Thoughts on BC Politics and More

  A Vancouver builder says he made the difficult decision to cancel a social housing project in the city’s Downtown Eastside due to a years-long nightmare process of trying to work with the city to secure a building permit. Perdip Moore still struggles to understand why the property he purchased in 2014 sits vacant amid a housing crisis. It’s a shame,” the senior project manager for PD Moore Homes Inc. told Global News in an interview Tuesday. "I find it really upsetting" ... CLICK HERE for the full GLOBAL news story

It’s pretty well known that if a government – any government – is going to have bad news, or is hopeful something will be missed, it will be delivered late on a Friday afternoon ... To that we can now add -- the middle of the night. At the stroke of 12am last night (see above screen shot), I received an email from BCStats Infoline. In that email, they stated that: Building Permits - The value of building permits issued by B.C. municipalities climbed (+7.1%, seasonally adjusted) in December, adding to a slight (+0.8%) increase recorded in November. Residential permits jumped (+22.4%), more than reversing the previous month’s (-6.5%) loss. Here's the thing though ... clicking on the Read More link was where the real information of note was located.   It was where to find one more sign of how WRONG Carol James is when she talks about the alleged strength of our economy in BC. Yes indeed figures released from BC Stats did indeed show the value of buil...

It’s always interesting what can be done with numbers ... that’s because they can generally be spun to suit whoever wants to them to sound good – or bad.   There’s no denying however what’s happening with building permits in the province of BC lately. The latest numbers ( Stats Can Mar 7 th , 2019 ) show that the value of building permits decreased 24.3% (seasonally adjusted) in January from the previous month. There were decreases in permits for commercial (‑54.9%) ... institutional (‑53.1%) ... industrial (‑30.7%) ... as well as residential projects which were down 4.3%. By comparison, the decrease nationally was just 5.5% -- that's quite a difference when compared with the nearly 25% drop in BC building permits. While I wait now to see how the BC NDP government will try and spin this into good news, former four term Chilliwack MLA John Les, isn’t expecting to happen anytime soon.   He commented to me just the other day that: " The...