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VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Every year, Vancouver’s cannabis retailers cut the city cheques for $34,000. It’s one of the largest municipal business license fees in the nation.

But that may soon change if one councillor’s motion, being tabled Tuesday, makes its way through city hall.

Councilor Rebecca Bligh is aiming to bring pot shop licensing fees more in line with Victoria’s, where they pay $5,000 a year plus a one-time $7,500 rezoning fee.

She said right now, it’s more expensive to license a cannabis store in Vancouver than to license the PNE.

“The fees [in Vancouver] right now are in excess of $34,000. The next-highest fee to that would be the annual business license fee for the entire PNE operation at $18,000. And even the local horsetrack’s annual business license fee sits around $13,000. As you can see, it’s $21,000 higher on an annual recurring basis than businesses that we would suspect ought to be far more complicated in how they function than one individual retail store with a handful of employees,” she said.

“All they’re asking for is a fair shake,” Jaclynn Pehota with the Association of Canadian Cannabis Retailers (ACCRES) said. “They’re not asking for special treatment here. They’re just asking for a reasonable alignment of their business licensing fees.”

ACCRES’ members include major local players like Muse and City Cannabis.

Pehota doesn’t feel the current fee structure is fair.

“It also strikes me as unjustifiable,” she said. “We have been making inquiries to the City of Vancouver, asking for a breakdown of where that [money] is going. Business licensing fees are supposed to be an exercise in cost recovery. They’re not supposed to be an exercise in revenue, from the city’s perspective.”

Bligh’s motion also seeks to eliminate an additional security screening that all pot shop employees have to pay for. She argues it’s an unnecessary burden on people who often make minimum wage.

“We’ll still have a criminal record check, but the extra layer of verification that is unique to the cannabis industry … that does not exist in a liquor retail industry feels more punitive and stigmatizing around the cannabis industry itself,” she said.

Jeremy Jacob with Village Bloomery Cannabis Store said shops like his “are not the license to print money” many think they are, telling us the current license fees are a huge hit.

“As a small business operating under regulation, we’ve seen our wholesale costs increase and then our retail margins decrease. And our consumer buy-in in B.C. is the lowest per capita in Canada,” he claimed. “Many small retailers are facing layoffs and letting staff go, and then the next day or next week or whatever, writing a cheque for $35,000.”

He’s happy Bligh is proposing a new fee structure, which would bring costs more akin to those associated with operating a liquor store.

“We need employment. We’re in a recession, we’re in a pandemic. And the license fees are counter to the goals of developing the sector,” Jacob said.

-With files from Lasia Kretzel

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Some people who spotted a line of bright white lights in the sky over the Lower Mainland Tuesday night say they thought they were seeing a UFO.

But the reason behind the celestial sight was not quite as unknown as many might have thought — it was actually the result of a series of satellites launched from Florida by SpaceX.

“Those were Starlink satellites,” explained UBC associate professor of astronomy Aaron Boley, who says 60 of them were sent up on May 4.

“That initial deployment phase is characterized by a line of satellites as they slowly spread out in their orbits, and they’re very bright at that time for a number of reasons.”

For one, the satellites are at a much lower orbit, Boley says.

Once they drift farther away, they lose some of their brightness, but remain visible.

The Starlink satellites are being launched as part of a plan to provide cheap, faster internet across the globe.

“The idea of bringing global connectivity to the world in a way that we’ve never seen, which we shouldn’t dismiss for a lot of remote communities who do not have reliable internet access,” Boley told NEWS 1130. “There’s implications for search and rescue, as an example, and just disaster response. So there are a number of very good benefits that come with it.”

However, there are downsides to sending up so many satellites into space.

Boley says space, especially the space near earth such as low-earth orbit, isn’t usually treated as “an environment.”

“An environment worth preserving. And there are a number of consequences that can come out of this, one of them being light pollution, obstruction of the night sky … but then there’s also the science component of it,” Boley said.

“All those satellites are recycled every five years or so — at least that’s the plan — and that’s going to be dumping material into the upper atmosphere, which, over time, can become an appreciable amount of mass.”

He notes SpaceX has been working on reducing how bright its Starlink satellites are to the naked eye, in an effort to reduce the view of the night sky. But that doesn’t address the impact these satellites have on telescopes, which are sensitive to light.

That can be problematic for wide-field surveys, which are done for a variety of reasons.

Some teams are looking at the night sky every few days to see changes, while others are keeping an eye on space for “planetary defence.”

“Looking for asteroids that could potentially be on earth’s impact trajectory and these … satellites are going to impact kind of the ability to quickly characterize a lot of the transience that we see in the night sky that we see,” Boley said.

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s next literary adventure is set in the far-off world of science fiction.

The 61-year-old from Ontario, best known for his viral rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while commanding the International Space Station, has now penned a space thriller called “The Apollo Murders.”

Random House Canada says the story centres on a NASA crew racing against their Soviet rivals to reach the far side of the moon, but someone on-board the Apollo module has “murder on the mind.”

Speaking to NEWS 1130, Hadfield explained why he wanted to delve into the world of sci-fi.

“Science fiction is kind of, like how a little kid sees the world, right? It’s this blend of what already exists and what might exist. And I think we need that type of visualization on the edge of reality, in order to help push ourselves into what we really need to solve the problems of the future,” explains Hadfield.

Listen to the full interview with NEWS 1130’s Kurtis Doering and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield:

The thriller will be rooted in the “little-known reality” of the Cold War-era space race and will feature characters both real and imagined.

The well-accomplished Hadfield, who has also worked as a pilot, engineer, and musician, says the goal of his new book is to give readers a practical sense of what life in space is like; A subject he knows well.

“So that they can really get a sense of what it would be like for them there,” says Hadfield. “How they would face the various challenges? How they deal with the imperfections? And then what it would change about them and do to them as a person? It’s hard to do that in a purely factual way, we almost need to tell an entire story.”

The book hasn’t even been released yet but Hadfield says he’s already thinking about a sequel.

The former commander of the International Space Station already has a proven track record as a bestselling author, with previous titles including “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth,” “You Are Here” and the children’s book “The Darkest Dark.”

“The Apollo Murders” is scheduled to hit shelves on Oct. 12.

-With files from The Canadian Press