Find your home at Fieldstone Park ›› p.5
Avant: new waterfront homes in Vancouver ›› p.8
An exclusive enclave of executive-style, singlefamily detached homes awaits in a new, peaceful Pitt Meadows community. With attractive prices and an ideal location, the homes are selling fast.‘You can’t just go out and create more neighbourhoods like this one,’ says BCStar Development Corporation president Brian Craig.
April 29, 2010
Rate hike expected as early as June 1 Bank of Canada maintains interest rates, but increase may come earlier TRICIA LESLIE The Bank of Canada held its benchmark overnight lending rate steady at 0.25 per cent at its most recent setting on April 20. The trend-setting Bank rate, which is set 0.25 percentage points above the overnight lending rate, remains at 0.5 per cent . The Bank dropped its commitment to keep the policy rate With “recent its current level improvements at until the second half in the of the year, opening the door to a rate economic increase at its next outlook, the fixed announcement need for such date June 1. With “recent extraordinary improvements in the policy is now economic outlook, passing, and it the need for such is appropriate extraordinary policy is now passing, and to begin to it is appropriate to begin to lessen the lessen the degree of monetary degree of stimulus,” the Bank monetary says. “The extent and stimulus.” timing will depend upon the outlook for economic activity and inflation, and will be consistent with achieving the two per cent inflation target.” The change in the Bank of Canada’s statement reflects a sharp upgrade to the Bank’s economic forecast, with growth in 2010 forecasted at 3.7 per cent, up from 2.9 per cent in its January projection, says an RBC Economics release. CONTINUED ON P.2
Stephen Parker is surrounded by beds at Parker’s Mattress Factory Store. These days, there are so many styles and materials available, purchasing a new one depends on each consumer’s taste. Rob Newell photo
Choose a bed, then lie in it Too soft? Too hard? Finding a bed that’s just right is up to the buyer MAGGIE CALLOWAY You’ve known for awhile that you need to replace ‘old faithful’ – the bed you have lugged around since your college days. Buying a new bed is one of the most intimate public purchases homeowners make
and one fraught with panic if a mistake is made. The sea of bed sizes and choices seem endless: pillow top, memory foam, latex, the ‘bowling ball’ bed, inner spring and coil spring … is coil different from inner? And now there’s plasma ... isn’t that a TV? A common perception is, the more coils the better the mattress. As a rule of thumb, 300 for a full, 375 for a queen and 450 for a king, but it turns out that although the num-
ber is important, it is also how tightly the coil is wound. A fact many may not know is that memory foam mattresses were originally developed by NASA to protect astronauts against extreme G-forces. Memory foam mattresses work by making contact with more of the sleeper’s body mass, consequently relieving stress on the usual CONTINUED ON P.2