Manufacturing & Transport
With Sichuan sifting through rubble, B.C. is freshly confident it can sell the Chinese on wood homes. Humans have a knack for myth-making, and we particularly like stories that culminate in beauty, riches, earthly bliss. Shangri-La, the fountain of youth, El Dorado: the tales we tell in earnestness and optimism may in fact provide a blueprint to our darker needs and anxieties.
There’s no mistaking the Vancouver headquarters of B.C.’s Hydrogen Highway for anything but a government office. The angular grey building, nestled in a remote corner of the UBC campus, is dominated by National Research Council Canada signage. Decorating the entrance are logos attesting to the multiple public agencies and programs...
Left: Daimler Chrysler Canadian headquarters in Windsor, Ontario I grew up in Chatham, Ont, which was an hour away from Windsor and Detroit, the twin motor cities. As a young man, my step grandfather hand built bodies for the Gray Dort car company. There were many small car companies in...
In the deep shadows of the western corner of Pilkington’s Metal Marine workshop on East Cordova Street sleeps a relic of days gone by. The cast iron behemoth, fondly referred to as the Hammer by the soot-stained welders working around it, is a throwback in today’s modern steel fabrication industry.
Few organizations are weighted with as many societal problems as a regional transportation authority. Whether it’s rising fuel prices, traffic congestion or climate change, the called-for solution is often to get more people on trains and buses. That’s certainly the line B.C.’s provincial government has taken, pledging more than $14...
Few single- purpose vehicles to move people around. Just mass. If you want to get from here to there, you either walk, drive, take transit to someplace vaguely near where you want to go, or cab it. Similar situations exist in most communities. Take the second option, also the most common.
Sometimes a personal conundrum can inspire a great business idea. For surfer Dylan Green, the 31-year-old owner of Tofino Bus Ltd., it was the lack of cheap, fast transportation between his home base in Victoria and the surf town of Tofino. In 2002 Green was a UVic student living in Victoria.
Let me get this out of the way right up front: I am an American. I have been visiting Vancouver for years, most recently on a beautiful spring day last April to give a speech sponsored by UBC and SFU. On the same day, I took a tour of Metro Vancouver’s walkable neighbourhoods with folks from Smart Growth BC, getting a first-hand experience of what it’s like to walk and take public transit in this region.
Different players cite different reasons for the discrepancy: manufacturers say it’s because Canada’s smaller market isn’t as profitable as that of the U.S., while critics maintain manufacturers charge more in Canada simply because they can. Last summer, thanks largely to...
What is it about Vancouver that attracts the eccentric fringe of the airline industry? The question seems only reasonable in the wake of this spring’s collapse of Oasis Hong Kong Airlines. It would be one thing if just one offbeat billionaire’s dreams of a low-cost long-haul airline went up in flames. But the collapse of Oasis came just one year after the sudden demise of Harmony Airways, another low-cost carrier started on the whim of a wealthy entrepreneur who saw a...