Capital Daily for Sunday, June 14

The 1889 courthouse at 28 Bastion Square has been empty since the Maritime Museum of B.C. was forced out in 2014, after the building was deemed unsafe. This week, council decided 11 years is long enough.

Councillors directed staff to ask the province for the building's condition and to bring back strategies for restoring it. Coun. Susan Kim, who brought the motion, said groups interested in the site call the inaction "demolition by neglect." The Ministry of Infrastructure pegs deferred maintenance alone at $20 million, and says it has spent $840,000 over the past decade patching the roof, fixing a water line and protecting the masonry.

Downtown's other knots got attention too. Council voted 8-1 to study whether 16 parking stalls atop the six-storey Johnson Street parkade could become an allotment garden, after the downtown residents association's wait-list for plots hit 160. And on the 900-block of Pandora, crews pulled the blue fences during a Thursday cleanup. Mayor Marianne Alto said some will stay down to test whether more space can open up for public use.

The snow that's supposed to feed the Island's rivers all summer is sitting at about 11% of normal right now, which Charles Curry calls "really unprecedented." That's before El Niño has even arrived.

Curry, a UVic researcher with the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, puts the odds of an El Niño at 80%, but the odds it'll be strong at just 30%. The media panic about a "super El Niño," he says, doesn't quite track with the data he's seeing.

Vancouver Island sits on the front lines of whatever does come. Environment Canada's Bill Merryfield says the coastal ocean will warm first, by up to a couple of degrees through fall and winter, possibly pulling fish species north into BC waters that normally stay further south. Higher winter sea levels could worsen flooding when storm season and extreme high tides line up.

The low snowpack itself isn't El Niño's fault. That's climate change, and a string of mild winters. El Niño just speeds up a tendency that's already taking hold.