british columbia

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Missing the Point

I was walking through the excellent ASI Exchange event the other week and came upon a booth from Industry Canada. They were preaching the benefits of business eco-efficiency and their new web site for guiding businesses in this endeavour. I, being the eco-convert I am, was eager to see what Industry Canada had to say. And then I came face-to-face with the Government of Canada’s bureaucratic brand of doublethink.

The brochure was titled “Eco-efficiency: Good Business Sense”, and it got off to a great start:

“Eco-efficiency is increasingly becoming a key requirement for success in business. It’s the art of doing more with less, of minimizing costs and maximizing value. Eco-efficiency promotes the creation of goods and services while optimizing resource use, and reducing wastes and pollution.”

Sounds great, sign me up! The brochure outlines a simple three step program for starting to incorporate eco-efficiency into your business:

  1. Assess yourself
  2. Create a plan
  3. Perform a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed plan.

Again, all good. I was pretty impressed until something odd happened. About halfway through the brochure, the brochure was entirely upside down – some thoughtless printer had messed up this flawless document! What a shame, to have this work ruined by having a production mishap insert the pages upside down. And, not only that, when I righted the brochure, I realized the mishap had managed to garble the text so severely that it almost looked like another language. The text now looked almost French. In fact, it looked exactly like French.

Hmm. Waitaminute.

Yes, you’ve got it: Industry Canada had printed a combined English-French version of the brochure – duplicating the entire content in a language that, despite being an official language, is not the mother tongue of the majority of British Columbians. And wasted a lot of paper, ink, and energy, not to mention money, in the process. Can you say “do as I say, not as I do”?

To be fair, the government is required to print all documents in both English and French. Fine, no problem there. But wouldn’t it make more sense, ecologically speaking, to print the French version separately? How can government expect business to get this new eco-religion, when the government itself hasn’t been baptized?

Come on guys, get your act together.

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

I. Am. Sore.

I went skiing at Cypress Mountain yesterday, the first time I’ve gone skiing in nearly ten years. And today, I am in a world of pain. Alright, “world” might be an exaggeration, but I’m at least in a small island, possibly a Pacific continent which I won’t name here, of pain. I don’t understand how ten years passed since last I went skiing. I guess with going to university and travelling, it got lost along the way.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed skiing. As a kid I joked about the almost pathological addiction of my father to skiing. He’d wake me up on Saturday winter mornings at an absurd hour, a gleeful grin on his face:

There’s fresh powder on the hills, let’s GO!

I think he enjoyed skiing just to spite me and get me out of bed early on the weekends. It was a 20-minute drive from our house to Kimberley Ski Resort, located in the sleepy town where my father worked at the local hospital. The fact that the hospital was only five minutes from the ski hill only fed his addiction, allowing a determined skier to hit the hill several times in the same work day: before work, at lunch, after work, and after dinner. And my father was a determined skier.

Mostly, I remember riding the chair lift with him, which he jokingly reminded me counted as “quality father-son time”. It was as if he were attempting to prod some omnipotent sky-bound referee to keep an accurate score.

I missed that yesterday.

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