Rodents gather outside of the Burrard SkyTrain Station in Vancouver on Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns
When the sun goes down, the rats of Vancouver’s Burrard Skytrain Station emerge, in a scurrying blur of fur and whipping tails.
Dozens of them, large and small, scamper around a park in front of the downtown station, running up and down the stairs among the legs of commuters and a wary reporter.
Some appear to be feasting on birdseed scattered on the ground.
Pest control experts suggest the skin-crawling scene may be due to a provincial ban on a type of rat poison, as well as other factors including Vancouver’s unusually warm winter.
Ashley Cochrane with Vancouver pest control firm The X-Terminators said she had watched a video of the rat “party” that unfolds in Art Phillips Park.
“Unfortunately, it’s definitely not good to see that, you know, for them to be so brazen … it’s a shock,” said Cochrane.
She said rodent-related services have become a bigger part of their business lately.
“I speak with a lot of people on the phone and the consensus is we’ve never had this problem before and now there’s just a lot more activity that we’re seeing,” said Cochrane.
Bill Rough, a pest control specialist with Surrey-based Advance Pest Control, said he recently responded to a rat infestation in a downtown Vancouver duplex.
He set 30 to 40 traps. But within half an hour, he got a call from the customer saying they’d heard the traps going off.
“I came back and there were nine rats in the traps … and they were the size of a small cat,” said Rough.
He said rat-related calls have gone up 30 to 40 per cent in the past 18 months. “It has been gripping crazy lately,” said Rough.
In January 2023, the province banned some types of anticoagulant rodenticides, saying they posed a risk to animals that eat poisoned rodents, such as hawks, and owls.
Pets or children could also be at risk, the government said, and only “essential services” such as hospitals and food production facilities were exempted.
Rough said the ban was one of the main reasons for the increase in rat activity in the Lower Mainland.
He said the government should “tweak” the policy by allowing people to use the banned rodenticide with caution in infested areas.
“I don’t see why that would be a problem (but) that’s not my decision, unfortunately,” said Rough.
Jason Page, general manager with Solutions Pest Control, said many factors contributed to the increase in rodent activity, including the poison ban, milder winter temperatures providing better breeding cycles, increased food availability from backyard chicken coops and restaurant patios, and increased urban development.
Page said the poison ban was “well-intentioned.”
“However, with every action, there is always a reaction. In this case, the apparent reaction we are seeing appears to be a 50 per cent increase in rats and mice,” said Page.
Jay McIntyre, a service supervisor with Solutions Pest Control who oversees rodent work in Greater Vancouver, said he had also seen a video of the rats outside Burrard station.
“It’s not normal, but it doesn’t come as a surprise,” said Mclntyre.
He’s been in the pest control industry since 1996 — he said one of his career highlights was trapping 65 rats in one house.
Mclntyre said his company has seen a “steady increase” of about 50 per cent in calls about rats in the past several years.
Although pest control companies are confident about the spike in rodent activity in Metro Vancouver, most municipal authorities lack hard data.
The cities of Surrey, Richmond and New Westminster said they don’t have data on rat-related calls
However, a City of Vancouver spokesperson said they received 1,174 calls about rats on the city’s 3-1-1 phone line last year, compared to 1,141 in 2022.
Kaylee Byers is a senior scientist with the Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society at Simon Fraser University, who also calls herself a “rat detective.”
She said the lack of a comprehensive system for rat sightings makes it hard for wildlife biologists to tell if populations are growing.
“??The thing is, nobody actually knows and that’s because we don’t have any form of municipal systematic reporting system for rats and rat sightings in the city,” said Byers.
“The best thing we have is sort of anecdotal evidence, which is calls to pest control professionals, but that data is not perfect because not everybody will call a pest control professional.”
In 2013, Byers joined the Vancouver Rat Project, an attempt to monitor and study rat movements around the city. Her team once captured more than 700 rats in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
She said cities in B.C. should follow the lead of rat-free provinces, like Alberta, as well as invest in rat management programs tailored differently to every city based on its rat populations.
“Rats are a part of our cities, and managing them is a complex issue,” she said.
“Part of the problem is that we’re approaching it like it’s a simple one. See a rat, remove a rat, or kill a rat, and it’s not working. We need to think more broadly, we need to address it as a complex issue in order to come up with innovative and multiple solutions to managing rats now and in the future.”
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
