BC Business
Priced out Anything related to real estate strikes a nerve in Vancouver, and on Friday, Gary Mason’s Globe and Mail column headlined “A Crisis in Vancouver: The lifeblood of the city is leaving” was no exception. Mason writes, “as young talent ages and wants the kind of things most people want – a house and a family – many can’t afford to stay in Vancouver. In fact, many can’t afford a home outside the city, either. Consequently, recruiting talent to the city is easy; retaining it is not.”
By midday the piece had more than 300 online comments. While many agreed with Mason, UBC sociology prof Nathanael Lauster sparked more discussion by tweeting, “Sympathetic, but not seeing it, followed by, “Not seeing it in the data… yet” and posting a chart showing that while people over the age of 30 are leaving the City of Vancouver, so far they are still moving to Metro Vancouver.
Demonstrating perfect timing, also on Friday Premier Christy Clark announced “the largest single social and affordable housing investment in the province’s history.” Over the next five years the province will commit $355 million to create more than 2,000 new affordable housing units across B.C. Funding for the Provincial Investment in Affordable Housing Program will be generated from the 2014 Non-Profit Asset Transfer program which transfers properties to nonprofit societies for affordable housing units.
The sniff testOkanagan wines could receive a flavour boost thanks to an invention by a Naramata resident. A retired professor of medicine and amateur winemaker, Dr. Dick Jones, has invented a membrane that allows carbon dioxide to escape during the winemaking process while leaving the aroma compounds behind. “Up to 80 per cent of a wine’s most important aroma compounds can be lost with the CO₂ during fermentation,” he said in a release from the blog Wine Country BC.
An expert in the human lung’s diffusion and expulsion of carbon dioxide, Jones was formerly a professor of pulmonary medicine at the University of Alberta where he invented nicotine nasal spray to help people quit smoking, one of the UofA’s top inventions. Film reviews Filmed in B.C. in 2015, Twentieth Century Fox’s Deadpool opens February 12 in theaters. The production spent more than $40 million during 58 days of filming in the province, hired over 2,000 local cast, crew and extras who earned more than $19 million in wages and contributed to various vendors and some of the production’s key local expenditures include: over $1 million on location costs; close to $815,000 on hotels, catering and restaurants; more than $735,000 on construction; and nearly $780,000 on transportation, truck and car rentals.
Vancouver expat Ryan Reynolds, who stars in the film, was promoting it on the Graham Norton show in January when he revealed he had been given grief at Canada/ U.S. border for bringing in apple pies purchased in Vancouver for his wife, Blake Lively. It’s not confirmed where they were made, but Aphrodite’s organic café and pie shop in Kits says Reynolds is a long-time customer and grew up in the neighbourhood.