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The city council of Vancouver, BC, unanimously passed a resolution on Wednesday, asking the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia—the Crown corporation that provides most car insurance in the province—to introduce pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) insurance. PAYD insurance is a powerful way to improve transportation, save lives and money, and reduce energy use and air pollution. The Provincereports. Some of the reader responses to this article are negative. PAYD guru Todd Litman of...

British Columbia boasted the fastest provincial economic growth in Canada last year. A 3.9 percent increase in GDP easily outstripped the national average of 2.8 percent. The headlines in today’s Vancouver Sun trumpet the forest industry as a principal cause. But therein lies a certain danger. Just two days ago, the Vancouver Sunprominently warned that BC’s forest industry would soon contract. A weakening US housing market, coupled with decreased buying...

A new study by a researcher at the University of British Columbia shows that BC’s over-the-counter policies for emergency contraception (aka, Plan B) have made a big difference. As the CBC reports, the number of BC women who used Plan B doubled to 18,000 a year after the province moved the medication off the prescription-only list in late 2000. The researcher estimates that expanded access to Plan B has prevented...

British Columbia’s logging practices are excoriated in a new report from the Forest Practices Board, a watchdog organization. The report claims that endangered species like marbled murrelets are victims of forest policy that makes cutting the first priority and habitat conservation a distant second.

The Vancouver Sunreported today that British Columbia and Alberta are expected to lead Canada in new vehicle sales in 2005 "thanks to healthy economies and confident consumers." The good news—aside from the confident consumers—is that hybrid vehicles, as in other parts of the Northwest, are rocketing out of BC car lots "as fast as they can be supplied." Hybrid sales have been spurred on in part because BC just doubled...

This morning, Vancouver, BC will break its record for the sunniest February ever recorded there. And there are still nearly four days left, most of which are predicted to be sunny. Meanwhile, next door in Washington, the Seattle Timesreports on the signs of spring, like hikers at Hurricane Ridge, emerging mountain wildflowers, blooming cherries and dogwoods, and Seattle temperatures setting records at 64 degrees Fahrenheit.

BC Hydro does a fair number of things right. It has an impressive energy efficiency program and a commitment to global responsibility. But today’s Vancouver Sun (subscription required) shows the other side of BC Hydro: it’s planning to build a large natural-gas fired power plant on Vancouver Island. A better way to go would be expanded investment in efficiency, renewables, and "demand response."

We’ve mentioned before that British Columbia has Canada’s longest life expectancy.  But residents of Richmond, in the Greater Vancouver area, have BC’s longest lifespans:  83.4 years, nearly 2 years longer than in Japan, the longest-lived nation in the world. That’s about 5 years of extra life, compared with the average for the Northwest states (WA, OR, and ID).  Over the last two decades, lifespans in the US Northwest have increased...

Editor’s note: We asked Thomas Michael Power, Chairman of the University of Montana’s Economics Department, to comment on a new reportby BC’s Urban Futures arguing that the province’s primary economic engine is its natural resource exports. Power disagrees—and argues that true economic development has little to do with exports and everything to do with creating a web of local economic relationships. Two and a half centuries ago, early economists in...

Most of Cascadia’s coast is equipped with early warning systems for tsunamis, so we’re better prepared than the people of the Indian Ocean. (See, for example, this article from the Newport (Oregon) News-Times and this one from the Eureka Times-Standard.) But that doesn’t make us immune from giant earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis. The 1964 Alaska earthquake was actually bigger on the Richter scale than Sunday’s Indonesian temblor, and it...