Yay, boo, and wow time.
Yay to the 200 students from Cataline and Nesika schools who performed at the Up our Watershed! concert last Thursday. The kids were enthusiastic — their voices nearly blew the roof off the Gibraltar Room. Kudos to the performance team who kept everything moving smoothly, (no easy task given the numbers involved) and to Holly Arntzen and Kevin Wright from The Wilds who made it all possible. Well done. Only one downer — the Gibraltar Room simply wasn’t big enough for this event.
Boo: A few weeks ago B.C. Agriculture Minister Norm Letnick said he knew foreign companies are acquiring productive farmland and replanting it with trees in order to claim carbon credits, but apparently he had no idea how much land was involved. Turns out it’s something like 8,500 hectares (so far) and it’s to stay treed (no cutting) for 100 years. How does this benefit B.C.?
Incidentally, B.C. is the only western province that doesn’t have restrictions on foreign ownership of farmland.
Yay, boo or wow depending on your political outlook, but when Albertans get tired of their provincial government, they don’t mess around. Pigs must be flying and hell freezing over because the New Democrats got a majority government after 44 years of Conservative rule. That’s quite a switch. One reason given for the change is said to be the large increase in the number of voters. Young people maybe? Workers from other provinces?
Boo: Monthly employment numbers show Canada lost four times more jobs than expected in April. Meanwhile, Canada spends half a billion dollars creating auto sector jobs in U.S. and Mexico just as 1,000 General Motors workers are laid off in Canada.
Yay: It’s lilac time in the Cariboo. The lilac is Williams Lake’s official flower and a favourite of mine. The fragrant blossoms are gone in no time but the bushes seem to live forever under any circumstances.
Diana French is a freelance columnist for the Tribune. She is a former Tribune editor, retired teacher, historian, and book author.