Category Archives: News

#COVID19 | As The Pandemic Wends Its Glorious Way to A Close

December 8, 2020BC Politics, Canada, Food & Health, News, Politics, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

Hope for an expeditious end to our current pandemic circumstance appears to be relatively close, with vaccines from at least four — and more probably, six — companies appear well on their way to receiving approval in the next short while, with the two-injection Pfizer vaccine appearing set for approval by Health Canada as early as this Thursday, December 10th, with Moderna, AstraZenica and Johnson & Johnson not far behind in the pipeline. Update: Health Canada approved the Pfizer/BioNTech on December 9th.

A number of announcements have been made in recent days involving the roll-out of the vaccines that will, eventually, keep us all safe …

On November 27th, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the appointment of former NATO commander Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin to lead the national vaccine distribution effort, with a target of immunizing half of all Canadians — that’s 19 million of us — or more, by September, 2021;

Just yesterday, the Prime Minister told Canadians that Canada has secured an agreement to receive its first batch of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine before the end of the year — up to 249,000 doses. Pending Health Canada approval, “Canadians will be getting vaccinated starting next week,” Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa. Shipments will continue to arrive in 2021; the second batch will be reserved for the same people vaccinated in the first batch — which is to say, the elderly in long term care facilities across Canada. “We’re facing the largest immunization in the history of our country,” Trudeau said.

Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) this past Friday released its final directive addressing the prioritization of who should receive the vaccines first, and which groups would be next, right through until the late spring. By the end of March, NACI scientists said they expect 3 million Canadians will have been vaccinated with one of the three (soon to be four, or more) approved COVID-19 vaccines, that number doubling by late June, and doubling yet again by early to mid-autumn of 2021.

The initial batch of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines will roll out to 249,000, or more, Canadians

NACI scientists advise the roll-out of vaccines will occur, as follows …

(a) Long-term care and assisted living facility residents, as well as residents in retirement homes and chronic care hospitals, who face “severe outcomes” and a much greater chance of dying from the disease than the population as a whole;
(b) NACI scientists said the next priority group would be “adults 80 years of age and older;”
Number of Canadians, by province, expected to receive the initial batch of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in the early part of 2021, beginning in January.

(c) NACI scientists expressed concern about Indigenous adults living in communities “where infection can have disproportionate consequences, such as those living in remote or isolated areas.” Indigenous persons will be the third group of Canadians to be vaccinated;
(d) Adults aged 75 – 79 would be next to receive vaccinations, followed by adults aged 70 – 74 years of age.

These four groups — long-term care residents and staff, the elderly, front line health care workers and some Indigenous adults — are expected to consume all of the six million doses (the Pfizer vaccine requires two doses) to be delivered in the first three months of 2021.

In the second phase of the vaccine roll-out, which would begin in April 2021, as more supply comes online, other essential workers will have access. The NACI advisory committee said first responders — such as police officers, firefighters and health care workers not included in the initial rollout — would be next in line, followed by residents and staff in other “congregate settings” — such as migrant workers, prisoners in correctional facilities and people in homeless shelters.
At the end of the day, though, it is the provincial Premiers, their Health Ministers and Public Health Officers who will determine prioritization of vaccine roll-out in their jurisdictions. By late summer / early autumn, Prime Minister Trudeau has said he expects half of all Canadians would be vaccinated — that’s 19 million Canadians.
The vaccine roll-out will continue through the end of 2021, and beyond.

Investigative Journalism | Why We All Must Subscribe to Media

November 18, 2020Media, News, Stories of a Life, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

The future of journalism will increasingly depend on you paying for the news directly. Subscribing to newspapers, magazines and online journals represents nothing less than your essential duty to your fellow citizens, a necessary act of good citizenship, particularly when the algorithms developed by social media feeds like Facebook knowingly publish what can only be considered as “fake news”, and a true diminishment of knowledge.
The genesis of today’s VanRamblings derives from this tweet by longtime, respected Globe and Mail labour reporter, Rod Mickleburgh …

I spend about $50 a month subscribing to various US, Canadian and local newspapers…that's about $1.70 day…what a bargain! Cheaper than a bus ride, and you get so much…Support journalism, folks…We need it more than ever #COVID19

— Rod Mickleburgh (@rodmickleburgh) November 17, 2020

For those who don’t know: I love short form writing, have for almost 60 years now. As this is my blog, and in some sense an expression of what I care about, it is also (increasingly) about who I am, and how I have arrived at where I am in my life, psychologically, spiritually, philosophically and intellectually at the age of 70 years, and a few more COVID-19 months on.

As I’ve written previously, from age 6 on, I pretty much raised myself — my father worked the afternoon shift til 1 a.m. at the post office, and my mother worked evenings at Canada Packers / Swift Meats on Lulu Island. After making myself some dinner, or eating some stew that was bubbling away in the slow cooker, I was left to my own devices. Sometimes that involved going to the movies, sometimes in the 1960s that meant rehearsing for a play at Templeton Secondary school, but mostly it meant spending evenings at the Vancouver Public Library, at Robson and Burrard (pictured above). In some measure, librarians helped to raise me.
The library opened up previously unimaginable possibilities about what the future held, not only introducing me to the great works of literature, but providing me with insight into history, politics, development, and the arts.
Amidst the many tens of thousands of books, there was a newspaper and magazine room, where I would spend the better part of an hour each evening, reading through Time magazine, the London Times, the New York Times, the Manchester Guardian, the Toronto Star, and in time, the “gang of activists” folks who began publishing This Magazine, Canadian Forum and Canadian Dimension. I read newspapers from across the globe, and consumed magazines as if I was starved for information about the beauty and breadth of the world around me. I carried on that tradition of magazine and world newspaper reading while attending school at Simon Fraser University in the 1970s, and carry on that tradition thru until this very day.
At present, I subscribe to the following newspapers, magazines and …

The Globe and Mail sets me back $29.36 each month, by far my most expensive subscription, I subscribe to the news channels through TELUS Optik TV. The annual subscription to the LA Times is $71.01 (or $5.92 a month), the Washington Post, $76.08 ($6.34 monthly), Slate Plus is $35.86 annually, while Vulture / New York magazine comes in at $27.36 for the year. The New York Times is $8.40 per month, and The Guardian is an even $5. The total monthly subscription to the news channels, and all the magazines above comes in at a whopping, easy-to-digest $67.28 a month.
Each morning when I arise to Stephen Quinn and The Early Edition, sometimes at 7 a.m., sometimes at 5 a.m., I immediately flip open the iPad Mini beside my bed, and click on the morning digest of news on my Flipboard app, a free and indispensable source of news.

Next, I surf through the New York and Los Angeles Times, then Slate, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and Vulture. Then, it’s up to make some breakfast while listening to the New York Times’ Michael Barbaro podcast, The Daily. Over breakfast I catch up on the news on CBC Network, the CTV News channel, CNN and MSNBC. After breakfast, it’s to my computer to continue with an hour of reading of the Globe, and the NY Times, the Washington Post and LA Times in depth, with a gander at Slate, and checking out Vulture / the New York magazine — and whatever I’ve found on Flipboard that I found interesting, in The Atlantic, Esquire, Vanity Fair, after which it’s off to Twitter and Facebook.
And then, after all that, I’m ready to begin my day.
Okay, okay, I can hear you say, “It’s alright for you to read and subscribe to so many news outlets, but not all of us have money to spend burning a hole in our pocket,” which will now lead to the following graph of my total income for 2019. I have an extra $75 in tax taken off, so I’ve got a bit of money, usually $900 in a tax return, each spring — thanks to my good friend (who knows how he puts up with me?) and accountant for nigh on 30 years, the spectacularly kind Patrick Mokrane, who’s kept me afloat financially thru his on the up-and-up derring do on my annual tax return.

A friend of mine tells me that he believes I live better on $1870.75 a month than anyone he knows. I have created an Excel spreadsheet that tracks every penny I spend, so that helps keeps me focused. My housing co-op monthly charge comes in at around $600, my bills (Internet, TV, mobility, home phone and Hydro, Netflix, Prime, etc.) comes in at around $245 — which leaves me with $67 for my subscriptions, $350 for food and household products, $75 a month on dining out or ordering in, another $75 a month for clothes and shoes — which, ordinarily, would leave me $400 each month left over to pay for dental, books, tech, insurance, hair cuts, donations to various causes (oh yes, I forgot, I donate $100 each month to the NDP provincially and federally, as well as to a faith organization, and various “causes”). Unfortunately, when in 2018 I came into a windfall arising from a 30-year-old union grievance I filed and won (for me, and hundreds of others locally), Canada Pension deducted that windfall from my annual income (economics - the dismal science), but in 2019 I had no such windfall, so in July Canada Pension cut my pension by $172.50 a month!
All of the above is by way of saying, if I can live relatively well on $1698 a month, or so, and can still prioritize subscriptions to various online news organizations, and donate monies to political parties I support, so can you.

As all of us are aware, it costs money to create content, and it costs a lot of money to fund good investigative journalism, as the nonprofit-run Mother Jones pointed out this year during a fundraising effort.
These past few years, we’ve also become aware of the controversy surrounding Mark Zuckerberg; the indifferent Facebook CEO claimed it was “crazy” that fake news on Facebook could have influenced the recent U.S. election results, or that his social media site has anything to do with aiding the repression of citizens across the globe. Sadly, that’s far from the truth.
Awhile back, Facebook eliminated the human editors who curated trending news; now an algorithm handles this — but the algorithm often gets it wrong, as stories from Russian bot sites present themselves as credible news organizations, make the rounds and trend on Facebook, feeding conspiracy theories and misinformation. Little wonder that, at last count, Facebook remains the world’s #1 purveyor of false or inaccurate news.
All of which is to say that you have an obligation to yourself, to those around you, and to society in general to keep yourself well-informed, and read credible news sites that are, in actuality, truly “fair and balanced.”
If you believe the newspapers and magazines above are a little too “conservative” for your liking, in Canada, there’s always rabble.ca, the public affairs journalism of richochet.ca, This Magazine, and Canadian Dimension, as well as down south, In These Times, Mother Jones, Crooks and Liars, and so many other left-of-centre journals and magazines that may be found online. There are places online where you can get credible, well-thought-out and researched, witty & engagingly written truthful news.

Do yourself a favour today: subscribe to one or more online, or home delivery, newspaper, journal or magazine. You’ll feel better for it. Honest.

Arts Friday | 75 German People of Influence in Western Canada

November 6, 2020Arts Friday, NewsRaymond Tomlin

Author Elke Porter holding up her new book. C’mon along to the book launch on Saturday!

During the course of the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, one of highlights of the “contest” to become a Vancouver City Councillor occurred at The Imperial on Main, at the Last Candidate Standing event (won by current Councillor, Christine Boyle), was the emergence of a relatively unknown independent candidate for Vancouver City Council, the incredibly witty and socially conscious, author and publisher, longtime Kitsilano resident, Elke Porter — who wowed the crowd, taking all into her heart.

“In 2018, I went into the election thinking that I had something of value to contribute,” Elke Porter told VanRamblings in an interview Thursday. “As a parent to two young women, I have long played a role in the parent action committees at their schools, had volunteered with a great many non-profit and charitable organizations, and had, for years, contributed as an activist and organizer within the German community.”

“With my girls now almost fully grown, running for Council seemed like the next logical step for me — not to mention, getting to know Vancouver in a whole new way proved, for me, to be the experience of a lifetime. As well, I got to know all of the candidates who were eventually elected to Vancouver City Council, which emerged as a humanizing experience for me. Quite honestly, I would recommend the experience to anyone.”

In 2020, Elke Porter has written — and, as of today, published — a new book, 75 German-Speaking Influential People in Western Canada, on the prominent difference makers of German descent from across western Canada who have contributed to making our nation what it is today.

Elke Porter's book launch, 75 German-Speaking Influential People in Western Canada

Click on the graphic above to purchase your copy of Elke Porter’s important new book

A necessary and invaluable compendium, a who’s who of the past and present regaling the stories of 75 Canadian citizens of German descent.

Thousands of Austrians, German and Swiss, were success stories in a variety of industries over the past 100 years. Some of them sold food and drink. Some founded real estate empires. There were artists, entrepreneurs, musicians, pastors, philanthropists, property developers, singers, writers and volunteers.

“David Oppenheimer, who opened the first wholesale grocery business in 1887 and became the second mayor of Vancouver is one of them,” says Porter. “Alvo von Alvensleben who bought a house and 20 acres in Kerrisdale in 1909 that took 13 servants to run, had his house taken by the Custodian of Enemy Property Act at the outbreak of World War I, which was then sold to the publisher of the Vancouver Sun, Robert James Cromie, and whose widow sold it to the Crofton Private School in 1942, for the sum of $15,000. Fritz Ziegler, started with a 1912 farmhouse in Fort Langley, added turrets, stucco and brick to it and ended up owning Canada’s only ‘castle’ that he named ‘Schloss Klipphaus.’ Ziegler, after throwing many ‘legendary’ parties, was eventually appointed the Consul General of Monaco.”

Schloss Klipphaus, the Fort Langley, replica castle built by Fritz Ziegler, featuring such age-of-chivalry elements as this knight’s hall.

“Some of the other prominent people you may know that are in my book are the Freybe family, who started what became a generational family business, dating back to 1844, pioneering a culinary experience around diverse products ranging from delectable salamis to traditionally crafted sausages. And the same thing with the Grimm’s family.”

So, now here we are mid-pandemic in 2020, and 75 German-Speaking Influential People in Western Canada has become a reality. VanRamblings asked Elke Porter, how and why did the book come together now?

“You know, it’s actually ‘thanks COVID’,” Ms. Porter says, laughing. “As a busy mom, I suddenly didn’t have to drive my kids to school. I couldn’t go out to restaurants, and found myself for the most part, housebound, except on those occasions when I went for a walk in the neighbourhood where, if you recall, I ran into you one day.”

“So, I just started writing when I had time. In addition, my mother proved to be an excellent editor, and my brother, Dr. Christian Klaue, the latter my maiden name — with his Phd in English — also emerged as an editor.”

“Given the work I’ve done with my West Coast German News periodical over the years, I found I’d interviewed a good number of the people who found their way into my book. Of course, there was a great deal of time spent at the library, in the archives. When I was writing the book, I was sent the Fred Herzog book, Photographs, and the Freybe family sent me their book. Much of the rest of the research for the book occurred through e-mail correspondence, which as a writer, as I’m sure you know, can be a most satisfying endeavour.

Now down to the nitty gritty: the book launch tomorrow afternoon at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. First up this book launch info graphic …

At this writing, there are a limited number of tickets available at $75 — 30 of 40 available tickets have been sold. Note should be made that strict COVID-19 protocols will be in place for the book launch. Donations made by clicking here will be designated as donations to the B.C. Cancer Agency.

As above, Elke Porter’s book launch — and fundraiser for the B.C. Cancer Agency — will be a COVID-safe event.

Elke Porter thanks you for your support of her, and her new book!

#USElection2020 | U.S. Long National Nightmare Will Soon Be Over

November 2, 2020News, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

The old tricks aren’t working. The October Surprise surprised no one. Junior says nobody’s dying. And the low whine of panic emanating from Trump, and his terrible children — Don Jr. mansplaining the pandemic, while Ivanka’s campaign “tea parties” try to convince suburban women that daddy doesn’t want you to die, just everyone else — well, it’s all coming to an end, perhaps as early as 7:30pm Pacific time Tuesday night, when all the Florida votes — including mail-in ballots — will have been counted.

The graphic above was published by MSNBC two weeks ago. For the past two plus years, American activist Emma González — the high school senior who survived the horrific February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida — and her fellow Parkland student, David Hogg, have joined with tens of thousands of other youth across the U.S. to change gun laws, and work to vote Trump and the Republicans out of office.

In 2015, young voters by the millions across Canada cast a ballot for Justin Trudeau, in numbers previously unimagined, driving overall voter turnout across Canada from 60% in 2011 to 70% in October 2015. In the process, the overwhelming youth vote turnout gave Trudeau a majority government.
As pollsters tend to under count young voters — because, as can be seen in the 2016 MSNBC figures in the graphic above, more often than not those 18 – 29 years of age don’t get out to vote — given that in 2016 Donald Trump won the Electoral College (but not the popular vote) by the mere combined vote of 107,000 American votes in just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — out of a total combined U.S. Presidential vote of 128,838,342, with 65,853,514 votes cast for Hillary Clinton, and 62,984,828 for Donald Trump — and given the unprecedented strength of the 2020 student Get Out the Vote campaign, dedicated to mobilizing the largest early vote and the largest overall student and young persons vote in American history, and given their success to date in driving the vote of young people across the U.S., in every state, by anywhere from ten to fifty times their number in 2016, and given that pollsters haven’t properly accounted for the young vote — young people are notoriously difficult to reach by pollsters — the youth voter turnout in the 2020 election will prove the difference maker, and come the late evening of Tuesday, November 3rd, it’s gonna be a rout, and not just a nailbiter, for Democrat Joe Biden.

Don’t take VanRamblings word alone, though — listen to what seasoned political operatives, strategists and journalists in Canada, and across the U.S., have to say about Tuesday’s consequential Presidential election.

Slate’s Political Gabfest is my favourite American political podcast — every Thursday is a joy, when the podcast is published late in the afternoon.
The podcast is hosted by the cantankerous and recently divorced American journalist, David Plotz — the former CEO of Atlas Obscura, past editor-in-chief of Slate, longtime co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest and founder of City Cast, who lives with his three children in Washington, D.C. —&#32and Gabfest co-hosts, Yale University professor and legal scholar, and writer with New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon, and correspondent with CBS’ 60 Minutes, the humble, good-natured, engaging and oh-so-erudite John Dickerson — who in the embedded podcast below of their latest Political Gabfest episode weigh in on the U.S. election, in an informed, easy-to-listen-to and accessible manner that will give you a greater insight into what is likely to occur tomorrow night than you’ll hear anywhere else.

The members of The Herle Burly podcast — left-of-centre federal and provincial Liberal Party strategists, David Herle and Scott Reid, and former four-time Stephen Harper Conservative party campaign manager and right-of-centre political strategist (a supporter and advisor to U.S. President, Donald Trump) — also weigh in on the November 3rd, 2020 U.S. election.

The PBS Newshour’s regular Friday political panel, moderated by Newshour anchor Judy Woodruff, the panelists, moderate Republican, sober New York Times columnist and acknowledged Trump-disparager, David Brooks, and 83-year-old, left-of-centre American political columnist and commentator, Mark Shields, together discuss tomorrow’s inductive 2020 U.S. election.

Now, it would hardly be fair if VanRamblings didn’t allow you to hear from FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the most trusted aggregate pollster in the United States. Up until 2008, Silver was a statistical sports analyst, whose track record predicting team and tournament wins garnered him an almost startling following among bookies, bettors, and those in the sports field.
As a lark, in 2008 Nate Silver decided to apply his statistical methodology to the U.S. election, both the Presidential and the congressional elections. Long story short, come election night, Tuesday, November 4th, Nate Silver’s prediction that Barack Obama would become the next president — having broken down the predicted vote in every county, in ever state across the U.S., and predicting with 100% accuracy, transformed Silver from a full-time sports analyst (an activity in which he and his colleagues on fivethirtyeight are still engaged) — and transformed him into the most trusted pollster in the United States. Here’s a bit of Silver on the election.

Nate Silver's aggregate polling website fivethirtyeight predicts an 89% chance Biden wins the U.S. Presidential election

Just click on the graphic above to be taken to fivethirtyeight’s 2020 election forecast

Today, we’ll leave you with this Joe Biden campaign ad, on decency …