sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½

If medical marijuana is a step toward legalization, just make it legal — or at least decriminalize it — and don’t dump it all on doctors.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing mid-Island communities is the exodus of young folks. From Nanaimo to Campbell River, large numbers of our most energetic workers are being lured to Alberta in search of oilfield jobs.

The massive tailings-pond spill at the Mount Polley Mine is as much a failure of sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½â€™s mining and environmental regulations as it is an engineering failure. The tailings pond at Imperial Metals’ copper and gold mine in sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½

If some integration of police services in the capital region is good, would not full integration be better? That question is not answered in a review of integrated policing units in Greater Victoria conducted by the province’s policing services divis

We can be grateful we are not California, which is reeling from record drought conditions. But it’s not some distant, disconnected event — it will touch us on Vancouver Island, sooner or later. And it has lessons for us.

The expenditure of public funds should be a matter of record, whether it is for infrastructure, MPs’ expenses or the salaries of First Nations chiefs and councillors.

Victoria’s crime rate fell 12 per cent last year, one of the most substantial declines in the country. And the capital region led sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ with a 17 per cent drop in violent offences, nearly twice the national average.

The sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ government’s offer to pay parents for kids kept out of school by the teachers’ strike shouldn’t be taken out of context — it’s just another negotiating tactic. And it’s a shoddy one.

The time to cut a program is when it’s no longer effective or is no longer needed. Neither of those conditions applies to the Pathway Project, a work and life-skills program for at-risk youth.

Manitoba has renamed its August civic holiday Terry Fox Day. Why didn’t British Columbia think of that? Fox, who had lost a leg to cancer, set out to run across sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ to raise awareness of and funds for cancer research in 1980.