All posts by Sarah Trick

Transit funding assumptions ‘unrealistic,’ documents show

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A plebiscite in Vancouver is underway that would, if passed, fund many new transit projects in the area, but documents show that the provincial government in BC has concerns that may stop the projects from going forward even if the referendum passes.

In a briefing note obtained through access to information laws that described a meeting the Ministry of Transportation held last year, the proposed plan was referred to as ‘unrealistic’ and concerns were brought forward about the province’s ability to pay.

The briefing note said, “The Minister communicated to the mayors and the public that the province had concerns with the Vision, in particular: unrealistic assumptions on the level of senior government funding, short timelines for build out of major capital projects, and use and infrastructure of provincial carbon tax.”

To put it more plainly, the minister was worried that the mayors were asking for too much money from the province and could not get the projects done in the 10 years they specified.

Then as now, the transit projects would cost around $7.5 billion. The mayors asked the province for $1.6 billion of that money.

However, the briefing note also stated tat the amount of money the province could contribute would be less than that, as that money needs to be available for use on a variety of infrastructure projects across the province, not only in the Metro Vancouver area.

The new transit plans were put forward by the Mayors’ Council on Regional Transportation, made up of representatives of municipalities in the Metro Vancouver Area.

The plans include replacement of the Patullo Bridge, 25 per cent more bus service in the area, and 30 per cent more accessible transit for people with disabilities. There would be new rapid bus lines for the most congested areas of the city, including several new routes that would serve UBC, the University of British Columbia.

(In another briefing note, the government stated that it wanted to time the vote for this March so that UBC students would get a chance to vote on the matter that affects them.)

In the document in which they laid out their vision, the council stressed the need for action. “Our population is growing, but our transit system is not,” they sai>d.

They also said it would require a significant amount of money just to maintain what already exists.

If passed, the plebiscite will allow the mayors’ council to increase municipal taxes by 0.5 per cent in order to fund the new projects. This will come from an increase in the province’s carbon tax and be harmonized with its provincial sales tax.

However, there are still no guarantees that that amount will actually make up for what is needed.

“As with any tax framework there is uncertainty,” said Sonia Lowe, a spokesperson for the transportation ministry, in an emailed statement.

“The BC government has committed to funding one-third of new rapid transit projects in Metro Vancouver and the new Pattullo Bridge, provided they can be accommodated within the provincial fiscal plan and the investments are supported by a strong business case.”

Lowe added that this would require up to a quarter of a million dollars a year for the projected ten years of the transit expansion.

The plebiscite began on March 16th of this year. Metro Vancouver residents can vote until May 29th.

What were the documents?

The document was a briefing note summarizing a meeting the Minister of Transportation of BC had with representatives from the Mayors’ Council.

Where did you get them?

I got them from the BC Ministry of Transportation

What did they tell you?

The transit plebiscite is being covered in the media as though it were a done deal if it passes. This briefing note showed that the province had reservations about the project and that there still may be obstacles to come.

Links to documents and requests:
“Records used”
 “My requests”
 “Informal requests.”

Responses:
 “Responses 1”
 “Responses 2”
 “Responses 3”
 “Responses 4”
 “Responses 5”

A bumpy road for Rideau-Vanier residents

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Rideau-Vanier ward had the highest number of complaints in Ottawa about roads and sidewalks for the month of February. The city received 18 complaints from residents of the ward.

Home to the busy ByWard Market as well as residential areas Lowertown and Sandy Hill, Rideau-Vanier has a large population of residents and visitors going through it every day.

Kitchissippi ward was in second place with 15 complaints, and Alta Vista had 12.

Source: the City of Ottawa

According to the city’s website, this category can cover general road and sidewalk maintenance, such as potholes on the road; excessive snow on the road; things being in the way of people trying to pass, and some illegal parking issues.

Rideau-Vanier councillor Mathieu Fleury says road complaints are different depending on the areas of his ward.
“We’re fortunate because the ByWard Market is one of the highest-priority areas in the city for road maintenance,” says Fleury. “Where it gets difficult is in the residential areas outside of that.”

Delaney Dunlop is a wheelchair user who lives in the ward. She says her perceptions match up with Fleury’s when it comes to snow removal, but that there are ups and downs to living where she does.

“Living basically in the market was a godsend because they try to keep the sidewalks as clean as possible,” says Dunlop.

However, Dunlop says she finds sidewalk maintenance is not what it could be and prompt snow removal isn’t the only problem that costs her.

“This is a new wheelchair,” says Dunlop. “I’ve only had it a few months and I’ve already had the front fork replaced. I know this is from hitting holes and high sidewalks.

Coun. Fleury agrees this type of maintenance can be hit-and-miss depending on where you are in the ward and what the city sees as a priority.

For example, Fleury says Transitway stations are another problem. “The stations themselves tend to be well-maintained, but getting to the station can be a problem,” says Fleury, adding that the worst offender in this regard, according to what he has heard, is Laurier station.

Map of wards sorted by complaints

Fleury adds that while some of the complaints may come about because of people parking where they should not in front of businesses, that’s not really his concern.

“Some people certainly do seem to think they should have their own personal parking spot in front of a house or business,” says Fleury.

But as a councillor, his work will focus on reducing unnecessary congestion.

To that end, he says one of his priorities for the year is to review winter cycling and try to make space for more cyclists in the ward.

“As of right now all we have are the Laurier bike lanes,” Fleury says.

He says he believes this will make more space for pedestrians as well.

“My concern is to make winter walking and cycling safe for everyone.”

‘In the North, for the North’: after 25 years, UNBC looks to the future

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“In the interior…people don’t think of education beyond grade 12. The questions they ask at the end of the day are ‘How many trees did you cut today?’ or ‘How were things down in the mine?’’

That’s what then-minister of advanced education Stan Hagen said in the Globe and Mail in 1989, when asked about the possibility of a university in northern BC.

But almost 25 years after its founding in June 1990, UNBC in Prince George is going strong with more than 4,000 current students. This year it is second in its category in the Maclean’s university rankings. It consistently attracts research funding and even has its own medical school, which specializes in training doctors to practice in the rural north.

Bruce Strachan, who was a member of the legislative assembly at the time of the founding and who became minister of advanced education, presented the petition to found the university to the provincial government.

“I just happened to be the right cabinet minister in the right place at the right time,” says Strachan. “It was a community effort.”

That community included 16,000 residents of northern BC, who each paid five dollars to sign the petition and become founders.

Even with that community support, Strachan says there were many skeptics.

“The ministry didn’t think we could have any interest. But it turned out there were a lot of really first-class academics who wanted to come here,” says Strachan.

Strachan says the university has heavily influenced the intellectual life of Prince George. “You get 450 academics in a town, that will change it,” he says. “We’ve seen a real gentrification in the city.”

Rob Budde, a professor in the English department for the past 14 years, says that the university built on an arts culture that was already there and is now stronger than ever. He says the university has been a home for writers who are uniquely northern.

“The university has contributed a lot to creating a kind of counterculture,” says Budde. “There’s almost a freedom to write up here, whereas in places like Vancouver you’re almost told how to write a certain way.”

Not all UNBC’s programs have been without struggle. Andrea Fredeen was one of the first students in the joint Bachelor of Fine Arts program that was shared with the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She is also one of its last graduates, since it is no longer accepting new students.

Fredeen’s program consisted of creative writing courses offered by UNBC and visual arts instruction from Emily Carr, but as time went on Fredeen says it was harder and harder to get the face-to-face instruction needed for studio art.

Eventually, the partnership with Emily Carr ended when that school got university accreditation itself.

“I have no regrets at all and I think the degree had so much potential,” says Fredeen, who is now doing a master’s in creative writing at UNBC. “I think it just got lost in the growing pains of a young university.”

Fredeen says she hopes the program will be resurrected one day. “UNBC just has to figure out a way to do it on their own,” she says.

Another challenge UNBC faces in the coming years is enrollment. Although numbers have not declined, Bruce Strachan says enrollment is stagnant right now.

“The north’s economy is doing really well, and a healthy economy has an inverse relationship to post-secondary education,” Strachan says, adding that when young people can get jobs right away they don’t necessarily think of going back to school.

When Strachan considers the next 25 years, he says he has no idea what they will bring. “When you go back and think about what we didn’t know at the beginning,” he says, “I couldn’t even speculate.”

Documents obtained:

UNBC History
 “Founding the University of Northern British Columbia”

Second Cup struggles to find market space

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Secondcup

Second Cup (TSX:SCU) brought in a little more money compared to the same time last year, but overall profits are still down.

The coffee chain brought in revenue of almost $6.7 million, a 6.8% increase from the third quarter of last year, when the figure was $6.2 million. Gross profits, however, dropped by just over seven per cent compared to the same period in 2013.

Management Discussion and Analysis on DocumentCloud

But that could be expected for a company that is only starting to turn around its performance after a few years of disappointments. Second Cup has recently brought in a new CEO, Alix Box, from Starbucks Canada, and has made several moves to make the company more attractive to investors.

More worrying is the drop in same-store sales for the year. In the first three quarters of 2014, the chain dropped sales in the same individual stores by just over five per cent.

“A same-store sales drop is bad news,” says Ian Lee, a business professor who teaches corporate strategy at Carleton University.

profile-lee

Professor Ian Lee. Source: Carleton University

Essentially, Lee says, Second Cup is being “squeezed” by its two main competitors in the market, Tim Hortons and Starbucks.

“Tim Hortons is competing on price, but Starbucks is trying to compete on differentiation,” says Lee. Differentiation means the experience of buying a coffee in one of their stores. Between those two, they seem to have a lot of the coffee market in Canada covered—those who want a cheap coffee will go to Tim Hortons and those willing to splurge a little on a five-dollar latte will go to Starbucks.

“The question for Second Cup is, is there a third space they can occupy? And so far it’s not clear there is,” says Lee.

Second Cup, though, seem to think there is reason for optimism. Although the company did not respond to requests for comment by deadline, in a presentation given to investors last November, they tried to make the case that now is a great time to invest in their company.

They appear to be betting that they can expand more in the higher end of the market, planning to renovate many stores so that they have a more welcoming look and feel and planning the launch of a more upscale ‘café of the future’ in downtown Toronto.

The company is also trying to attract more franchise partners. As part of its strategy to get back on track, it reduced the royalty rates franchisees must pay. The royalty rates are the money that a franchisee, who owns their own business, must pay to the parent company for the use of their brand. Some of the drop in profits shown this quarter came about as a result of decreased royalty rates.

Like many food service companies in Canada, Second Cup operates as a mixture of franchises, which are owned by independent partners, and corporate-owned stores. Second Cup shut down two of its corporate stores in the third quarter, and according to its management discussion and analysis (embedded below) was planning to close six more in the last quarter of 2014.

Lee is skeptical that trying to concentrate more on the higher-end market will do Second Cup much good.

“I think it will do well in places like Toronto, which has a lot of affluent people and a dense population” says Lee of the ‘café of the future’ concept. “Not sure about the rest of Canada. It doesn’t seem like it’s scalable at all.”

“Me-too strategies don’t work,” says Lee. “What they have to do is figure out what part of the market is not being served and go for that.”



Second Cup Stock Prices by sarahtrick on TradingView.com

Always on the air: CBC News Network and a quarter-century of change

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By all accounts, it had a rough start.
But CBC News Network, launched as CBC Newsworld in August 1989, has been going strong since then, though not without a few changes and bumps along the way.
According to reviews in the Toronto Star, shown below, the network’s first day was fraught with technical glitches, and the programming was uneven.
But that is expected in the environment of 24-hour news channels, which had gained popularity with the launch of CNN and is now an ubiquitous feature of the news landscape.
But to be always on the air poses unique challenges.
Sharon Musgrave worked at Newsworld since the year it came on the air.
She says it is difficult to maintain freshness when you are covering the same stories hour after hour.
However, she cautions, some repetition is inevitable.
“Viewers don’t watch CBC News Network for 24 hours…you have to assume the person who sees this hour doesn’t see the last hour,” said Musgrave.
Musgrave says, rather than keeping content fresh every time the team does a story, the focus with 24-hour news is to evolve the story throughout the day.
“We try and change it up every hour so that the hit at the end of the day looks nothing like the hit at the beginning of the day,” Musgrave said. This results in a long process where stories are constantly updated by reporters.
Musgrave started out as a technician, doing sound work. Over the last 25 years, she has climbed through the ranks at CBC and is now senior producer in charge of live elections coverage.
She says that although principles of 24-hour news coverage remain the same, the way reporters and producers at CBC gather news has changed dramatically since she joined the network.
“What you will never understand is there were no satellites and no iPhone coverage…you sent your people out to cover an event and they came back,” Musgrave said.
She contrasted that with the news environment of today, where virtually all reporters can file their stories on location.
“We had a young man last year covering the Senate scandal for us. He filed all of his stories on his iPhone,” Musgrave said.
It’s not only the method of filing that has changed. It is also the content and the way news is covered.
A laughing Musgrave said that “people were appalled,” by the introduction of the news crawl across the bottom of the screen. “If you look at it now, banners are always there,” said Musgrave. “They call it mute value.” The banners make sure people are getting news even when the sound on the TV is off.
The substance of coverage has also changed. The days of covering four-hour parliamentary committees are over, and the phone-in show Newsworld used to have in the afternoons would be unheard of today.
“We used to say ‘Okay, something’s happening but we’ll hold that for The National—now Paul Wells [of Maclean’s] has that and he’s tweeting it…you don’t hold anything back anymore,” said Musgrave.
With news becoming digital, and stories being broken online, it might seem as though 24-hour television news could become a thing of the past.
The future for CBC News Network looks precarious in light of job cuts announced at its parent network two weeks ago. The network announced it will cut more than 600 jobs over the next two years.
Last year’s annual report, shown below, said CBC News Network captured an audience share of 1.3 per cent. Its goal was 1.4.
Chuck Thompson, head of media relations for CBC, said in an email exchange that the cuts will affect all CBC News services.
However, he said that “it’s safe to say programming at CBCNN won’t be affected.”

A review of Newsworld’s first day, by Greg Quill:



An article about Newsworld’s first day by Antonia Zerbisias:



CBC’s 2012-2013 Annual Report, with information about CBCNN annotated:



Loblaw’s profit down slightly, but acquisition of Shoppers Drug Mart leaves them in strong position

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The grocery store chain Loblaw lost $12 million in the last quarter of 2013 compared to the last quarter of 2012, a decrease of six per cent.

According to the company’s management discussion and analysis for the year, shown below, the loss was because of operating costs. There were many different costs that Loblaw incurred due to expanding its operations, but by far the biggest was its acquisition of Shoppers’ Drug Mart.

That deal cost Loblaw over twelve billion dollars. It closed on March 28th of this year,

But it’s not just the purchase price that will cost them.

Loblaw will have to get rid of nine stand-alone pharmacies and 18 stores.

Despite these losses, revenues are actually up. Revenue increased 2.3 per cent from the fourth quarter of the previous year.

Over the whole year, this pattern has been the same, with an increase in revenue and slight losses due to operating costs.

According to the management discussion and analysis, the impact of the losses were ameliorated by growth in their gas bar sales and growth in their clothing line, Joe Fresh, as driven by online sales. Their financial services segment has also done well.

These increases just weren’t enough to offset the expenses.

But even though the merger with Shoppers will cost Loblaw in the short term, in the long term it could set them up for more success. Ian Lee, a business analyst and professor at Carleton University, says Loblaw’s strategy in purchasing Shoppers was a good one, and tied to changing demographics.

He says the two companies tapped into different portions of the market, and therefore a merger was a win-win for both.

“Loblaws is very strong in the suburbs because land is much cheaper there,” said Lee. “The nature of grocery retailing has always been big box stores in the suburbs.”

But Shoppers’ business model has always been exactly the opposite, said Lee.

They have always had many small stores in downtown, urban areas.

According to Lee, the merger will allow Loblaw to “penetrate the urban core,” which has become home to increasing numbers of young people over the past two decades.

It will also allow Shoppers to move their branded products into the suburbs.

It is crucial for grocery stores to be able to diversify, says Lee, because of the low profit margin involved in selling food.

“Grocery stores make money…because we all have to buy groceries every week,” said Lee. But he said that in order to succeed, the stores need to have things with a better profit margin than food.

That’s another area where the Shoppers merger can help both companies.

“It’s not that they’re trying to take over another industry,” said Lee, “but they need things that will bring up their profit margin.”

But Lee says that despite the success that comes from expanding the pharmacy brand and merging the two companies, he is wary of Loblaw trying to diversify too much.

He is wary of pinning too many hopes on the Joe Fresh clothing line, which offset much of the loss in 2013’s fourth quarter. Although the clothing line helped them in the short term, he is not as optimistic about its long-term success.

“It’s too soon to say,” said Lee. “It may become a niche product.”

Clothing is also more profitable than food, but Lee worries the clothes take too much floor space in stores and distract from Loblaw’s core product.

“I don’t think most people want to go to the grocery store to buy clothes,” said Lee.

Loblaw itself seems to have every confidence in its clothing line. Joe Fresh