choreographed movement worth of Busby Berkeley and we sped through looking like a bus full of seated people.
That wouldn't work here. It is often impossible to move, let alone pretend to be seated.
The bus drivers say that if the police are going to start enforcing the rules, bus fares are going to have to increase 35 per cent
That seems reasonable. Bus prices are cheap, less than $3 Canadian for the 90-km trip to Leon. That's partly because they carry a lot of people and speed sometimes. Take that away, and prices will go up.
It's hard to criticize the government for working on bus safety. The boat disaster brought attention to the whole transportation issue.
And there have been a few bad bus crashes too. This week, Pedro García Urbina was sentenced to one to four years in jail. His bus ran off the road Jan. 21. Eight people died, 66 were hurt and the court found he was speeding and the bus was overcrowded and badly maintained. (I don't know how fair the justice system is, but it's quick. Crash Jan. 21, guilty verdict less than six weeks later.)
I've had a few bad drivers, and obviously bad buses. It's very unpleasant to stand for four hours.
But mostly, the service is fast and acceptable.
And affordable.
All in, my stipend as a volunteer is about 10 per cent below B.C. minimum wage. My daily commute this month will me cost me less than $20. Somebody being paid minimum wage will pay $85 to take the bus to work in Victoria.
Today, I crossed the highway from work and was on a minibus in about three minutes. The interior was full, and I ended up in the front, arm out the window, watching to try and catch volcano Momotombo exploding.
Not today.
Postscript: Managua has a city bus system too, 12 cents with an electronic pass card, 25 cents if you're paying cash. My partner Jody Paterson wrote about her commute here.

Nothing like a boat disaster to help you think about risk

I've been thinking about my sense of travel risks since last week's boat disaster.
Pangas - heavy fibreglass open boats, generally with a couple of big outboards - run between Corn Island and Little Corn Island, off the Nicaraguan mainland in the Caribbean. The airport is on Corn Island, a lot of people want to stay on quieter Little Corn and the boats ferry people the 15 kms between the two.
A sometimes bumpy ride, as my writer friend Matt Jones describes here.
On Jan. 23, the winds had prevented sailings for at least a day, and tourists were getting impatient. A group of Costa Rican travellers stranded on Little Corn arranged a trip with Captain Hilario Blandón, who ended up with 32 passengers on board, plus his helper.

It went wrong. About five kms from Little Corn, three waves hit the boat. The first rocked it and all the passengers slid to one side, sending the boat into a dangerous list. A second wave dumped them in the water. A third flipped the boat.
Twenty-one people were rescued. Thirteen died.
After four years in Central America, I can easily imagine myself standing on the dock on Little Corn, impatient to head to to the next destination. Checking out the boat, deciding the captain knew what he was doing and climbing on board.
You get used to sketchy transportation options in poor countries. Crowded, beat-up buses with bald tires and texting drivers, or a four-hour ride on a plank seat in the open back of a truck. Perhaps too used to them.
Early in our time in Honduras, Cuso International was worried about security as the murder rate became the highest in the world. I helped with a survey of volunteers about their concerns.
Transportation was the big issue, not crime. Bad roads, poorly maintained vehicles, unreliable buses.
I've only been alarmed a few times by bus drivers who seemed to have crossed some line of basic sense.
But the boat disaster was a good reminder that you're responsible for your safety here.
The captain might not know what he's doing. The boat might not have enough life jackets or they might be homemade and useless, as they apparently were in this case.
The whole trip might be in defiance of safety warnings. (Some news stories have said the naval authorities had ordered boats not to sail; others say that's not true. The captain and helper have been charged with negligent homicide.)
The reality is that if you were super security conscious and paid attention to every warning you probably wouldn't leave your house.
I don't think we're reckless, but we do rely a lot on instinct when it comes to walking or taking a cab, leaping onto a jammed bus or waiting, or deciding whether to pay for a tour or accept the challenge of standing by a dark highway at night hoping a bus comes along.
But the boat disaster is a good reminder not to get too comfortable.
That happens. A Danish traveller almost had his backpack taken on a bus, until Nicaraguans warned him about the departing thief. We talked, and he said he had been on the road for almost two months. He never would have been so inattentive in his first few weeks, he said, but everything had gone so well.
I expect it's like that in assessing other risks too. Nothing goes wrong, so you are more inclined to leap from the dock into the boat. Which might explain how we ended up hitchhiking on a deserted road at dusk in Honduras, having counted on buses that didn't run in the late afternoon. Oh, and with grandchildren.
That turned out fine. We piled into the back of a suspiciously expensive truck and were back in town in about 45 minutes. You can, mostly, count on the kindness of strangers.
It's an interesting balance for travellers, or people living in a different country.
Not careful enough, and you might get hurt. Too careful, and you miss out on great experiences.
The disaster sent the Nicaraguan authorities into a belated boat safety campaign. They shut down the three main boats sailing to the island of Ometepe, a popular tourist destination in Lake Nicaragua - or Cocibolca, as it was named by indigenous people. It took two days for the owners to scrounge up life jackets and other safety equipment, as angry tourists and locals sat on the docks.
We took the boat to Ometepe last year. It seemed safe enough sitting in the sun on the top deck. But I didn't really think about how I'd get to a life jacket as we bounced through the waves.
Maybe next time I will.
But I'll still probably climb off the dock and on to the boat.

A tale of three newspapers: Nanaimo, Guelph and Kelowna. Two closed, one survives

The Guelph Mercury was selling about 9,000 papers in a metro area of 155,000 people. It closed.
The Nanaimo Daily News was selling about 5,000 papers in a market of about 100,000.
Gone.
But the Kelowna Daily Courier, selling about 8,900 papers in a market of 180,000, survives.
What's different, besides the normal variations in markets?

In Guelph and Nanaimo, the same company owned both the daily newspaper and the community newspaper.
Metroland, a Toronto Star subsidiary, could close the Guelph Mercury knowing it would capture much of the ad revenue with its twice-weekly. Maybe even raise rates once the main print competitor was gone.
Black Press has the same control in Nanaimo, thanks to its deal to trade papers with Glacier Media a little over a year ago.
But in Kelowna, Black Press owns the three-times-a-week Capital News. David Radler owns the daily. And he shows no interest in closing it.
The future is bleak for daily newspapers in markets like these. In Nanaimo and Kelowna, the population has grown as people from away, as they say in Saint John, decided it was a good place to retire. They're not much interested in local news. (In fact, if they had a strong commitment to community, they wouldn't have picked up and left friends and family behind.)
But it's a lot bleaker when one owner has been able to eliminate competition between the community and daily newspapers.
The federal Competition Bureau has been useless in this area. It has primarily considered whether advertising rates will rise as a result of merger or acquisition. (Marc Edge looked at the Competition Bureau and newspapers in a Tyee piece.)

Ralph Sultan's very odd letter of instruction to Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant voters

Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant, when Ralph Sultan lived there

Odd.
That's the only way I can describe MLA Ralph Sultan's letter on The Tyee website.
The Tyee published a piece on the Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant provincial byelection, profiling the candidates. The Liberal hopeful, Gavin Dew, didn't respond to interview requests. So no quotes from him. (Disorganized campaign? A strategic decision? Just one of those things? Who knows.)
Sultan was disappointed that his former campaign manager - Dew has been active in the BC Liberals and Vancouver´s NPA - wasn't in the article. Sultan wanted to help his campaign. So he wrote a letter, which The Tyee graciously published.
It might seem strange, he acknowledged, that the MLA for West Vancouver-Capilano was telling people in Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant how to vote. Sultan's riding is the wealthiest in B.C. - half the households have incomes over $100,000. Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant has the lowest incomes in the province - less than half the level of Sultan's constituents.
"What on earth would the sitting member for West Vancouver-Capilano (me) presume to say to the citizens of Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant?" Sultan asked in his letter.
A very good question.
Sultan says his roots are in the riding. He grew up there.
But a quick look at his bio confirms he lived in the riding in the 1930s and 1940s.  A lot has changed since then.
Sultan's letter says voters in the riding shouldn't worry about income assistance and disability rates that leave many of their neighbours in poverty. The Liberals are redeveloping St. Paul's Hospital and had a conference on the tech industry and Chinatown is doing well. They have done well on jobs and economic growth. (One of those things people probably judge based on their own experiences.)
I can't imagine how Sultan's intervention from the heights of West Van or the Liberal offices in the legislature will help Dew. Sultan is hardly a household name. His qualifications are impressive and frequently cited - Harvard PhD and professor, former chief economist for the Royal Bank, successful mining career.
But it's harder to point to highlights from his record as an MLA over the last 15 years. He was appointed to cabinet in 2012, and dropped nine months later.
Maybe there have been big contributions behind closed doors. But based on the public record, Sultan is  unlikely to sway many voters in Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant with tales of yore and recounting of generic party platform material.

Postscript
Dew's campaign bio sets out his educational background in a way that suggests he followed in Sultan's footsteps at Harvard.
"He went on to complete an MBA at Oxford and study crisis management at Harvard," the bio says.
Except he only spend six days at Harvard, in a continuing education course, as Andrew MacLeod reports here.
It's hard to say if a six-day course really justifies the claim. I did a 10-day course at a fancy business school in France, but would feel like a fraud if I claimed I went on to "study management there."

The Sparwood 'Bogeyman' who slipped through the cracks

From my piece in The Tyee today.

Randall Hopley, the Sparwood bogeyman, was back in the news last week.

Hopley is the scrawny loner who grabbed three-year-old Kienan Hebert from his bed and held him for four days in 2011. Hopley then eluded a massive RCMP manhunt and snuck Kienan, unhurt, back into the family home, leaving him snugly wrapped in a blanket. It took another three days for police to catch Hopley.

It was a rare story that justified the news media cliché "every parent's worst nightmare." Kienan was a cute kid from a caring family. Hopley was a 46-year-old loner with a long criminal record who lived in a trailer and drove a clapped out 24-year-old Toyota. Police released pictures that showed an unshaven man with blotchy skin and a bad haircut.

But Hopley was also a perfect example of how badly things can go when we don't do anything to deal with a little kid's problems and just boot him into the world.

The kidnapping was one of the chapters in Dead Ends: B.C. Crime Stories, my book published last year. (Available in fine bookstores or through Amazon and Chapters.) The story was gripping. But so was Hopley's sad life.

Check out the rest of the column here.

Letter from Managua: Bright lights, poor country

If you’re in a window seat, you probably see the giant yellow trees of life before you land in Managua.

They’re hard to miss. About 21 metres tall - imagine a five-storey building - and 13 metres across, 17,000 bright yellow lights on each one. Some 134 and counting are scattered across Managua - in the centre of rotondas (roundabouts), in boulevards and in a dense array along Avenida Bolivar, the main street leading down to the lakefront.

‘Que bonita,’ we said to our taxi driver as we drove past the trees one night early in our stay a year ago. 

He grunted. A lot of people without electricity in their houses, he said, and the government is putting up pretty trees. Who’s paying the bills to keep the lights on? What do they cost? 

Good questions, and the first indication that the trees - pretty as they are - were not universally beloved.

The trees are a pet project of Rosario Murillo, the wife of President Daniel Ortega. Murillo, who is also communications minister and the only spokesperson for the government, is interesting - educated in England and Switzerland, a revolutionary and a poet who appears in public draped in flowing scarves and a dizzying number of bracelets, necklaces and rings.

Murillo had the first eight metal trees put up in 2013 for the annual rally to celebrate the 1979 Sandinista victory and and the resignation of Antonio Somoza. The design is based Gustav Klimt’s 1905 painting of the tree of life, a powerful image. 

Since then, Murillo has kept on planting the metal trees around around the city. The

Rotonda Hugo Chavez near our old house had three of them and a giant illuminated portrait of the late Venezuelan president, a benefactor of Nicaragua.

When we returned from Canada in September, a new copse of trees had appeared in different colours. The bright yellow has been joined by greens and blues and reds and purples. 
There is a small forest in the new waterfront park on Lake Managua, and the push is on to have more ready by December and La Purisma - celebrating the conception of Mary - and Christmas. On our way home from a play last week, we spotted the white-hot lights as welders assembled more trees in a field near the central square.(Why is there a field near the central square? A 1972 earthquake flattened the city and aid that was supposed to support rebuilding was stolen by the Somozas. Managua was rebuilt in a sprawling, decentralized way. Some 43 years after the earthquake, the old cathedral on the main square is still unsafe to enter.)
La Prensa, one of the two main newspapers, has been taking a critical look at the trees of life. The stories noted the cost, at $25,000 U.S. each, is now about $3.4 million. The electricity bill is about $1.1 million a year, La Prensa said. 

That’s a lot of money in a poor country. At least 30 per cent of Nicaraguans live in poverty. Probably more. About 22 per cent of the population didn’t have electricity in 2012, according to the World Bank.

La Prensa found experts to say what could have been done with the money spent on the electric trees - replant the region around Managua with real trees, or bring electricity to thousands of homes.

I understand politics in Canada. I figured out the politics of Honduras in about six months.

But Nicaragua is more complex. 

The media aren’t much help. The newspapers are anti-Ortega. La Prensa, in every story that mentions Ortega, refers to him as the “unconstitutional president.” (The constitution limited presidents to one term; that was changed to allow Ortega to continue to govern. He’s on his third term.) The TV stations are largely pro-government. 

There are big protests, especially about the government’s plan to let a Chinese billionaire build a canal across Nicaragua to compete with the Panama Canal. But a Cid Gallup poll last month found 66 per cent of Nicaraguans gave Ortega a positive approval rating. The opposition is divided and, from my perspective as a visitor, ineffectual.

And after 36 years, Daniel Ortega’s role as leader of the Sandinista revolution is still powerful. We rented a house in Leon earlier this year. There was a little red and black concrete monument, a couple of feet tall, that said our neighbourhood was called the Barrio 4 de Mayo, in honour of four young men dragged from their homes by Somoza’s National Guard and killed on May 4, 1979, barely two months before the revolution triumphed. 

Our neighbour told Jody how her two brothers were executed in the street, where children now played.

Maybe Ortega has disappointed. Maybe the trees are a wasteful extravagance. But many Nicaraguans remember how it used to be, in the days when death came in the night.

Murillo seemed unchastened by the media attention. More trees would be going up, bringing “beauty, colour and love” to Managua, she told the media.

Clark scandal is about corruption and an attack on democracy, not just FOI

In my long-ago days running newspapers, we were preparing - once again - for a trip to the Labour Relations Board for some sort of hearing.
Our labour lawyer had come over from Vancouver as we sorted through the documents we were legally required to disclose to the union's lawyer in advance of the hearing.
The HR vice-president from Toronto who was 'helping' with negotiations and strategy came across a note she had scribbled on a scrap of paper - a few words, a thought during a meeting.
"I don't have to disclose that," she said. "It's practically a doodle."
And the lawyer, very pleasantly, told her that she did have to disclose and he wasn't going to stand for anything less than total adherence to the rules.
I'd always like him. I liked him more after that.
Which provides context for my Tyee column on the Liberal government's willingness to break the law to protect its own interests.
In the column, I write:
"The state has immense power, and politicians and their operatives are motivated to wield that power to protect their own interests. Citizens, ultimately, are protected by the rule of law. If the state's agents put themselves above the law, citizens have lost the most important thing standing between them and oppression."
That's what is at stake in this case.
You can read the column here.