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British Columbia’s bold provincial budget
British Columbia’s ruling center-left party, the NDP, announced its budget yesterday, and Paul Willcocks at The Tyee declares it an ambitious success. Raising the carbon and corporate income taxes, the plan offers to reduce health premiums, build affordable housing, and reduce child care costs. A report at CBC notes the British Columbia budget includes $50 million in new funding for Indigenous programs, including preservation of aboriginal languages
Seattle to offer free transit passes to high school students
Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan announced a proposal that would provide free transit passes to all high school students in the city, one of the most generous public transit benefits to students in North America. The Urbanist notes the program had its origin in efforts by a group of students in the city’s racially diverse Rainier Beach neighborhood.
The Bitcoin mining gold rush in Eastern Oregon
Willamette Week reports on the strange phenomenon of small time “prospectors” flocking to the Dalles, Oregon to set up rooms full of thousand computers to mine for the encrypted keys to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The miners are flocking to eastern Oregon because of low electricity prices — 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. But the environmental and social cost is proving to be high.
Trucking sea lions to save steelhead
OPB reports that wildlife managers in Oregon are resorting to trucking hungry sea lions from Willamette Falls out to the Pacific coast because they’re devouring endangered steelhead runs. “It would be great if we could just take them to the coast and they could stay there, but that’s not what we’ve found,” Wright said. “I wish it were that simple.”
Terese Mailhot on motherhood and inherited sorrow
In an excerpt at Literary Hub from her new memoir Heart Berries, British Columbia Indigenous writer Terese Mailhot reflects on how she headed to the US to create a new life and find herself as a writer. “I didn’t expect the best things, and I have turned loss into a fortune—a personal pleasure. It’s not a sustainable joy, I know.”
“Bunker,” a poem by Azura Tyabji
Seattle Review of Books has a poem from the young poet Azura Tyabji, who’s serving as SROB’s poet in residence this month. “Bunker” addresses the city of Seattle’s attempts to build an expensive fortified police headquarters when it’s under scrutiny for excessive use of force against black citizens:
“…Government ain’t the wizard we hoped
but a coward pretending to be better than he is
Is this the fraud I’m expected to call progressive?”
Read the entire poem here.
That’s all today’s news, arts, and culture from the Great Pacific Northwest where it sometimes snows in late February! –Andrew Engelson
Photo credit: BC legislature buildings by Wikimedia Commons user Voyager CC BY-SA 2.5