All posts by Sabrina Nemis

Plan to continue selling off BC Rail property on the right track

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BC Rail is selling off industrial parks and prime real estate and making millions.

Once the biggest rail company in British Columbia, BC Rail is now run by the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. It sold off its trains 10 years ago and leases its track to CN. Its mandate is to sell off any property not related to its ports and rail operations, according to information from records released through the B.C. freedom-of-information law. Disposing of surplus property is part of the province’s asset disposal policy.

Between 2005 and 2015 the company sold more than 400 properties. BC Rail gained $144 million from the sales and they’re predicting they’ll sell more surplus land in the next two years, according to information that came from records released through the B.C. freedom-of-information law. In last year’s budget, they estimated they’ll have yearly proceeds of $2.5 million with gains of $1 million between 2015 and 2018.

BCR Properties, the subsidiary of BC Rail that sells its surplus property, sold 11 properties in the past year. Properties in Squamish, Pemberton, Prince George, Mackenzie and Fort St. John have generated proceeds of $4.6 million and gains of $1.9 million, according to an email received from the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.

Before any land can be put on the market, the province has to do any necessary environmental clean-up. For example, a former BC Rail North Yard site took more than six years to complete environmental clean up. BC Rail has worked with Lorax Environmental and Envirogreen Technologies to clean the land to make it safe to sell to the public. BC Rail’s current surplus properties don’t require cleanup.

Larger properties are also sometimes broken up into smaller parcels of land for easier sale. Right now BCR Properties has three properties publicly available for sale through the Cushman and Wakefield real estate company: industrial land in Dawson Creek; an industrial park in Prince George; and retail and office-zoned land in Squamish.

The asking price for the Dawson Creek land is nearly $400,000, while the Squamish and Prince George prices aren’t listed.

(*) What is the information? This is information about what BC Rail is and its strategic goals for the future.
(*) From which department did these pages come? These pages come from the BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.
(*) Why was this information helpful? This information was helpful because it laid out why BC Rail is selling off surplus properties.

(*) What is the information? This is information about BC Rail’s surplus property sales in the past and their plan for the future.
(*) From which department did these pages come? These pages from from the BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.
(*) Why was this information helpful? This information was helpful because it provided specific numbers and dollar amounts relating to both what BC Rail has already sold and want it estimates it will sell in the future.

Who you gonna call? How Ottawa’s Goosebuster solves a turd of a problem

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Geese glide across the water like a scene from a post card. People take out their cameras and smartphones, children feed them hunks of bread.

Below the water’s surface though, it’s a literal shit show. Each Canada goose generates about 1.5 lbs, or more than half a kilogram, of droppings per day.

“Take a pound of butter. Take two of them. Then cut them up into little pieces. Then take it and throw it all over a piece of grass,” said Steve Wambolt, the creator of the Goosebuster drone. “And then do that times 1,000.”

At Petrie Island’s beaches, favourite spots for geese, people can step around the feces on land. But when a flock floats in the water nearby, the poop dissolves and creates a dirty, messy soup just offshore.

In response, the City of Ottawa put Wambolt on the payroll. Since 2013, he’s flown noisy drones with flashing lights to scare geese away from the island’s two beaches.

“I go down there at two o’clock in the morning and fly my drone around this pitch black island,” he said. “You see this cool thing buzzing around—no one has a clue what I’m doing—it’s chirping and making sounds.” He does this for about half an hour. The geese coming up the Ottawa River hear the sound of the drone and see the flashing lights. Then they pass Petrie Island by and head further upstream.

Since he started flying his drones there, there have been fewer high-level E. coli days during the summer.

No one wants to swim in nature’s toilet. People can get sick from bacteria in goose droppings, because where there’s poop, there’s E. coli. Measuring it is a good way to know if other dangerous bacteria, like salmonella, are in the water, because they tend to live under similar conditions.

The city measures bacteria levels at beaches every day in the summer. Health Canada recommends closing a beach when the levels get to 200 E. coli colonies in 100 ml of water. Ontario is stricter, so Ottawa closes beaches at a level of 100.

From the Government of Canada's water recreation guidelines (p. 37)
A scientific connection between poop in water and disease guides policies for testing water for E. coli and closing beaches when levels get higher.
View entire document on DocumentCloud

Rainy days tend to stir things up, but goose turds are one of biggest reasons for increased bacteria at public beaches, according to Allan Crowe, a scientist formerly with Environment Canada.

In 2012, Petrie Island Bay beach had 18 days of levels more than 100 and Petrie Island River beach had 10.

In 2013, after Wambolt started operating the drones, the Bay beach had four days of levels more than 100, while the River beach had nine.

Wambolt said the beach staff who clean up the poop on land reported less droppings since he’s been flying his drones. Beachgoers also said they noticed less poop.

Geese at beaches is a widespread problem. In the early 20th century, conservationists were afraid Canada geese were doing to die out. The government protected them. By the end of the century, their population boomed. But so did E. Coli levels at beaches.

There are guides to getting rid of geese on government websites, like Environment and Climate Change Canada. There are also organizations like Geese Peace that specialize in conflict management between geese and people.

Cities and businesses across North America have tried to get rid of geese by poisoning their eggs, installing strobe lights and noisemakers or spraying the ground with scents geese aren’t supposed to like. These methods either don’t work or only for a short time.

Wambolt’s Goosebuster drones are effective and they’re beginning to be in demand across the continent. For example, he’s set up chicken and shrimp farmers with drones to keep geese and other birds from contaminating the farms with their droppings.

“There are millions of birds in the world—they’re going to poop. We can’t control that. What we can control is where they poop.”

Not even a page in the history books: The legacy of Rita Johnston

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Sometimes historic headlines end up as nothing more than footnotes buried in the past.

The 25th anniversary of the first female premier in Canada is a reminder that not long ago there were no women leaders in this country at all. With only 11 female premiers and one prime minister ever, it’s also a reminder of how little representation there is at the top.

“We still have disproportionately fewer women in elected political offices across the country at all levels of government, than we should,” said Margot Young, a law professor at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on social justice and equality. “And there is still discriminatory reporting and analyzing of those women in those positions in power.”

On April 2, 1991, Rita Johnston took over as the first female premier in British Columbia. She was the first female leader at the provincial or federal level in Canada.

The media barely paid attention to her break through the political leadership glass ceiling. National newspapers and international wire services gave it no more than a line or two of recognition.

Wall Street Journal write-up about Johnston (p. 1)
A brief mention is all she warranted in 1991.
View entire document on DocumentCloud
The Financial Post covers Johnston's swearing in (p. 1)
There is no mention in the story that she is the first female premier.
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women in politics. The first female premier of a territory took over later in 1991 and in 1993, PEI got its first female premier. Then Kim Campbell became Prime Minster.

Johnston’s role seems more of a blip in retrospect. Despite making up slightly more than 50 per cent of the Canadian population, there wasn’t another woman in a leadership role until 2000.

Why didn’t Johnston usher in a new era of female political leadership in Canada?

“Rita Johnston wasn’t seen as someone who was supporting women in particular,” said Jill Vickers, a political science professor at Carleton University.

“She wasn’t someone who had any kind of feminist profile.”

Not a feminist, and perhaps she didn’t see herself as doing anything out of the ordinary.

She was a wife, mother and grandmother when she became premier. She’d also been a hard-working businesswoman, running a trailer park and managing a finance company before entering politics.

The idea that women haven’t historically been wives, mothers and workers outside of the home is a myth, or at least a generalization. Blue collar and working class women have worked as long as there have been factories and shops to work in. Providing income was a way of taking care of the family, much like it is now.

What pushes Johnston’s accomplishment a step beyond this was her position as a leader. Further, she was chosen as for that role by her fellow members of the Social Credit party.

Part of the problem in giving her a place in the history books is that scandal overshadowed her term. The reason the premiership was available is that William Vander Zalm, the former provincial leader, resigned due to serious conflicts of interest. News articles covering her leadership focused more on her association with the disgraced Vander Zalm than her role as female trailblazer.

A headline in the Globe and Mail (p. 1)
In more than 1,200 words, this is the space given to Rita Johnston as first female premier. The rest of the story focuses on the Vander Zalm conflict of interest.
View entire document on DocumentCloud

Yet she was the first and her role may have helped to cement the idea of women leaders in the minds of Canadians at some level.

“The presence of any new category of people in politics has an impact, there’s no doubt about that,” said Vickers.

It’s been 25 years and Canadian provincial and federal governments still fall short of representing gender distribution in this country. Yes, Justin Trudeau instituted gender parity in his Cabinet and there are more women in leadership positions in provincial and federal Canadian politics than there were in 1991. But not many more.

If Rita Johnston began anything in becoming the first female premier, it was helping to get Canadians used to the idea of seeing women leading at a higher level. Now it’s time to see women in power move beyond the headlines and the endnotes, and let them star in the history books.

All of my newspaper articles were found using LexisNexis, through Carleton University library database access:

The Wall Street Journal was a very brief hits that noted Rita Johnston as the first female premier. It was helpful in demonstrating how little fanfare was given to this event.

The Globe and Mail article demonstrated that even when longer articles were written on the occasion of Johnston becoming premier, they focused more on the Vander Zalm conflict of interest resignation.

The Financial Post article demonstrated that articles written about her didn’t even necessarily address that she was the first female premier. It seemed to be a non-event.

The information for the timelines was obtained using Wikipedia. It corroborates with information found from other sources but synthesizes the format to create a consistent visualization. It was helpful to see all of the female leaders in one place, with the dates they were in power over the past 25 years. It helped contextualize how little the impact Rita Johnston and the other female first ministers have had on the political landscape.

Etsy vulnerable to international currency

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The weak dollar meant huge losses for Etsy in 2015. In their November report, it reported a comprehensive loss of $39,646,000. This is a difference of more than 60 per cent from last year, before the company went public.

Etsy boasts sellers and buyers from nearly every country in the world and offices in seven countries, including Canada. An emphasis on a worldwide community of handmade goods, like customized T-shirts, lamps and necklaces, is part of the company philosophy, but according to the last quarterly report, it’s also the reason they’re reporting large losses.

“We believe weaker local currencies in key international markets continued to dampen the demand for U.S. dollar-denominated goods,” it stated. The company deals in U.S. dollars, so any expenses incurred in markets outside the United States are then converted to USD and reflect as a loss. It’s reported more than $15,000,000 in foreign exchange loss.

(To see the entire financial statement in DocumentCloud, please click on the annotated image.)

Foreign exchange loss (p. 1)
The company deals in U.S. dollars, so any expenses incurred in markets outside the United States are then converted to USD and reflect as a loss
View entire document on DocumentCloud

“They call it a secondary thing. I don’t call it secondary,” said Scott Bedard, a consultant based in Edinburgh.
Canada is one of the countries with a large Etsy market. While the Canadian dollar has been a factor in Etsy’s losses, Etsy Ireland had a currency exchange loss of $15.7 million. With its weak financial situation, the intercompany debt between Ireland the U.S. office is expected to be a continuing problem.

These losses have contributed to a steady decline in Etsy stock prices since they went public in April 2015 and staying below $10 since they released the November quarterly report. The stock is at $7.76 as of Jan. 30.

Etsy had hoped to make up for those losses over the holiday season, a time when they’ve historically sold more than the rest of the year, according to the report. However, it said if low currency continued outside of the U.S.—as it has—there was reason to believe it would “dampen the demand” for American priced goods.

The numbers for the holiday season have not yet been released, and the company declined to comment before the next quarterly report, expected in February.

There’s a lot of competition with online vendors facilitating independent sellers—Amazon Marketplace, Alibaba and eBay have much bigger operations are able to offer cheaper or free shipping, as well as flexible return policies.

In the report, the company stresses that “authenticity” and a sense of community are what helps it connect both with sellers and buyers, so they’re making a choice to buy into more than a single purchase. It also states that the personal relationships between the company and its sellers and buyers are essential to its branding in every country.

Many of Etsy’s more than $44,000,000 in marketing expenses have gone into attracting sellers in the many international markets it serves. It has more sellers than ever, with 1,533,000 active sellers—about 250,000 more than the year before. Since the goods are mostly not being sold in U.S. currency and have to then be converted to U.S. dollars, the investment isn’t doing the company any favours.

“It doesn’t translate into anything, because the goods shouldn’t be sold on Etsy, or they’re not going to be sold on Etsy,” said Bedard.

And as close as each seller and buyer may feel to the company, the reported losses means the global market is putting a strain on the profitability of the business.


Etsy by sabrinanemis on TradingView.com

 

 

Source: TradingView.com