Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse
Investors and speculators are taking prime agricultural land out of production – and sometimes erecting palatial mega-mansions on the landscape – as the B.C. government’s outdated tax system allows them to exploit incentives intended only for those who farm. Kathy Tomlinson reports
Source: Speculators buying B.C. farmland while exploiting tax breaks GLOBE AND MAIL
Even after the fall of the the Berlin Wall, it was possible to find apologists for communism who would insist that the political system responsible for immeasurable human suffering wasn’t inherently flawed. There was nothing wrong with communism, you see, it was the implementation that had failed. Professor Colleen Flood’s defence of Canada’s creaking state health-care monopoly in the Huffington Post last week has a similar air of unreality.
Written with the sententiousness of a party tract, but none of the revolutionary élan, I don’t expect many readers followed her plodding piece to its perfunctory end. Fortunately, you don’t have to get that far to see the problems with her argument (to use the word loosely): each of the first three sentences contains a factual inaccuracy, and the blog goes downhill from there.
The legal case that has agitated Professor Flood does not “challenge … the publicly funded Canadian health system,” nor does it “allege that medicare violates the Charter.” The plaintiffs’ constitutional challenge is straightforward: if the government does not provide timely medical treatment, then it cannot at the same time legally prohibit patients who are suffering on long wait lists from taking control of their own health care and arranging treatment privately.
Is it time for a moose tax?
Faced with declining game populations and the increasing complexities of wildlife management, people are starting to look at new funding models.
And a tax to help moose and other game animals might be one way to go.
A few years ago, in response to growing concerns that British Columbia’s moose numbers were in decline, the provincial government conducted 20 population surveys. The results were troubling. While in some places numbers were stable, in many regions moose numbers had declined by 50 per cent to 70 per cent.
Word quickly spread among the hunting community about which areas held the fewest moose, and soon there was a pile-on in regions that still had good numbers. That caused alarm in some First Nations communities, where people saw outsiders coming in to shoot moose that local families needed for winter food.