Where have all the cowboys gone?

“This could be bloody. How’s your stomach?” asks Mike Rose, ranch manager of Quilchena Cattle Co. Ltd., as we approach the red bull corseted by a steel cage and three cowboys in fringed chaps, smeared with blood.

Cow boss Miles Kingdon clamps a wrench-like device around the bull’s testicles and muscles down on them while the other cowboys steady the squirming 270-kilogram yearling that somehow managed to avoid the typical one-month-old castration. With the placement of his testicles on a fence stump, alongside two others, the Hereford-Angus cross is now officially a steer. more...

Round table: All together now

In this pre-Olympic age, the term megaproject has new meaning in B.C. Notice how the phrases Canada Line, Sea-to-Sky and Port Mann twinning have a different ring to them than, say, fast ferries? One of the major differences is public-private partnerships, or P3s.

It’s a concept born in the U.K. for handing major responsibilities of public projects to private companies, and in Canada no province has done more than B.C. In fact, when Nova Scotia wanted advice this spring on which infrastructure projects to pursue as P3s, it paid $200,000 for B.C.’s opinion.

And yet P3s are like a recipe book for how to inflame our Left Coast sensibilities: public services entrusted to private companies, tax dollars fuelling corporate profits, unionized public workers excluded from provincial works, multinationals bidding against B.C. companies. more...

Suburban walking blues

Let me get this out of the way right up front: I am an American. I have been visiting Vancouver for years, most recently on a beautiful spring day last April to give a speech sponsored by UBC and SFU. On the same day, I took a tour of Metro Vancouver’s walkable neighbourhoods with folks from Smart Growth BC, getting a first-hand experience of what it’s like to walk and take public transit in this region.

I must also mention that since Vancouver is widely considered to be one of the most walkable, livable and vital cities on the planet, it is with great humility that I comment on a place that is much more vital than nearly any U.S. city.

But I will comment, because I want to encourage Vancouver to continue to offer the U.S. a model of walkable urban development that we need so badly. more...

Off-roader

Kellee Irwin Senior VP, insurance, marketing and underwriting, ICBC

I’m not what people expect for a vice-president for underwriting: spiky-red-haired biking chick. But the motorcycle business is very dependent on insurance! I’ve been in the business for 20 years now and biking for almost 40. more...

The inheritance problem

When the executor read out the terms of their father’s will, Julia and her two siblings just stared at each other in stunned silence. “We were completely shocked,” recalls the Vancouver marketing specialist. “My dad had done his best to control us while he was alive – now he was doing it from the grave.”

What they expected to be a simple three-way division of their dad’s considerable estate turned out to be a complex set of instructions, sending his adult children cap in hand to his executor any time they needed a little extra cash to cover unusual expenses such as new vehicles, home renovations or weddings. more...

Learning on the line

There is a decade-old story – told by an adult literacy worker in a small industrial town in northern B.C. – of a supervisor demanding that the name of an employee being helped with his reading be revealed. Why? So he could fire him and put in his place someone with higher skills.
Fast-forward to 2008 and this lack of sympathy would cut no ice with Marlyne Harrison. Today the 10-year veteran at Teck Cominco Ltd. is happily opening up to me – and management – about her learning curve through a much-acclaimed scheme to help the 1,500 employees on-site in Trail, B.C. more...

What's up, docks?

Deltaport sticks out into the Georgia Strait like a hatpin – a squarish man-made island tethered to the coast by its thin causeway. On the west side of the island, great dunes of sooty coal await loading onto Pacific-bound freighters. On the east side, steel shipping containers stuffed with the inbound bounty of Asian factories sit stacked like giant Lego. more...

This old house

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Tough love

The learning curve of a philanthropist, the Bentalls are discovering, is expensive. “It’s so much easier to make money than it is to give it away,” Bob Bentall tells me. Bentall, a multimillionaire and former CEO and chairman of the Bentall Corp., is 85. He has been trying for over 20 years to give away his income but often gathers more than the $3 million the Cedar Foundation can shovel out annually.

The foundation, run out of a stylish 12th-floor office in (where else?) Bentall Centre’s fourth tower, will spend a planned total of $100 million over 35 years. more...

Silence is golden

It was 17 years ago that I moved my business address from Bay Street to Burrard Street. In 1991 I left Richardson Greenshields in Toronto to join Phillips, Hager & North Investment Management Ltd. in Vancouver. I am still asked by my eastern friends and clients what it is like working on the Wet Coast. Is it a good place for an asset manager to be?

Lotusland is a great place to manage money. There are trade-offs, but on balance Vancouver managers are in a good position to deliver attractive returns to their clients. more...