A Christmas gift from the government
As this is the season for giving and joy, it’s time to stop bashing B.C.’s government and offer thanks instead. Well, at least from some of us … those of us who own our neighbourhood homes, plus the folks who will soon be altering our neighbourhoods forever.
The government, in their jaw-dropping efforts to reduce the cost of housing, has given homeowners a lovely gift. But it’s nothing compared to the gift they have given the residential developers and builders.
With their ingenious array of new taxes and occupancy rules, the government has steadily inflamed the cost of housing. But now they have made virtually every single-family lot a potential “development site” … with no longer any need for rezoning. Developers no longer have to gamble on buying a lot, hoping that in one or two years (10 years in Oak Bay’s case) it might get rezoned.
Nor do they have to attempt to get the homeowner(s) to sell it to them “subject to rezoning approval.” And they no longer have to strategically choose a lot (or lots) that might be favourably treated. They can pick any old lot they want.
They’ll just need to buy one and apply for a permit to build a six-unit (or more) structure in the larger cities, or a four-unit one in the smaller centres.
No rezoning hearing is allowed. Instead, the councils will now have to place an ad saying there will be no hearing. B.C. is about to become a developers’ paradise. And the values of residential lots will soon be seeking their stairway to heaven.
Do you think homeowners will want to sell their homes to other homeowners? Mightn’t they rather deal with developers instead? Does anyone want to guess what else this will do to the cost of housing?
And does anyone want to guess what’s going to happen to our neighbourhoods?
So, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to B.C.’s homeowners. We’re going to lose our neighbourhoods, but “Jingle Jingle” will soon be the sound of something other than sleigh bells. Thank you, B.C. government.
And don’t spoil this by squawking about the significant increases in taxes and assessments that are going to become part of this gift. No humbug allowed.
Bob Wheaton
Victoria
Keep Christmas lights burning into January
Call it what you like, Christmas, Yule, Winter Festival … but I need cheering up these dark days and enjoy seeing strings of lights brightening the evenings.
But please, don’t turn them off on Boxing Day. The nights are still dark and Christmas is a season, not a day.
Leave your lights on at least until Old Christmas Day, the 6th of January, which is of course Twelfth Day of the old carol.
Joe Harvey
Victoria
Health system has been highly effective
I thought I was in the peak of health some three years ago, happily married, exercising, eating well, good friends, etc. etc. Out of the blue I was told I had leukemia, and then that I had prostate cancer.
Treatment was immediate and efficient. In the summer of 2022 I had surgery to remove a prostate that was aggressively cancerous. I have since received radiation and am on a two-year course of medication to kill any remaining cancer cells.
This treatment has been most successful and I now have no need to see my urologist for a year.
Throughout, I have found the system to be most effective. Staff have always been efficient, helpful and cheerful, and I am so grateful to those who have saved my life, as are my wife and children.
Please print my good news and counteract the sadness of your front page articles on problems in health care.
Bert Slater
North Saanich
The Earth is in danger, so travel around it
Re: “Let’s learn from the past, and adopt new ways,” letter, Dec. 11.
The letter asks an important question: “Do we have the wisdom to learn from our past mistakes and adopt new ways of being?”
Unfortunately the answer appears to be “No.”
If we closely examine Jane Goodall’s book, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, the one recommended by the writer, we will find out why it’s not happening.
Jane was asked, by co-author Doug Abrams: “How do we get people to heed the dire warnings of the people on the ground who have been fighting this danger for so long?”
Jane replied, “That is why I travel around the world — trying to wake people up, make them aware of the danger…”
Goodall tells readers that she and her travel companion, Mr. H (a stuffed toy), travel the world 300 days a year.
She has visited more than 61 countries, hoping to create awareness of the crises we are facing.
While there’s little doubt Goodall has given the world an instructive inside view of the life and times of chimpanzees in Africa, one wonders whether Goodall sees the irony in her new way of being: travelling around the world 300 days a year.
Ken Dwernychuk
Esquimalt
Most dental issues can be prevented
Dental care is remarkably simple. Dental disease and treatment, fillings and such, are totally preventable.
There is no place for subsidizing neglect.
There is a place for assistance in surgical problems and orthodontics, but covering fillings, from neglect, is ridiculous.
The National Health Service in Britain showed how impossibly expensive it is to support such nonsense. B.C. and Canada should learn from that. Offer preventative services.
G.R. Greig
Retired dentist
Victoria
Empty bike lanes, other misguided comments
I must commend the Times Colonist for providing a venue for all the grumpy car drivers in Victoria who vent their (misguided) frustration at one of Victoria’s more vulnerable users, the cyclist.
“Get off the road,” “get off the sidewalk,” “get some lights,” “enough of the flashing lights,” “get insurance,” “pay for the roads.”
Some of these complaints are quite valid (too many invisible cyclist without lights for examples). Some of it is just wrong (cyclists pay property taxes, which pay for the roads).
Some of it is misguided (could the traffic congestion have something to do with the recent increase in car ownership since COVID, and recent migration to Victoria).
But most of it is intolerant.
For the writers focused on the lack of use of bike lanes, have they thought for a moment about the thousands of kilometres of roads that lace this province that sometimes don’t see a vehicle go by for days at a time?
And yet there they are. And what is the alternative to bike lanes, public transit, commuter rail?
More cars, more widening of existing roads, more pavement, more heat, more drainage problems, more CO2?
The one thing the complainers don’t do is suggest a better alternative. All they provide is more CO2 from their tail pipes and their mouths.
Cyrus Farivar
Cyclist/car driver
Victoria
The raw, the cooked and the forest industry
Re: “Next time, just call a log a log,” letter, Dec. 8.
I enjoyed the recent tongue-in-cheek letter about the peculiarity of the concept of a “raw” log. The writer wonders whether the concept should be understood literally as an uncooked log.
In 1964, the great French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote a book on the cultural significance of the opposition between “the raw and the cooked” (as the book was titled).
He argued that the opposition was used to indicate the boundary between nature and culture. Anything raw stood outside civilization. To turn raw things into socially meaningful things, you had to cook them.
It follows that the concepts of raw and cooked depend on each other. Also implied is a value system. Raw is bad and cooked is good.
In the case of logs, a log is never just a log. It is either a raw log or a cooked log. Furthermore, once the log is “cooked” it is assimilated into culture and becomes “good.”
From the point of view of economists, trees are never just trees and logs are never just logs. They are objects whose value is determined by exchange markets (money).
In short, raw logs must be cooked if they are to be profitable. By designating an object as raw, you indicate that it has yet to be improved by cooking.
Richard van Oort
Saanich
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