Kelley Bromley

You know, so much happens everyday that I mean to write here. I even pause and say, “That would go great in my Blog” but I never get to it, heh. Since my business is so small and isn’t yet established I can’t get a credit card in the business name, but I need some kind of financial institution backing the business to be able to be official enough to order from certain suppliers. So today I opened a small business operating account and ordered some business cheques. I went to the branch on campus and they don’t have small business advisers, so the branch manager had to set up the account. She didn’t really know how to do it, so I had to help her navigate the internal bank system, lol. Pretty cool :P Anyway, an hour later it was all worked out and I will have cheques with my company name on them :D

Today I also picked up some binders and dividers and set up all my business documents, purchasing info, and tax requirements in a nice and organized fashion. Looks great!

The website is also coming along nicely - products are finally starting to be listed, w00t! I’m hoping to launch it soon, then when I have all my wholesale accounts open I will decide how much to invest in each manufacturer.

Fun fun!

Well, the “Department of Homeland Security” may be trying, but they’re still pretty dense. I was checking to see if I can take my laptop on my flight to Atlanta (I can) and found that I can no longer take on such dangerous taking-over-the-plane things like toothpaste, hand sanitizer, lip gloss, or gel shoe inserts, or even water, but the more traditional tools like corkscrews, metal scissors with pointy ends under 4 inches, pointy knitty needles, screwdrivers, wrenches, and tools under 7 inchs - well, they’re just fine. Yeeeeeh. Read more about it here.

I read something on the internet that I want to post here. It was a speech made by Prof Ramesh Thakur, senior vice rector, UN University, and assistant UN secretary-general in his speech ‘Peace and Social Stability: The Role of the UN in Defeating Terrorism by Promoting Tolerance’. After talking about 9/11 and the US “for us or against us” policy, he brought up an earlier attack seldom talked about:

“In 1985, Air India flight 182 was blown up while flying from Toronto to London. All 329 people aboard were killed. Proportionate to their respective populations, the scale of loss of life due to one terrorist attack for Canada was similar to that of 9/11 for America. And we knew almost immediately who the culprits were: Sikh terrorists seeking independence from India.

“Now consider what Canada did not do. It did not dispatch its military forces to India to drain the swamp of terrorism in Punjab, nor declare a global war on terror, nor demand that Washington carefully screen all Sikh migrants and visitors henceforth. Rather, it increased and improved airport security measures, launched a criminal investigation, and prosecuted the alleged perpetrators in court. The court action failed ultimately, but that is a price we accept in democracies. It is called the rule of law, where prosecution by the government does not entail presumption of guilt and certainty of conviction.

“Yet the menace of Sikh terrorism has more or less disappeared from India as much as in Canada and the Sikhs are valuable and valued members of modern Canadian society steeped in the ethos of multiculturalism.”

Go Canada! God I can’t wait for Bush to get out of office.

*Rant over*

Well, it’s official: I am a business! On Wednesday, Aug 30, 2006 I got a letter from the BC Ministry of Finance that my first name choice for my sole proprietorship was available (Canadian Craft Supply Depot). On Thursday I bought two domain names, canadiancraftsupplydepot.ca and craftdepot.ca. Unfortunately craftdepot.com was unavailable, but I registered canadiancraftsupplydepot.com today and I will email the owner of the craftdepot.com domain since there is no website there right now.

So yesterday I called the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and got my business number and two accounts: a GST account and an Import/Export account. Today I registered with the BC provincial government to be able to collect PST, but that application takes a few days to complete and it’s a long weekend *sigh* The last step is to register on a municipal level with Vancouver City Hall to get a business license, then I can fax my license to my suppliers and they will ship me the wholesale catalogs and I can order stuff! WOOO! So what does it take to get a business?

So I still have a few things left to take care of, but I’m hoping to finish this up next week:

So exciting! I thought it would cost way more to start up but it wasn’t too bad at all :) I’m actually lucky to be starting at this time of year, because the initial business license with Vancouver is $106 + $50 application fee, but since it’s pro-rated this year I only pay $52 out of the $156 and next year in January I only pay $106 for the whole year =D