Mary Beach

Chances are, you have loved the beauty of New Zealand even if you haven’t actually visited it yet. Both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies were filmed entirely on location there, from the Shire’s peaceable farmlands on the North Island to Edoras’s epic battlefields on the South...

Rob Fai, Vancouver Canadians director of communications and broadcaster; Jeff Holloway, Vancouver Canadians director of community relations; J.C. Fraser, Vancouver Canadians GM; and Ian McLean, Challenger Baseball Canada national coordinator Rob Fai, Vancouver Canadians director of communications and broadcaster; Jeff Holloway, Vancouver Canadians director of community relations; J.C. Fraser, Vancouver Canadians...

For those who want to see the expression “time is money” in action, consider Shirt. Shirt—code name for the new Power Rangers movie—was one of 269 productions shooting in the province as of October 2015. From the time Shirt’s producers started thinking about filming in B.C. to the point when they...

Power to the pedallers! Hungry Vancouverites eager to increase their intake of local organic food can now decrease their carbon emissions by having their groceries delivered free–and free of guilt–by bicycle. Be Fresh Market Cafés, the brick and mortar shops of SPUD (Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery), have three locations in Kits and downtown where locals...

Film festivals often promise the chance for the little guys to rub elbows with dealmakers, and today the Whistler Film Festival (WFF) Industry Summit delivers the goods. It’s small, it’s intimate and people here care about local talent. “We need to nurture our own stories,” says Shauna Hardy Mishaw, taking a...

Developers on the hunt for low-rise complexes are finding the process easier than it used to be since the passing of new provincial rules last month. Those complexes, where owners have individual units, but share common property and assets under what’s called a strata corporation, have become prime targets for...

Tops with travelersVancouver’s YVR Airport ranked 10th right behind Zurich, when 128,000 Condé Nast Traveler readers picked the top ten international airports outside the U.S. Singapore topped the list, with Dubai, Hong Kong and Tel Aviv close behind. The Vancouver terminal's highest marks were for the fast and cheap access...

A hard bargain After several days of around-the-clock bargaining, yesterday Unifor signed collective agreements with six Port Metro companies, including Aheer, Forward, Prudential and Sunlover. But today striking drivers for Port Transport and Harbour Link continue to picket because those two companies declined to sign. “These collective agreements are a major step...

Dam decisionBC Hydro has awarded a $1.5 billion contract for the Site C dam, its largest contract ever, to a consortium called Peace River Hydro Partners, made up of ACCIONA Infrastructure Canada Inc., Calgary-based Petrowest Corporation and Samsung C&T Canada Ltd. The contract includes the earthfill dam, two diversion tunnels and a...

Top trips In 2014, B.C. tourism had a great year, with the highest growth overall in total overnight visitors and Canada's highest growth rate in international visitors—and 2015 looks even better. According to Statistics Canada, international visitors are up 7.6 per cent to date over 2014–an increase of 290,532 visitors. September visits grew 11.5...

Teacher's petSurrey (A-) and Vancouver (B-) received high marks for financial transparency, while their eastern counterparts—Toronto and Winnipeg (D-), Vaughn (F)—floundered, in a report card on city budget practices from the C.D. Howe Institute. According to the report, “no major city in Canada offers a clear budget presentation and none earns an...

No Can Do The Canadian Fishing Company, Canfisco, part of the Jim Pattison group of companies, alerted the UFAWU-Unifor yesterday that it is closing the canning lines in Prince Rupert. The reason? Both the supply of salmon and the demand for fish in its canned form, are dwindling– making the costs...