24 photos from my recent trip to the Okanagan are now up on my online photo gallery. Please enjoy them!

Turns out Gordon Campbell was indeed able to secure a victory yesterday in the BC election. 49 seats won (43 required for a majority) and 46% of the popular vote versus 36 seats and 42% for the NDP. The Single Transferrable Vote concept floundered with only 39% of voters saying ‘yes’ on their ballot.

It would have been very interesting (and not necessarily in a good way) to see a provincial NDP government in power during the Olympic Games. Alas, it’s status quo for 2010.

As we drove to work, I contemplated that today was garbage day at my house. Departing our garage, it struck me that so many people use garbage bags to dispose of their trash. Our next door neighbors use no less than three each week.

I was bewildered at the idea that people purchase brand new plastic for the explicit reason to be thrown out. It is truly one of the most stupid things I can think of. Imagine if someone handed you a cup of coffee and your first inclination was to pour it down the drain and then get on with your day. Or if someone gave you $5 and you promptly ripped it into pieces. But the fact that garbage bags are not only new, but are made with plastic is absolutely confounding. These are bags that we use for mere days – never more than a week – and once at the dump will take over a hundred years to decompose. They will sit in a landfill, amongst a hundred thousand others, having been used once, to do nothing more than contain more trash. I wonder what the impact would be if we all used hard trash bins to contain our garbage? That’s what we use.

Is the use of garbage bags yet another product of our consumerism and late-20th century suburbanism? Are we blind to the consequences as a result of mass media marketing and PR by the likes of Glad? Many people have begun using reusable beverage containers, reusable lunch bags and reusable grocery bags, yet garbage bags appear to be completely out of the conversation. I wonder if an appeal to limit or restrict the sale of plastic garbage bags to the Loblaw/Superstore/Safeway/Save-On Foods of the world would result in any action? They are stores who are limiting and soon canceling the use of plastic shopping bags, afterall. I wonder what kind of response Glad would have for stores who decided to ban plastic garbage bags? It would be ironic that a company would employ crisis communications to respond to not being allowed to sell plastic garbage bags (as it is a crisis that we’re using brand new plastic for our garbage in the first place).