Not To Be Trusted With Knives

The last time I was in Ottawa, Sarah and Dave’s attempt to bring me to the Diefenbunker was thwarted by holiday closure of said bunker. On this trip, to make it up to me, Ottawa gave Sarah & me free admission! More specifically, the Ottawa Public Library offered free admission and Sarah, a regular at said Library, picked up said free passes so that she and I could enjoy all the awesomeness of Canada’s Cold War Museum for free, free, free! Poor Dave couldn’t join us as he had to work, like a sucker!

The Diefenbunker, which operated from 1959 to 1994 as previously alluded to, is Canada’s Cold War Museum. More specifically, it is a bunker that was built, under the government of Prime Minister Diefenbaker – who you may remember from my Prime Ministerial series as the blog posting guest written by the aforementioned Sarah – as a place that prominent Canada politicians – along with all the gold in the Bank of Canada – could go in the event that Ottawa got nuked with an atomic bomb. Back in those days, everyone was sure that it was pretty much inevitable that such a thing would happen, so a series of bunkers were built across the country, with the biggest and most elaborate one being the Diefenbunker, locate 30 km west of Ottawa and intended for the Prime Minister, the Governor General, various federal Ministers and military big wigs. The idea was that they wanted to ensure that Canada could be re-built and governed after a nuclear attack and so they needed the people with the power to do that to be kept safe in this bunker. Plus they needed the money to do it – hence the giant vault built to house all the gold from the Bank of Canada¹.

Of course, such a bunker system was only useful in the event that there was enough forewarning of a nuke on its way that all these important people could be brought to the bunker before the bomb hit. Which was true when they started building the bunker – the delivery of bombs via plane from Russia at that time would have been slow and there would have been several hours warning of such a bomb on its way. By the time it was finished, that wasn’t really true anymore, but that didn’t stop the bunker from being staffed for many years after it was built! In fact, it was operated until 1994.

After decommissioning, the bunker was turned into a museum and much to the surprise of even the people running it as a museum, people were clamouring to see it! I mean, how often do you get to see the inside of a previously secret government facility like that? If you ever find yourself in Ottawa, I highly recommend you check it out. It feels like walking onto the set of a movie about the Cold War² and I had to keep reminding myself, “no, this is the real deal!”

Also, in a move that I can only imagine coming from a guy like him, Dief never once set foot in the Diefenbunker. At some point, he was told that should he need to go to the bunker, he would not be allowed to bring his wife with him. The bunker was built to accommodate the government officials and bureaucrats deemed necessary, along with the support staff needed to run the bunker³, plus two CBC radio personalities who could broadcast messages in familiar and comforting voices to those left up on the ground – around 500 people in total – and stocked with enough food to sustain those people for 30 days (at which point it was felt that it would be safe to go back outside). If all those people were allowed to bring spouses (and not even their kids), it would need to be twice as big and stocked with twice as many supplies – and that just wasn’t feasible. And it was decided that if everyone else in the bunker was leaving their spouse behind, how could the Prime Minister not do the same? Dief decided that he wouldn’t leave his wife behind to get nuked and so he boycotted the facility, refusing to ever step foot into it.

Another interesting story that the tour guide told us was what happened to all the other bunkers around the country. When the bunkers were decommissioned, the government had to figure out what to do with them. After all, they couldn’t all be museums – and truly it’s just the Ottawa one that was really big and decked out – so what do you do with a series of underground bunkers designed to withstand a nuclear bomb? At first, they figured they could sell them to recoup some of the costs of building them all, and they sold one of the bunkers to a farmer. A farmer who proceeded to sell the bunker to some Hell’s Angels, who used it as a clubhouse! Realizing that they didn’t want the bunkers to fall into the hands of just anybody and that they could control what happened to them once they sold them off, they bought the bunker back from the HA and proceeded to fill them all up with concrete!

The next time you find yourself in Ottawa, I highly recommend a trip to the Diefenbunker!  They have guided tours as well as self-guide audio tours – we did the guided tour, which was cool because you can ask their tour guide questions and find out things that might not be on the audio version, and then after your guided tour you are free to roam around and check out the different exhibits!

1. When we were talking about our trip to the Diefenbunker later at Sarah’s parents house, Sarah’s dad said his favourite part of this is that if the bunker ever needed to be used, it would take hundreds of people to get all the gold from the Bank of Canada in Ottawa onto a train, ship it to the bunker, and then load it all into the vault in the bunker. And then those men would be sent back on that train to Ottawa to wait to get nuked! [↩]
2. and, in fact, it as used as a set for The Sum of All Fears, because where else are you going to find a nuclear bunker that you can film your movie in? [↩]
3. think cooks, doctors, nurses, mechanics, etc. [↩]

Hey, remember a million zillion years ago when I was working on a series of postings about BC Premiers, posting about one premier each Sunday? Yeah, apparently neither did I. But with the convergence of needing to come up with a new blog posting topic every day this month AND the big news of Gordon Campbell quitting this week¹, I thought it was high time to resurrect, yet again, this series that I seem to keep letting fall off my plate.  I only have four premiers left (until the BC So-Called Liberals pick a replacement for Gordo), so surely I can keep this up for the next four Sundays, right?

OK, so when we last left off in our series, Premier Mike Harcourt had resigned the position. Enter Glen Clark, the 30th Premier of the Province of British Columbia.

• Glen Clark is a controversial guy, as evidenced by the fact that his Wikipedia page is a mess of “this page’s neutrality is disputed” and “you need actual sources to back up this shit, yo.” And since I’m far too lazy to do any real research, take anything I write here with a giant grain of sodium chloride.
• 1986: elected to the BC Legislature
• served as Finance Minister under Premier Mike Harcourt and when Harcourt resigned in 1996, Clark was elected by the NDP to succeed him
• 1996: Clark won an NDP majority government, did stuff like keeping tuitions fees frozen and something about Vancouver Island and Skytrain
• And since BC politics loves scandals, there were two “scandals” during Clark’s reign:
  • The “Fast Ferries” – some new, faster ferries were built for BC ferries, but they cost way more than expected, took longer than they were supposed to and never quite went as fast as they were supposed to³.
  • “Casinogate” – Glen Clark’s house and officer were searched by the RCMP in 1999 in relation to accusations that Clark had accepted $10,000 worth of renos in exchange for granting a casino license. He was charged with “breach of trust,” a criminal offence, but in the end was not found guilty. Essentially, the judge said that he’d done something stupid, but not done anything criminal.
• Clark resigned as premier in 1999 in light of the “Casinogate” scandal.
• currently works as an “Executive Vice President” for the Jim Pattison Group and president of The News Group North America.”

In summary, Glen Clark did some stuff and then people got mad at him and then he quit.

References:

• Wikipedia, the reference of champions

Footnotes:

1. for his mug shot when he got arrested for driving drunk in Hawaii, click here [↩]
2. Nanaimo a.k.a., “Surrey by the Sea,” and the home of the deliciousness that is the Nanaimo Bar [↩]
3. if memory serves, they went fast, but then it took a long time to dock them because they didn’t quite match up with the docks correctly, so after all the time and money spent on the new ferries, your ferry trip wasn’t any shorter than it was with the old ferries [↩]

So lately I’ve been reading a fair bit about the real estate market. As a kid, I was brought up to believe that when you grow up, you buy a house – after all, it makes more sense for the money you spend on housing to go into an asset you will own, as opposed to going into someone else’s pocket, right? I was also brought up to believe that education was very important and so I spent the first eleven years of my adult life pursuing that¹. And the idea of buying real estate never even entered into the realm of possibility in those years, as I barely had enough combining jobs, scholarships, bursaries, and student loans to get by, let alone even think about investing in anything. And since I graduated, my financial focus has mainly been on repaying my crushing student loan debt and trying to build some semblance of an RRSP/pension – and, in the last two years, putting money into my Tax-Free Savings Account.  And though I’ve been pretty good at finding cheap rent, it’s always in the back of my mind that “you are putting money in someone else’s pocket!”  Hence, the thinking about, and reading about, the real estate market.

I mean, I knew that the prices of homes in Vancouver are absolutely nuts, but when I started to read more about it, I was surprised to learn how truly, ridiculously, extremely nuts they are.  A general rule for “affordable housing” is that your housing costs (including taxes and insurance) shouldn’t be more than 30% of your gross income. For example, if you make $50,000 per year, you shouldn’t spent more than $15,000 on your mortgage, property taxes, and insurance. Another way of looking at it is that, to be affordable, houses shouldn’t cost more than three times your annual salary². Again, if you made $50K per year, your house shouldn’t cost more than $150K. And the thought of a $150K home anywhere near the Vancouver Lower Mainland is laughable. Even our shoebox-sized condos cost double that! Personally, I make more than $50K, especially when I have teaching gigs and contract work on top of my annual salary, and there’s no way I could find a home in this area that costs less than three times my annual income (and that’s not even counting my $1000/month student loans payments thrown into the mix).

And it’s not just me. Over on the Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive blog (which I’ve been following for a little while), they posted a couple of graphs that illustrate the insanity of the market. This one illustrates exactly what I’m talking about:

Dashed lines = salaries (in % increase) and solid lines = home prices (also in % increase).  It doesn’t take a statistician to see that home prices have shot up dramatically compared to income. According to Stats Canada, the median family income in Vancouver in 2007³ was $66,330.  That’s *family* income, not individual salaries.  And according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, the “benchmark” price for a property⁴ in Greater Vancouver is ~$577,000. The benchmark price for a detached home is just less than $800,000, and the benchmark price for an apartment is ~$386,000.  So we are talking about nearly 9 times the median annual salary to buy a “typical” home, and 12 times to buy a typical detached house. Even to buy just an apartment, it’s almost 6 times the annual median salary – twice as much as an “affordable” home should cost.  Ouch.

And it’s this crazy house price-to-salary ratio that have people talking about a housing bubble, poised to burst. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently issued a report that Canada is in the middle of a housing bubble. Then the C.D. Howe Institute issued a report that says the opposite⁵.  Though I’m not an economist by any stretch, I just look at these numbers and wonder how on earth people are buying houses?  Of course, low interest rates on mortgages (using very low down payments) have allowed people to do it, and lots of people are saying that it is rich foreign investors and/or drug dealers⁶ who are buying up the over-priced real estate.  But seriously, why would rich foreign investors continue to buy – and drive up the price of – Vancouver real estate when real estate in the US is so cheap?  And once mortgage rates go up, won’t those people who could only afford their mortgages because the interest rates were rock bottom be in trouble?  And if those same people put down only 5-10% as a down payment, and then prices drop by more than that (as is being predicted by some), won’t they owe more on the house than they could get even if they sold it?

As I have no interest in buying something that I can’t afford, especially given that the value of the “asset” in question could drop considerably (after all, it’s not putting money in your own pocket if the price of your house drops well below how much you owe on the mortgage), my plan is to continue to wait this thing out. I still have a fair way to go until my stupid student loans are paid off anyway, so I’ll just continue on my path of paying those down, balanced with putting some money aside in savings⁷ and emergency savings⁸.  Of course, if my dad would just win the lottery like he keeps telling me he is going to, all of this wouldn’t matter!

Image Credits:

• First image: stock.xchng.
• Graph: VREAA

Footnotes:

1. perhaps I took my mom’s saying of “more education is never a bad thing” a little too literally? [↩]
2. I know I’ve heard this somewhere, but can’t seem to find a reliable source to link to on it. If someone out there has a good link – or if you think I’m totally mis-remembering it, hit me in the comments section! [↩]
3. the most recent number I came across [↩]
4. where “benchmark” = a typical property in the region [↩]
5. I would have linked to the C.D. Howe report directly, but their website is down right now, so I’ve not been able to read the report myself, only the news reports about the report [↩]
6. the latter who, presumably, aren’t reporting their actual incomes, thus making the estimates of income lower than they should be [↩]
7. granted, it’s not like I’m making scads of money in my RRSPs and TFSAs, given how much the market sucks, but I’m doing OK, considering [↩]
8. ‘cuz you never know when you might need it! [↩]

Spotted on a mailbox downtown:

Props to Kalev for bringing this hilariousness to my attention!

The 28th Premier of the Province of British Columbia and the first female one ever!

• the first – and so far, only – female premier of BC
• before getting into politics – and I’m not making this up – she ran a Surrey trailer park.  Actually, according to Wikipedia she ran a “successful trailer park.”  I’m curious as to what criteria are used to judge whether or not a trailer park is “successful”
• 1969: elected to Surrey city council where she served under then-mayor (and future premier) Bill Vander Zalm
• 1975: lost election for Surrey mayorship by fewer than 100 votes
• 1983: elected as the MLA for Surrey
• 1986: served in cabinet, yet again under the Zalm, in the following positions:
  • 1986: Minister of Municipal Affairs
  • 1986-88: Minister of Municipal Affairs and Transit
  • 1987-88: Minister of State for the Kootenay Region
  • 1988-89: Minister of Municipal Affairs, Recreation and Culture
  • 1989-91: Minister of Transportation and Highways
• 1990: appointed deputy premier by the Vander Slam
• April 2, 1991: upon Billy VZ‘s resignation, she was named acting leader of the SoCreds – and thus acting premier of BC, making her not only the first female premier in BC history, but the first *Canadian* premier.  In 1991.  Seriously.
• July 1991: elected leader of SoCred at the party convention, beating Grace McCarthy, who was expected to win
• Oct 1991: the SoCreds lost the election to the NDP and Johnston lost her own seat; this loss was attributed to Vander Zalm‘s scandals and the split within the party due to the leadership race (with insufficient time to repair this between the party convention in July and the provincial election in October)
• Jan 1992: she resigned as party leader on my birthday in 1992, retired from politics, keeps a low profile

In summary, I can’t believe there had never been a female premier in Canada before 1991!

References:
Wikipedia, the reference of champions
Library and Archives Canada.

• born in the Netherlands, immigrated to Canada after WWII
• dropped out of high school and sold tulip bulbs (what else is a guy from the Netherlands going to do, really?)
• started a garden business, invested in real estate
• 1965: elected alderman in Surrey
• 1968: lost a bid for a seat as a federal MP, in which he ran as a Liberal
• 1969-1975: mayor of Surrey. Claim to fame: cracking down on “welfare deadbeats” (apparently welfare was handled municipally at the time – who knew?)
• 1972: lost a leadership bid for provincial Liberal Party
• 1974: joined the SoCreds
• 1975: elected as a provincial MLA
• 1975-1978: served as the Minister of Human Resources under Bill Bennett, “continued his crusade against welfare fraud” – became famous for his comment: “If people are truly in need, they can expect and will be treated fairly and compassionately. If people are elderly we will treat them with respect and when in need reward them for their lifelong contributions. If people are handicapped they will be treated generously, hopefully even more so than in the past. But if someone is able to work and refuses to do so, they had best pick up a shovel or I’ll give them a shovel.” [emphasis mine]
• sued the Victoria Daily Times for libel after they published a political cartoon of him as a “grinning sadist deliberately snapping the wings off five helpless flies;” he initially won, but that decision was overturned by the BC Court of Appeal
• 1978-1981: Minister of Municipal Affairs
• 1981-1983: Minister of Education
• 1984: bought Fantasy Garden World (a theme park)
• 1984: lost his bid to be the mayor of Vancouver, in which he ran as a Non-Partisan Association¹ candidate
• 1986: after Bennett announced his retirement, Vander Zalm won his bid for the leadership of the SoCreds, beating out 11 other candidates; was sworn in as premier and then handily won a majority in the election the next month
• Vander Zalm made his cabinet up of people who “languished” as back benchers in the government under Bennett. Under Bennett, the “urban fiscal conservatives” had held the reins of the party, but Vander Zalm was from the other half of the party – the social conservatives (see: obsession with welfare “fraud” above).  Case in point – Vander Zalm tried to pull provincial funding for abortions that were “not medically necessary,” but he was forced to retract this due to public uproar.
• he was involved in his fair share of scandals, including:
  • the appointment of his buddy David Poole as his “Principal Secretary,” which pissed people off as Poole became “allegedly become the second most powerful person in the province despite never having been elected”
  • possible” influence peddling” in the sale of the Expo 86 site
  • the sale of Fantasy Garden World – Vander Zalm bought FGW for $1.7 million in 1984 and sold it for $16 million in 1991. The buyer was given the VIP treatment by the Lieutenant-Governor before the sale and the woman who brokered the deal, Faye Leung, “thought that Vander Zalm was a “bad man” since the day she first met him and secretly recorded conversations she had with him, and was happily willing to speak to the media and provide copies of her audio tapes.” He was found to have been in conflict of interest for mixing personal business with his public office in this sale (though the BC Supreme Court found him not guilty of criminal breach of trust), and he resigned in 1991.
• 1999 – lost his bid in a by-election for the South Delta seat, in which he ran as a member of the Reform Party of BC²
• 2009 – after a 10 year hiatus from the limelight, Vander Zalm burst back on the scene in opposition to the BC So-Called Liberals introduction of the Harmonized Sales Tax (H.S.T.), which, I might add, they had explicitly said they *wouldn’t* do during the election³. Vander Zalm ultimately led a campaign for a referendum on the HST and on June 10, 2010 delivered a petition to the government in the form of “85 boxes containing containing 705,643 signatures from voters in every riding across the province.”  I believe that the government is now in the process of verifying those signatures.

In summary, Fantasy Garden World. The End.

Image Credits:

• Fantasy Garden photo posted by Kevin Cawley on Flickr with a Creative Commons License.

References:

• Wikipedia, the reference of champions
• Fantasy Garden site goes up for sale, April 10, 2007

Footnotes:

1. for the record, I would like to point out that having a party called the “Non-Partisan Association” makes absolutely no sense. Partisan means “an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, esp. a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance” (dictionary.com), so NPA means the party in which no one supports the party. Wha?? [↩]
2. I didn’t even *know* there was a Reform Party of BC! [↩]
3. I know, the BC So-Called Liberals breaking an election promise is *so* shocking. [↩]

Darren tweeted this today and I though I’d share it here: http://datalibre.ca/census-watch/

It’s a list of organizations and individuals who are for and against the government’s decision to scrap the mandatory long-form of the census. That’s 212 against the government¹, and a mere 6 in favour. You don’t even need a statistician to tell you that this is a lot more people and groups that think it is a bad idea than think it a good idea.

1. and I am pleased to report that two organizations to which I belong – the Canadian Evaluation Society and the Canadian Public Health Association – are on the “against” side [↩]

• Bill is the son of Wacky.  So it’s sort of the like the George Bush Sr. and Jr. thing except, as far as I know, the Bennett’s never invaded any other countries. As far as I know.
• was a businessman and real estate investor
• Sept 1973: elected as the MLA for the South Okanagan riding
• Nov 1973: elected as leader of the SoCreds
• 1975: became premier when the SoCreds knocked the NDP out of power (Bennett had refused to engage in a TV debate with Barrett during this election); re-elected in 1979 and 1983.
• he “slashed social services  and gutted labour laws”, and ran TV ads that called people who disagreed with him “Bad British Columbians.” (Wikipedia)
• he spent a shit-ton of money, however, building the Coquihalla highway and bringing Expo ’86 to Vancouver
• 1996: convicted of insider trader.
• 2007: received the Order of BC.

In summary, being convicted of insider trading does not preclude one from being awarded the Order of BC.  You know, in case you were planning on doing both of those things.

Image credits: There don’t appear to be any freely available photos of BB anywhere on the world wide interwebs! b00-urns!

References:

• Wikipedia, the reference of champions
• CBC Digital Archives

This month’s public health achievement – the decline in deaths from coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke (a.k.a., cardiovascular disease [CVD]) – is one that hits close to home for me.  My maternal grandfather died of a heart attack and both my paternal grandparents have had heart attacks as well. My mom is on meds for high cholesterol, hypertension and diabetes (all risk factors for heart attack).  My dad hasn’t been tested, but I’d be willing to bet that he has all of that too.  With all this heart disease on both sides of my family, I’m at high risk for getting it, so anything I can do to mitigate that risk, I’m all for it!

Some random interesting things about the decline of CHD and stroke:

• Deaths from CVD have been dropping since the mid-1960s. Between 1994 and 2004, it fell by 30%.  This decrease is likely due to a number of things, including:
  • prevention efforts (e.g., decreased rates of smoking)
  • better diagnosis and treatment of hypertension and high blood lipids
• Even with this decline, we still have a lot of CVD – ~1.6 million people have heart disease or have had a stroke.  And with increasing rates of obesity and diabetes, we may very well see CVD rates start to increase again.
• 1942 – Canada introduces its first food guide (called the Official Food Rules), which had to take into account wartime rationing while also trying to promote the health of Canadians.  The food guide has been updated several times since then, most recently into its current iteration in 2007.
• 1971 – ParticipACTION was introduced (remember ParticipACTION?) to get people active.
• 1986 – “Achieving Health for All: A Framework for Health Promotion,” a federal report, make “health promotion [...] the guiding principle behind the further development of public health in Canada.”  Also in that year, the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was released at the first International Conference on Health Promotion.
• 2007 – Nutrition Fact labels become mandatory.

Things You Can Do:

• Be physically active for 30-60 minutes per day.  Physical activity can take many forms, whether it’s going for a walk and talking the stairs instead of riding elevators, or playing sports. And you don’t have to do 3o minutes at once – 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there will have positive health affects.
• Eat well.  There’s lots and lots of “rules” for eating well, but it mainly comes down to: eat a variety of real foods – the less processed the  better!
• Maintain a healthy weight (which eating well and being active will help with).
• Don’t smoke.
• Know what your blood pressure, blood lipid and blood glucose levels are.  You can’t feel it when you have high blood pressure or high levels of lipids or glucose in your blood, but they can all be really damaging, so it’s important to catch these things early!

In addition to things you can do individually, we should also be concerned about policy issues – like regulations on things like trans fats and sodium and tobacco, access to healthy foods for all people, and making our environments more conducive to physical activity.