Admit it — you see plenty around here that needs changin’. We see it, too. Which is why we invited some of our regular contributors, along with lots of notable Valley residents to each give us a big idea whose time has come, both for the Okanagan and for the globe. But, as with most good ideas, the main challenge is in the implementation. We learned very quickly that the Okanagan is a very busy place. More than 90 per cent of those we invited to take part in this feature said they simply had too much on their plate to reflect on this challenge properly. So, what is here represents a small but diverse array of ideas that are sure to make you think, make you laugh, make you angry or even make you wish you had the chance to provide your own two cents. You can do just that by emailing us at editorial@okanaganlife.com or adding your comments about the following ideas on our blog at www.okanaganlife.typepad.com. Special thanks to the Russouw family of Dor’Ann, Talia and Adrian for striking the poses.

Super-snooze … Superhero — Shazaam!
Shelley Wood

1 In my humble opinion, what the Okanagan needs now is for all of us to just go back to bed — and no, I’m not talking about sex. I have plenty of potential solutions bubbling in my pot of ideas, but a lot of them might just come about on their own if we all just had a few more zees.
Who on city council is going to give the green light to some lousy, short-sighted development proposal if he or she has had a good night’s sleep?

If we just gave ourselves an extra hour of rest per night or grabbed a catnap during the day, we’d be more polite, we’d get in fewer accidents, we’d be less likely to absentmindedly litter or shoplift.
My guess is we’d feel more energetic and more likely to walk or bike to work, rather than drive.

Studies suggest people who sleep more, weigh less: we’d probably make fewer sleep-starved, ill-advised food-choices at the grocery store if we’d refuelled on rest the night before.

If more people were sleeping in, or going to bed early, there’d be fewer noisy boats on the lake at the times of day when there’s something to be said for watery peace and stillness.
We’d be more patient with our kids and pets; we’d have more time to dream.

Crime and drug-use would also likely decline because even if being less tired did not have the effect of inspiring reformation, only a select few criminals and addicts have mastered the art of stealing things or injecting drugs while asleep.

Why not mandate afternoon naptime for adults? And not to bring this back to sex, but I bet most people would be having a lot more of it if they weren’t so darn tired.

2 Globally, I propose that we need a superhero  — a single, nondenominational, omniscient, all-powerful, ass-kicking arbiter of right and wrong. I don’t care whether it’s a he or a she, or whether this person wears the Lycra suit and cape (although frankly, if the tight-fitting duds are a go, I’d prefer a male). If the 20th century saw the rise and fall of super-powers and the now impotent UN, the 21st desperately needs some kind of action-hero who can settle some of the world’s most egregious problems once and for all.

Russia, India, China and the U.S. won’t sign onto the anti-landmine treaty? Pow! The leader of the Lords Resistance Army won’t show up for peace talks in Uganda? Shazaam! Human rights abuses in Llasa? Thwack!

I’m not advocating violence; rather I’m arguing the time has come for a single, decisive, agnostic superhero that everyone can get behind. No single altruistic god is going to rise from one of the world’s squabbling religions to settle the issues of the day, free from political debts, profit motive or colonial aspirations. But someone’s got to.

—Shelley Wood is a Kelowna-based journalist who works full-time as a medical reporter for WebMD. She’s been a long-time freelance contributor to Okanagan Life and regularly foists her big ideas on anyone foolish enough to remain within earshot.

Recognition for the True Captains
Deanna Kent-McDonald

Lots of big ideas are really cerebral  — impressive with philosophical or controversial weightiness. Whilst many will spin innovative (even grandiose and ridiculously intelligent yet difficult-to-implement) solutions for how to revolutionize the landscape we call life, I can only offer a small simple thread about how to change the fabric of our Okanagan community — and one that might even impact the world.

3 As a community, we tend to be like all others in that we’ve got a whomever-has-the-biggest-dinghy-wins kind of attitude. But what about our smaller (and extraordinarily critical) day-to-day interactions? I propose we permanently shift our perspective and give the appropriate recognition, compensation and adoration to those individuals who actually run the world (not just those who have enough hull to buy respect). Give the good stuff to those souls who get you through the day.

Just for a moment, think about who really rocks your idyllic Okanagan world. Who do you bow to? If the faces of your waste management specialist, your feng shui guru, the pimply guy who puts through your toilet paper order or your acupuncturist didn’t first pop into your head, you may be giving your respect and reverence to the wrong people. The fabulous Okanagan lifestyle would be all for naught if your recycling wasn’t cared for, your Zen garden lacked the proper chi, your stern unclean (financial strain can upset that irritable bowel) and your body not limber enough to do 18 holes. And what about the sommelier who picked last night’s perfect elixir? Your Botox provider?

If we made a small perspective shift from a big-hull mentality to a big-happiness one, we’d give all the less-recognized superheroes of our days the appropriate gratitude and respect. It would change the nature of the Okanagan.

4 As for the world …. Well, ditto on the previous paragraphs. But let’s really get to the grass roots. It is a little-acknowledged truth that moms (especially those stay-at-home types) run the entire planet. Maybe even the universe. Besides the million other things she does, we totally know that each and every day she is cultivating the next generation. Even so, we pay her the worst wages on the planet and throw her those squinty, grumpy furrows when we are forced to dodge her cranky children in the grocery stores. The world would be better off if we afforded this divine entity all the veneration she deserves.

My big ideas are pretty simple. In our community and around the world we should ask who floats our boats. And then recognize, compensate and salute these captains for how they impact our day to day lives.

—Deanna Kent-McDonald is a freelance contributor to Okanagan Life and is also a novelist and columnist who navigates the world on too much caffeine and happily gives appropriate reverence to those who provide it. You can visit her website at www.deannakentmcdonald.com.

Knowing Discretionary Spending and Priming the Elements of Discernment
Don Elzer

5 Discretionary spending is the amount of money we spend as consumers after we have paid for our staples such as housing. Collectively in the Okanagan we spend about $4.5 billion per year, however, we don’t know a lot about our discretionary spending habits.

Such spending is at the core of knowing and understanding how to shift consumer behaviour and ultimately what drives our local economy. A shift in such local spending patterns can retain millions of dollars locally, and conversely, can mean millions of dollars leaving the community.

We must turn our community economic development agencies into local knowledge centres that understand the details of local discretionary spending patterns. Local initiatives should help compete against big box retailing and the global marketplace in order to retain local spending within the community economy.

Promoting efforts to buy locally grown food, locally made goods and purchase services owned and operated within the community could add 30 per cent value to our economy in the Okanagan and create a formula of sustainability.

But the bigger picture is more about our need to “spend” and “collect” in the first place. The ideas of day trading, a floating currency or even an industry called tourism were not even concepts 100 years ago and have added to the elements of global consumerism.

It was Albert Einstein who said, “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life is based on the labours of others.” That would surely sum up the economic structure we’ve devised today.

6 If we could imagine the same scope of change for the next 100 years as we have experienced in this past century, we would most certainly have to rely on some sort of safety mechanism where a common morality drives us to choose to do the things that are truly beneficial for humankind and the planet.

It wasn’t long ago that Italian philosopher Umberto Eco suggested that the next great genius who could be compared to DaVinci or Einstein would be the person who discovers the method by which information discernment can be taught to the world.

Eco is convinced that human beings seek out more information than they know what to do with, and without the knowledge base to use information constructively, we actually become destructive.

Eco was the guy behind the popular Mac versus DOS metaphor in 1997 when in one of his weekly columns he first mused upon the “software schism” dividing users of Macintosh and DOS operating systems.

Mac, he posited, is Catholic, with “sumptuous icons” and the promise of offering everybody the chance to reach the Kingdom of Heaven by following a series of easy steps. DOS, on the other hand, is Protestant: “it allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions … and takes for granted that not all can reach salvation.” Following this logic, Windows becomes “an Anglican-style schism  — big ceremonies in the cathedral, but with the possibility of going back secretly to DOS in order to modify just about anything you like.”

It’s a metaphor of the technology-driven age we live in. Group this idea with shopping malls being our new places of worship and we might be finding a trend here. In fact, we are on the brink of a kind of techno-spiritualism that randomly links our morals of the day with economic needs and technological efficiencies in order to retain our idea of prosperity.

So it should be no surprise that if given the freedom to think, learn and act, we will change the world, as quickly as possible, simply because we can, and the past 100 years proves this. We are a people that simply demand to be busy. But without the element of discernment, it will be interesting to see how our limitless need to consume unfolds within this next century.

—A resident of the Okanagan for the past 25 years, Don Elzer is a cultural ecologist, writer, artist and futurist with a keen interest in rural communities and local economics. He writes for local publications and is also the publisher of The Monster Guide, www.themonsterguide.com. Most days he can be found studying our changing planet at The Wildcraft Forest between Lumby and Cherryville.

Green Roofs — Is Farming’s Future Over Our Heads?
David Madison

I look down from my small airplane on a tidal flood of new subdivisions washing up our hillsides. I see miles of fresh pavement covering the earth to prevent us from getting dust on the shiny chrome of massive off-road SUVs that ply their way from these new homes to supermarkets, soccer fields and schools so that our obese offspring can be fed, exercised and educated in controlled, supervised and sanitized ways.

My view from above is mostly grey; the grey of shingle or tar rooftops, cement driveways, multi-lane highways and huge parking lots. In the summer this great heat-collecting mass sends violent thermals into the afternoon sky and creates its own microclimate. If I were blindfolded I could tell when I’m flying over the city because of the sudden roughness of the air. In winter the reverse is true and the inversion holds the millions of molecules from our burned hydrocarbons close to the surface cloaking the entire valley in a choking, monochromatic depressing grey. It’s the Okanagan’s own version of a fart in a phone booth.

7 What one thing could we do to stop this insane progression toward self-destruction? How about looking up a bit  — not to the sky, but to the tops of our roofs. The concept of green roofs is not new. (I don’t wish to bore readers with endless citations so in the aim of brevity I will make up some statistics as I go along to give the apparent weight of credibility to my thesis.)

A green roof is simply using the rooftops of our homes, apartments and commercial structures as the support for a soil medium capable of growing grasses, grains or other food crops. The typical tar and gravel rooftop used on most flat-roofed commercial buildings does little good beyond its function as a protective barrier from the environment. When the sun beats down on it, it absorbs heat and requires the building to use air-conditioning to be comfortably cool. This places demand on our electrical resources and leads to more dams being built and rivers flooded or perhaps nuclear generation plants being constructed  — none of these are cool things.

In the cold of winter the tar and gravel roof provides minimal insulation and radiates heat away requiring a system to replace the lost heat within the building. This means more power demands, more natural gas burned, more crud in the air. With the exception of some fast-food products, tar and gravel does not do much to assuage hunger. So lets look at a green roof instead.

The green roof is a planned feature in the construction design of a building. The roof needs to be able to support the weight of the growth medium (a $10 word for dirt) but most roofs can already do this without major changes. Crops that would normally have been grown on the ground now covered by the building can be grown on the roof instead.

Tomatoes, carrots and potatoes might be planted here. Grain crops could be problematic and grazing animals also present unique problems, however with some planning during construction, the green roof concept can restore more than 68 per cent of the lost agricultural land in urban areas (Remember what I said about statistics).

The green roof not only restores lost agricultural land to the city, it also reduces the demand on energy. Food is grown locally  — no shipping costs, no needless consumption of a declining energy resource. Green roofs provide insulation against both heat and cold. Again, we need less electrical energy for cooling and less natural gas for heating. Green roofs also serve as a buffer holding back the flood of rainwater that fills our storm sewers during a summer squall. By holding and using this wasted run-off we reduce the impact on our lakes. Green roofs will provide more oxygen as the plants do their photosynthesizing thing. Oxygen has always been one of my favourite gasses!

By embracing the green roof concept we can bring home gardens back to the subdivisions that, with their typical lot size, can presently sustain only three tomato plants or 68 dandelions. We can park the Hummer and cultivate the soil on our roofs instead of making that 4.6 kilometre average commute to the grocery store to buy a cucumber. Heck, we could even convince the kids to pick up a hoe and start growing healthy food. Green roofs might just be the key to a sustainable future.

—David Madison, a freelance contributor to Okanagan Life, is a photographer, motorcycle enthusiast and pilot who has lived and taught in the Okanagan for more than 30 years.

A Space of Our Own
Bruce Kemp

When the Great and Powerful Oz gave the Tin Man a heart, he admonished the clanking character to be careful because the heart is a fragile thing. Like the heart of a Tin Man, the heart of a city is very delicate as well and if you don’t believe a city has a heart then the magic of Paris is lost on you bub.

Right now, with this mania for developing and redeveloping every square inch of land, Kelowna has to be very careful not to lose its heart.

8 What Kelowna’s citizens need right now is a space to call their own. Not a space tailored to the tourist trade or the Shadow population who drift in for two weeks out of the year and leave nothing of substance behind when they take off, but a livable space that preserves our city’s sense of self.
This assignment has been tough because I came up with a number of facile ideas, however, “Nothing focuses a man’s mind like knowing he will be hung in a fortnight …” so I have tried to focus on the less fanciful and more practical.

After living in a number of cities around the world the one feature that made each of my favourites livable has been a vibrant downtown that isn’t up for grabs.

Look at New Orleans’ French Quarter or take a walk in Gotham’s Central Park, but don’t dare suggest either be turned into a breeding ground for high rises or you’ll be dealing with eight million irate citizens in less than a New York minute.

These neighbourhoods fairly sing about the joys of living in those cities. Okay, how do we create that atmosphere in Kelowna?

Let’s start by expanding the idea of the Cultural District to include the lower parts of Bernard, Lawrence and Leon and protecting it for the future. Let’s also build a proper, year-round covered farmer’s market somewhere within that district.

We should guarantee the security of the historic buildings along Bernard and encourage more small mom and pop restaurants and boutique type stores to fill up the neighbourhood.

The first thing New Orleans did after Katrina was start to rebuild the French Quarter because everybody (except maybe The Shrubster) knew this was the key to the city’s resuscitation.

When Avignon in the south of France was faced with the dilemma of building within the old city’s walls, the town fathers didn’t blink an eye at the construction of a new Les Halles (French Farmer’s Markets with local produce) and turned down every other new building.

Those good burghers recognized the fact that visitors eat in restaurants, but residents buy groceries from their neighbouring shops and what better way to invite everyone, from families and twenty-somethings to octogenarians to gather on a Saturday morning for nothing more than a bit of grocery shopping and maybe a coffee to enjoy the celebration of living in our city.

Now if I only had the courage to ask for a brain ….

—Bruce Kemp is an international award-winning writer and photographer whose work appears in national and international magazines along with Okanagan Life. Visit Bruce online at www.C2CMedia.ca.

Cooperation:  A 21st-Century Manifesto
Karin Wilson

There are two occasions in life when we are directed to turn inward. One is when tragedy hits  — divorce, the death of a loved one, even a transition at work. At the macro level this becomes economic recession or environmental disaster like the Okanagan Mountain Park fire. These events force us to look inside to see what needs to be fixed and determine how to move forward.

The other occasion is when we presumably have everything  — enough food, adequate shelter, clean water. Our families are thriving; we have sufficient education. We feel fulfilled. The temptation here is to let that moment for reflection slip past, yet this is exactly when we have the opportunity to realize something far larger than ourselves. This is when we have the chance to push beyond the obvious to create something new.

So how does all this fit into the Okanagan? Clearly, this region is at a crossroads. For eons it has been home to people who live in close relation to the earth. Our aboriginal communities roamed this land long before the white man came along and began cultivation, planting orchards, then vineyards and establishing food industries.

But like our aboriginal predecessors, all this has done is sustain us  — and very few of us. The rest continue to struggle along surviving with a sunshine tax, working a patchwork of part-time jobs to fulfill full-time commitments. It’s hard to believe so much poverty can exist in a “land of plenty.” But that’s what happens when the mentality is: I grow at the expense of you.

This is the legacy of black and white thinking. And as long as we expect our wealth to come from outside ourselves, we will remain limited in our thinking  — and limited in how we can do life in this Valley.

Here’s a new thought — if we can’t afford to pay people living wages or give them full-time jobs when they want them, maybe we’re in the wrong business. Maybe we need to change.

9 So my new idea is this: That the Okanagan define itself as a Centre for Cooperation. Black and white thinking has got us to where we are. It’s time for us to recognize there are an infinite number of choices available to us about what we want this region to look like, how we want to live and what we want our people to be.

When we know our objective is to cooperate, we listen more. Cooperation requires respect, it stimulates creativity and innovation; it celebrates collaboration by taking the best from each party to come up with a greater whole.

Our real leaders — whether they are in our families or in our governments or key businesses — know we are living in a true land of plenty. And just as with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this means we are in the perfect position to look at what we really want to do from this point forward.

It means having the courage to loosen up some of the fear-based boundaries we have created in the past. It means letting go of old ideas of how things should work, so we can make room for how things can work.

It’s a high order. But if that were the mission statement of every household, every company, every corporation, every government, our region would act as a beacon for others. We would be the authors of a true land of plenty.

—Karin Wilson is a freelance contributor to Okanagan Life whose work has also appeared in the Vancouver Sun, Canadian Geographic, Creative Thought Magazine and on CBC Radio.

Do It Yourself
Jennifer Cockrall-King
& Florian Maurer

Big ideas for the Okanagan? This conjures up the image of Gary Larson’s cartoon of a sheep in the middle of a herd shouting: “I want to be me!” When it comes to needing BIG ideas, we’re in it together with the rest of the world. Let’s cut out the “I am special” silliness.
Some BIG ideas have been around forever. It is more a case of picking them up again when needed, and that’s what our submission is about: DIY. Do it yourself! It’s what an architect and a food writer can agree on. It offers ways to confront grim problems: shortage of food and shelter, abundance of unrealistic expectations. Here is our take on it.

10 JCK: I think we should all grow our own food for a year or so, long enough to realize a few basic things. As a carnivore, I’m well aware that the fact that we humans seem to love the taste of meat so much, multiplied with the fact that we seem to be multiplying every few nanoseconds, means that we’re asking a lot of our planet. For every calorie of fossil fuel we spend on growing fruits, veggies, grains and other plant crops, we get between 1.5 to 2.5 back in food calories. Yet, it takes 33 calories to produce just one calorie of feedlot beef. And according to the 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization, global livestock production is responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions  — that’s more than all the transportation in the world.

Hence, DIY food. Maybe then we won’t be such penny-pinchers when it comes to paying local or even national farmers and ranchers a living wage. Growing good food is hard  — those who do it certainly deserve to be paid more than they are currently. Come to think about it, they should be paid more than most other occupations. Except for writers.

If you’re a carnivore, try to eat less meat. What you do eat, catch it and kill yourself. Yes, meat is too tasty and too easy to be resisted when it comes pre-killed, butchered and wrapped for us. Next time you want a pulled pork sandwich or a juicy burger, you’ll have to go out to your yard, catch a pig (not easy), steer or buffalo (again, not without its challenges) and kill it, etc. All of a sudden, those sedentary potatoes and that Swiss chard desperate for your attention look like easier options, now don’t they?

If you want fish, by all means, go out fishing with a rod and a hook. Global over-fishing problem … solved. And chances are we’d catch fish in our nearby lakes so maybe we’d think twice about all those chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides we spray onto our lawns. On second thought, maybe we’d rip out our lawn because we need that space for our veggie gardens!

11 FM: I am asking you now to design and build something yourself, something like a house even. Whatever. After you have done it you will see that it is a BIG idea. Here is why.

We’re buying daily things about which we know nothing: not how they’re made, not how they function, not how we could replace them with something else if we had to. Every slightest flaw upsets us. We have become very discriminating and are easily dissatisfied with what others make for us. We have lost touch with the sacrifices and ingenuity that brought us these marvels. What would happen if a group of modern consumers got shipwrecked on another planet? Would they be able to recreate civilization from scratch? I think they would slide back into barbarianism within two generations. You don’t agree? Let’s try it!

What we build ourselves, with materials at hand, is of our place and time. If it is a house we’re building, it has a better chance of fitting its surroundings than picking a “dream home” from a catalogue and having a builder nail it together just like a thousand similar ones across the continent.

What we build ourselves must be buildable by ourselves. It will likely be much simpler than what we are used to buying. Our perception of beauty will change: instead of being suckered by glitz we will begin to recognize harmonious proportion and get to know the materials we use. We will learn to love simplicity. We will learn to recognize ideas that work and appreciate them in the work others do for us.

Our handiwork will not be perfect. We will learn to accept imperfection as the natural state of things, ideally even love it. We might become more forgiving with others. We might even find a cure for the disease of perfectionism: who expects perfection will always suffer.

Every gardener knows the satisfaction of bringing homegrown food to the table. Let’s expand the idea and fix our lawnmowers ourselves instead of taking them to the shop! At worst it will give us self worth. At best it teaches us that we don’t need lawns or cars that are too complex to be fixed along the roadside. Maybe we will start working with our kids in the shop instead of giving them Playstations.

Building things ourselves will make us think twice about what we really need and how much of it we need. Houses will be smaller, gadgets fewer, satisfaction greater.

Do it yourself trains two endangered species: commonsense and dexterity. Instead of theorizing around rocket science we must become totally comfortable with basic principles of mechanics and design. If the work requires physical strength it will give us fitness, too. We will be fit to deal with the mess we’re in.

It’s a BIG idea that’s needed right now!

—Jennifer Cockrall-King (www.foodgirl.ca) writes about food and other cultural matters of great importance for national and international publications such as Maclean’s, Chicago Sun-Times, NUVO and the National Post. She splits her time between Edmonton and Naramata, and publishes and writes The Edible Prairie Journal, a magazine about food, cooking and eating on the Prairies.

—Florian Maurer is partner of Allen+Maurer Architects Ltd. in Penticton
(www.allenmaurer.com) and regularly contributes to the architectural and general interest media. His handmade house in Naramata received a GovernorGeneral’s Medal for Architecture in 2006, the only one given that year west of Winnipeg.

ORT and the Messiah
Rick Cogbill

12 I know I should be content, but there’s one thing big cities like London, Tokyo and Vancouver all share in common, and it makes me jealous. For the price of a single ticket, you’ve got a window seat on the cheapest city tour you’ll ever find. I’m talking Light Rapid Transit.

Here in the Okanagan, communities from Vernon to Osoyoos are all on the “invaded communities list,” and whether it’s caravans of out-of-province sun seekers looking for the perfect summer vacation or locals commuting to work, thousands of people and their attendant automobiles flow in and out of our towns every day. That’s why we need ORT  — the Okanagan Rapid Transit system.

Imagine. A whisper-smooth sky train that parallels Hwy 97, stopping in every little town and hamlet along the way. The benefits are endless. Can’t find a camping spot in Osoyoos? Just plant your Alberta motorhome in Winfield and take ORT to the beach. Want to experience Ironman but can’t stand the traffic? ORT gives you sky-side seats, plus you can pop down to Osoyoos halfway through and cheer on your favourite bike rider.

Imagine Okanagan Falls as a bedroom community of Kelowna. Have dinner in Peachland and catch a theatre production in Vernon before returning to Penticton for the night. Meld an Osoyoos Desert Centre experience with a ride on the Kettle Valley Steam Railway in Summerland for a history lesson your kids will never forget  — all without mashing the remote garage door opener even once.

But ORT is just the practical side. His right-brained cousin, ESCORT (East Side Corridor Okanagan Rapid Transit), would be a spur line following the old Kettle Valley Railway bed. What could be more cool.

13 Alas, fixing transportation problems in our little corner of paradise is easy; global solutions are another story. What does the world need right now? In a word, the most humanly needed thing is a messiah.

I know, I’m talking political potty-mouth right now, but a simplistic definition of the term “messiah” is someone who is regarded as a savior or liberator. Be honest; can you actually scan the daily headlines and tell me we’re doing just fine, without at least a tiny catch in your throat?

Something isn’t working. Food relief rots on the docks while corrupt third world officials wait for their bribes. Medical epidemics ravage whole continents because the medicines we stockpile can’t seem to get where they’re needed. Deranged demagogues drag their followers into genocide. Energy-addicted nations place more value on barrels of oil than human suffering. Basic human rights are trampled under the heavy boot of societal control. Personal egos aside, a “fixer of world injustice” would be a welcome relief.

The historical problem with past liberators is that annoying lack of perfection. Human frailty simmers to the surface and power the tool becomes power the goal. So what we really need is a messiah who has one foot in humanity — understands the conditions — and the other foot elsewhere, perceiving and pursuing the bigger picture. Sound impossible? Pretty much.
I didn’t say it was humanly possible; just humanly needed.

—Rick Cogbill is a freelance contributor to Okanagan Life, nationally-recognized humour columnist and former automotive technician and shop owner residing in Summerland. View his website at www.slimcookie.ca.

An End to the Spread of Invasive Chemical Spray
Mark Coffey

14 The great dandelion — scourge of Okanagan lawns. Decades of outright war have been waged against them. No end is in sight. A Manley Report is in order; time to seriously evaluate our strategies and practices. 

We have the same number of dandelions as we did in the spring of 1972 (not supported by any actual data — just guessing). We do, however, have an increase in the number of chemical pollutants in our Okanagan soils; a sorry eventuality in herbicidal warfare. These are the same soils that grow our food and carry our children’s drinking water.

Quebec, Ontario and numerous Canadian municipalities have banned pesticides and herbicides for casual use. We aren’t leading any packs here in the Okanagan — time to pick up the pace. Oh, and the dandelion weeder.

As a lifelong soldier in the dandelion war, my wife, Sarah (now a major-general), is a patient and efficient digger in the front lines of our front lawn. I, by marriage, have now been sworn in as a private in the force and am proudly continuing the good fight. Chemical-free warfare. The war is nasty, fiercely contested hand-to-root combat. We have been utilizing the tried and true tools, hands and small trowels. 

I will be the first to admit that some days the dandelions gain the upper hand, maybe most days. Okay so I am going to say that we are simply aerating the lawn. Rightly however, for this is finally a fair fight. Fair to the dandelions — fair to our children.
 
—Private Mark Coffey is a professional freelance photographer and regular contributor to Okanagan Life — when he isn’t in the front yard.

Give Small Biz a Break
“Don Quixote”

15 My one idea that the Okanagan, and indeed the province, needs now is a small business property tax break. I maintain that local small businesses (drug store, local pub, local radio station or locksmith) should be taxed at a different rate than big businesses (banks, Walmart, Staples etc.).

I was told that this was not allowed by provincial regulation. On closer examination I discovered that the big businesses were already paying at a higher effective rate than the smaller ones and had been doing so since 1984 when the provincial government passed legislation allowing a $10,000 exemption for improvements on a business property assessment. 

The province did acknowledge the purpose of that first $10,000 exemption to be: “The exemptions were intended to provide assistance to small business enterprises.” Now if we adjusted that exemption to say $50,000 then the small businesses would benefit much more than the larger ones who have the ability to pass off their property taxes to their customers.

Each city could still collect the same amount of total taxes from this class of property owners but the small owners would get some tax relief with little effect on the larger banks and boxmarts. In the small city of Vernon a $100,000 business would save 35.4 per cent annually while the big $3 million boxmart or bank, which could add another cent on their underwear or bank fees, would increase by only 6.2 per cent. Lets allow the municipalities of this province some latitude on the exemption that will be given so that they can use this as a planning tool to allow for the revitalization of our downtown cores. A small business tax can be a big idea.

It would be too presumptuous to contemplate a big idea that the world needs now. This is a question for the great environmental minds like David Suzuki or contestants for Miss Universe to philosophize about. My rather small idea is to complete the trilogy of great Canadian cuisine by adding the missing item of Klik Burgers to the already-accepted Canadian duo of poutine and prairie oysters. This rather inexpensive combination of Klik (or other leftover, off-the-floor renderings), onions and mayo served on a bun could solve the current food crisis that is enveloping the world.

—“Don Quixote” is the writer of a local blog (http://vernonblog.blogspot.com) who has decided to share a few ideas in the Machiavellian scheme of getting more readers. His blog is an equal opportunity skewer of bafflegaff, bullshit, political buffoonery and bureacrabic incompetency or impotence. 

Photo Credit: Mark Coffey / freestonespirit.ca