Council approves goose cull
VERNON — A program to cull invasive, non-migratory Canada geese in British Columbia’s North Okanagan has the strong support of Vernon city council.
Councillors have voted 6-1 in favour of the program to spend up to $40,000 to eliminate as many as 250 geese.
Only Mayor Victor Cumming voted against the cull, which still needs a management plan from wildlife biologist as well as federal and provincial approval.
Initial plans would see about 10 kayakers rounding up the geese at three Vernon-area beaches on Okanagan Lake, something Cumming says would have to be done annually, to keep numbers in check.
Staff say a longer-term plan will be created and council was encouraged to maintain other options, including an egg addling program which destroys the embryo of fertilized eggs but leaves the eggs in the nest so geese do not lay more.
Word of the cull has already prompted two separate petitions signed by nearly 2,000 opponents of the plan.
In addition to addling, council has been told alternatives to a fullscale cull could include sport hunting and kill-to-scare, a process that removes a single animal from the flock, generally encouraging the birds to move to another location for a period of time.
Kelowna has used kill-to-scare tactics in the past to control its goose population.
Canada geese were introduced in several areas of B.C. in the 1960s and ’70s.
But populations grew rapidly and the introduced birds do not migrate, meaning the more than one kilogram of droppings each produces daily fouls beaches and parks and damages water quality.
Councillors in Coldstream, just east of Vernon, are also mulling some sort of goose control in the municipality’s parks and along beaches on Kalamalka Lake.
Coldstream has requested a presentation from local resident and wildlife specialist Pete Wise, after learning he was instrumental in the 2016 cull of nearly 500 geese from the area around Parksville, on Vancouver Island.
It was never going to be “happy Friday” with new unemployment numbers for January on deck, but there were plenty of signs it was going to at least be “silver-lining Friday.”
Alas, it’s neither of those. The labour market in January was the bleak mid-winter we feared, especially if you’re young, or a person of colour, or female, or a part-timer – or, God forbid, all of those at once. And policy-makers seem poorly equipped to do much about it for now, except to counsel patience.
About 213,000 jobs disappeared in January as some of most populated areas in Canada – namely Ontario and Quebec – tightened up pandemic restrictions. It means that the second wave is taking a serious toll, eroding the employment gains of the summer and fall and making a quick recovery more elusive.
At our worst point last April, when a firm lockdown was in place, about 5.5 million people were without work or dealing with reduced hours because of the pandemic. Summer allowed many people to return to work or find new jobs, but we’ve lost ground in December and January. And now, there are still 1.4 million affected workers, many of them in the same groups of people who were hit by the first wave.
Canada’s unemployment rate rose to 9.4 per cent in January, up from 8.8 per cent in December.
Digging a bit deeper, Southeast Asians saw their unemployment rate rise by 7.6 percentage points in January to 20.1 per cent – one in five. Black Canadians are at 16.4 per cent unemployment, up 5.5 percentage points from a month earlier.
Of Black women who are holding onto their jobs, almost a third were working in the health-care sector and a third of those were in lowpaid positions such as orderlies or nurses’ aides. In other words, they are holding onto pandemic employment by taking on poorly paid and often dangerous positions.
Unemployment among young people rose 1.9 percentage points to 19.7 per cent and the job losses were particularly striking among parttimers and working-age teenagers.
Women lost twice as many jobs as men in January, especially mothers of young children.
We’ve been here before. The first wave showed us the same disturbing patterns, as the pandemic restraints shut down businesses involved in accommodation, tourism, travel, arts and culture, and food services.
But there were some signs that maybe the second wave would be kinder, and that employers were learning how to roll with lockdowns and constantly changing constraints. More than 5.4 million people are working from home, the highest number ever. High-income jobs have stayed protected. Capital markets are surging, creating a wealth effect. Housing prices are up. Commodity prices are up. And the federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to keep the economy afloat.