Vancouver Magazine
Beijing Mansion Hosts Chinese Restaurant Awards New Wave 2023 Dinner
A Guide to the City’s Best Omakase
5 Croissants to Try at the 2023 Vancouver Croissant Crawl
The Best Drinks to Bring to a Holiday Party (and Their Zero-Proof Alternatives)
The Wine List: 6 Wines for Every Holiday Wine Drinker on Your List
Nightcap: Spiked Horchata
5 Things to Do in Vancouver This Week (December 4-10)
Protected: Your dream smile, just in time for wedding season
5 Things to Do in Vancouver This Week (November 27-December 3)
Escape to Osoyoos: Your Winter Wonderland Awaits
Your 2023/2024 Ultimate Local Winter Getaway Guide
Kamloops Unscripted: The Most Intriguing Fall Destination of 2023
2023 Gift Guide: 8 Gorgeous Gifts from Vancouver Jewellery Designers
Local Gift Guide 2023: For Everyone on Your Holiday Shopping List
Local Gift Guide 2023: For the Pets
A confession, to start. I’ve lived in this province for 30 years, yet I’ve seen hardly any of it. I’m good on Metro Vancouver (I’m great on the Brewery District), and I’d give myself a solid B for Vancouver Island. Farther afield, though, and it’s mostly terra incognita — a string of places I only consider when I watch returns maps on election night.
I’d love to experience more (retirement project?) because I’m a proud British Columbian, yes, but also because discussions of our economic future always have a slightly theoretical quality for me. Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project involves cities like Kitimat that I’ve never visited, and sums of money that are so massive as to appear equally imaginary.
Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain project stands at a more comprehensible scale — at least it terminates in Burnaby. I’ve been there. Like many British Columbians, I see benefits and risks in the proposed expansion of pipelines linking the tar sands to our port. Gregor Robertson’s recent fight with the National Energy Board overseeing the application, however, was galvanizing for me. It’s heartening to see politicians stand up for their constituents and their principles. (I also approve of Joyce Murray recently demanding in the House of Commons that First Nations be heard in Northern Gateway deliberations.) Robertson’s questions about democratic process and the need to consider big-picture costs — climate change, say — have motivated me to do what I should have from the beginning: research and read for myself what is involved.
That’s my summer project, which sounds dour, but this issue is so full of tips on great new patios, craft beers, and gelato that I don’t mind doing some research while I’m checking them out (and dreaming of this Okanagan getaway). Especially given the sobering thought that such projects carry at their heart considerable risk to our main renewable resource: the beauty that garners us over $13 billion in annual tourism. A big, theoretical number, but one I’d like to get to know quite intimately.
Depending on wind, Isabella Bertold burns between 1,000 and 3,000 calories an hour in competitive Laser sailing
Paul Webster, the reporter behind A Wing and a Prayer, recently took home the 2014 Sanofi Pasteur Medal of Excellence in Health Research Journalism for April 2013’s Adverse Reactions
Executive chef Lee Parsons’s hangover cure from his youth: a two-litre bottle of Fanta bedside: “That was religion”