Category Archives: Politics

#VanPoli | Housing & Development | Making The Vancouver Plan Irrelevant, Pt. 1

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Vancouver Planning Staff and Developers Set to Turn Vancouver into Manhattan West

A core element of Colleen Hardwick’s successful 2018 run for office as a Vancouver City Councillor was the need for the city to draft a visionary planning document — to be called The Vancouver Plan — a bold, comprehensive and inclusive city-wide, neighbourhood and heritage community development plan for all residents living in the City of Vancouver, a 30-year plan that would focus on creating opportunities to integrate new housing, recreation centres, jobs, and amenities across our city.

As a first order of business early in her inaugural term of office, working with three term Vancouver City Councillor, Adriane Carr, Councillor Hardwick seconded a pioneering motion that would have staff employed within the Planning Department at Vancouver City Hall draft The Vancouver Plan (initial title, the City-Wide Plan) document, towards the creation of a livable, affordable and sustainable city, a single, city-wide plan that would guide future growth consistent with key community priorities, a guide to our city’s future growth …

  • The provision of affordable housing in all of Vancouver’s 22 neighbourhoods;
  • Working on a meaningful climate action plan, and environmental sustainability;
  • The provision of well-paying jobs city-wide & in neighbourhoods + economic growth;
  • Prioritizing public and active transportation needs for Vancouver residents;
  • Arts & culture, and the provision for related community amenities;
  • Infrastracture, including community pools, ice rinks and recreation centres.

Public input would be sought in The Vancouver Plan engagement process, which continues through until this day.

The final draft document of The Vancouver Plan is set to be presented to the public and to members of Vancouver City Council in early spring of 2022.

In the video above, the narrator of the visionary Vancouver Plan intones …

“Now more than ever, it’s important to reduce our use of carbon fuels, and adapt to climate change. To advance these big ideas, we need to rethink our low density neighbourhoods. To that end, we could help shape future growth more in major transit areas. New housing, jobs, child care centres, and public plazas would be built along these transit corridors.”

Remembering for just a moment that The Vancouver Plan is far from having completed its community engagement process, and is not due to be presented to both the public and Vancouver City Council until spring 2022, this past Wednesday, November 3rd, the Planning Department presented The Broadway Plan to the members of Vancouver City Council, a fait accompli document that will add 50,000 new residents along the Broadway corridor, framed by Vine Street to the west, 1st Avenue to the north, Clark Drive to the east, and 16th Avenue to the south.”

As reported in The Daily Hive Vancouver by civic affairs reporter Kenneth Chan …

“The emerging direction of the densification strategy calls for increasing Central Broadway’s population by up to 50,000 to about 128,000 residents — an increase of 64% compared to 78,000 residents today. This would be achieved by growing the number of homes in the area from over 60,000 today to up to 90,000 units, with much of this is intended to be more affordable forms of housing.

Added office, retail, restaurant, institutional, and creative industrial spaces would grow the number of jobs from 84,400 today to up to about 126,000 jobs.”

The residential and employment targets outlined above would occur over a period of the next 30 years, through until 2050. Tower heights between 30 and 40 storeys will be built in areas around the stations. Shoulder areas adjacent to the immediate area surrounding the stations — generally within a two or three block radius — will see height allowances of 20 to 30 storeys.

Example of a “Centre” area near the future South Granville Station, November 2021. (City of Vancouver)

Example of “Shoulder” areas along Broadway in the Broadway Plan, November 2021. (City of Vancouver)

More details on the “Broadway Plan” may be found both in Mr. Chan’s story in The Daily Hive, and John Mackie’s story in The Vancouver Sun.

The question has to be asked: if the reasoned, thoughtful and neighbourhood resident consulted 30-year visionary document, titled The Vancouver Plan, is not due to be presented to Vancouver City Council until spring 2022, why are the members of Vancouver City Council being asked by the City Planning Department to approve The Broadway Plan as early as next week, on either November 16th, 17th or 18th?

And why, if The Vancouver Plan is a city-wide and neighbourhood visionary development plan for Vancouver as we head towards 2050, why is the City Planning Department taking a piecemeal approach to presenting any number of development plans in the pipeline to Council now — months in advance of the presentation of The Vancouver Plan to the public & members of Vancouver City Council?

Tomorrow on VanRamblings, we’ll present 1) several more “visionary” large scale developments currently in the Vancouver development pipeline — of which you may not be aware — that are destined to have a major impact on the livability of our much cherished Vancouver home; 2) a continued exploration of VanRamblings’ ongoing thème du mois — “A city for whom? Benefiting whose interests?”; and 3) whether the tens of thousands of housing units set to be built as envisioned in proposed Vancouver development plans to be presented to Council even before the final draft of The Vancouver Plan will be made public, will result in an overbuilt city that will cater explicitly to wealthy and offshore investment interests and their developer friends, rather than to the implicit and explicit interests of Vancouver residents living in the 22 neighbourhoods across our city.

The 70+ storey Bay Parkade development — due east of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and sandwiched between Seymour and Richards streets — one of seven 65+ storey downtown developments approved by Vision Vancouver (the first two, the Shangri-la Hotel on Georgia, and its neighbour across the street, Holborn’s “Trump Tower”), the Bay Parkade development will be presented to Council for approval sometime before the 2022 Vancouver civic election.

#VanPoli | An Apartment on Every Block | Mass, Arbitrary Rezoning

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The graphic above courtesy of retired Vancouver architect, Brian Palmquist. “All the blue and orange areas up for grabs” in a mass rezoning of 16 of 22 Vancouver neighbourhoods.

Has there ever been a Vancouver City Council more seemingly in the pocket of developers than our current Vancouver City Council?

Oh sure, our Mayor and Councillors do the right thing on occasion — as they did last week in referring the redevelopment of False Creek South to the city’s Planning Department — but, objectively and overall, the commitment to “growth” in our city continues unabated, as it did in the decade Vision Vancouver was in power at City Hall, and as continues on through until this day.

Densification of our city is an inevitability, as more and more people move to our little burgh by the sea. The question arises, though: in whose interests, and to whose benefit will this densification of our city take place?

Where is the clarion commitment to non-market co-operative and co-housing, and supportive social housing that will house the broad swath of Vancouver residents who earn the median income of $44,000 for single persons, and $65,000 for couples (figures provided by Statistics Canada), seniors on fixed incomes, single parents of little means, the creative community, and persons living at the shelter rate?

A corollary to those questions is the question posed by UBC professor Patrick Condon In his latest article in The Tyee …

“The presumption is that by increasing rental stock all along the shown routes rents will drop to affordable rates. But will they?”

Today, VanRamblings will present two informed perspectives on a document titled Streamlining Rental Around Local Shopping Areas , the massive 348-page report provided by city staff to Vancouver’s bealeaguered City Councillors for action.

Click on this link to listen to Patrick Condon’s interview on The Early Edition.

In his column in The Tyee, Dr. Condon writes …

“The importance of this motion cannot be overemphasized. In effect this proposed bylaw change, in combination with the Broadway plan, probably predetermines the density, tenure and affordability of most of the city. If this is true, what then is left for the city to decide in its ongoing $18 million city-wide plan, three years in the making?

Providing affordable housing is the existential need in our city. Our service workers, many of who are our sons and daughters, are being forced out of this city in droves. This Trojan Horse of a seemingly technical change will, if passed, benefit mainly the land speculator, whose pockets are already stuffed to overflowing.

Our housing crisis and accompanying urban land value inflation is far worse than experienced by either Cambridge or Berkeley. We should do no less than what they have enacted, and find a way to stream land value gains into affordable homes for those who need them.

The crux of the matter is this: the mass rezoning of Vancouver, if passed by Vancouver City Council, will “allow for six-storey mixed-use, unaffordable market rental buildings development” in residential neighbourhoods across the city.

Not to mention which, should Council approve the staff report, there would be NO community consultation and no option for residents to address Council on future rental projects approved by staff for construction in their neighbourhood.

In the report currently before Vancouver City Council, our elected representatives not only have to digest all 348 densely-packed pages of the report, and make some sense of the lengthy document and what it portends for the city going forward, but vote on the most significant change to zoning — a mass rezoning of 16 of our city’s 22 neighbourhoods, sans much in the way of any palpable, informed input from residents now, or more particularly, in the future — Vancouver has ever witnessed.

Take a look at the graphic above. The city’s Planning Department envisions, and recommends to the members of Vancouver City Council, the approval of three to six storey apartment-style buildings along arterials in 16 of Vancouver’s 22 neighbourhoods — as well as, three and four storey townhouses and apartment buildings along residential streets one block away from the arterials.

All in the name of what? Greed? A “gentle densification” of our city that will make living in Vancouver more affordable for families — is that the goal of The Plan?

In his substack article titled Rental—Streamlining or Steamrolling? , architect Brian Palmquist writes …

More than a generation ago, anything more than single family homes in the RS districts of the city, which are much of this report’s focus, was forbidden. Basement suites were illegal and their closure was vigorously enforced by city staff — laneway houses as we now know them were nonexistent.

Fast forward to this report, where the same staff who impose burden after burden on even the simplest laneway rental home are proposing that RS homeowners solve the affordable housing shortage largely caused by staff’s work pace and fee demands, by accepting a massive up zoning affecting 16 of Vancouver’s 22 neighbourhoods — the other 6 are already subject to special, as-yet not revealed zoning such as the Broadway Plan and the Vancouver Plan.

Speakers presenting to Council may talk about various of the negative impacts of these proposals as they sit before you. As for me, I consider the proposal before you to be not so much streamlining as steamrolling.

VanRamblings presents the columns written by Patrick Condon and Brian Palmquist as edification on the Streamlining Rental Around Local Shopping Areas report before Vancouver City Council, and currently up for debate.

The key questions: Vancouver. A city for whom? Benefiting whose interests?

[Disclaimer. VanRamblings acknowledges that the members of Vancouver City Council are hard-working, dedicated public servants, who mean well for our city, and approach the very difficult work in which they engage each day with principle and integrity.  VanRamblings’ rhetoric is meant only as a ‘shot across the bow’, a reminder to our elected representatives that it is us who they were elected to represent, not the special interests who whisper, almost constantly, into their ears.]

#VanPoli | False Creek South | The Heart of Our City Preserved

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REJECTED | City of Vancouver Real Estate Department Plan for False Creek South

In early October, when the City of Vancouver’s Real Estate Department presented a sordid, mercenary plan for the redevelopment of False Creek South —  that parcel of land on the south side of False Creek stretching from the Cambie Street bridge to the Granville Street bridge — Mayor Kennedy Stewart the very next day came out in full-throated support of The Plan, writing in an overly solicitous column published in The Straight that averred …

“Great cities like ours can never stand still. We must always examine whether our city is meeting our needs, both for today and tomorrow.”

The Real Estate Department’s Plan called for a greedy financial return to the City, that sought to more than triple the existing density of homes in the False Creek South neighbourhood, from 2450 units to a reconfigured 6600 units.

The real cost of the Plan?

The absolute, utter destruction of the False Creek South neighbourhood, a decimation of the heart and demographic integrity of one of Vancouver’s most sustainable and livable districts — the ‘close-fisted’ Plan laying waste to existing housing co-operatives dotted throughout the neighbourhood, moving residents from their current locations to a ghettoized, ‘poor door’ stretch of land situated along the bustling, carbon emitting 6th Avenue traffic corridor.

Community outrage soon ensued.

As founding chair of the UBC urban design programme, Patrick Condon, wrote in an article in The Tyee , the City’s Real Estate Department’s Plan would …

  • Increase market condos nearly fourfold, from 688 to 2,350 units;
  • Increase by more than 13x market rental units, from 150 to 2020 units;
  • See all new buildings constructed at least six storeys tall, ranging up to 50 storeys tall at the Granville Street bridgehead. Today, most buildings on the district’s city-owned land are three to four storeys in height;
  • Shift the tenure mix on city-owned land from the current 36% market strata, 8% market rental & 56% non-market co-op / affordable rental units, to 35% market strata, 30% market rental, and 34% non-market co-op and affordable rental;
  • Eventually demolish most of the existing co-ops, with these sites reused for market rentals and market condos, or to expand Charleson Park.

As Robert Renger, a retired senior planner who worked with the City of Burnaby, wrote in a response article in The Straight to the column written by Mayor Stewart — as well as to supporters of the City of Vancouver’s Real Estate Department’s Plan for False Creek South, which accused False Creek South residents of both nimbyism and elitism …

  • 15% of FCS residents are children, with 11% freehold and 16% citywide;
  • 17.5% of False Creek South family households are single-parent, compared to 10.9% of False Creek South freehold and 15.9% citywide;
  • The income mix on FCS lands closely parallels that of the city as a whole.
  • The residents of False Creek South had long ago published a document they called RePlan , a thorough and critical vetting of the City’s proposed Plan for the False Creek South neighbourhood, writing that …

    “False Creek South offers a housing model that is affordable, resilient and community-focused, with a variety of affordable, mixed-income housing options that span a spectrum of housing tenures. We are calling on Vancouver City Council to protect the existing variety of affordable, mixed-income housing options in False Creek South, to eliminate the threat of housing insecurity on leased City land, to kick start community growth, and to create right-sized housing in the False Creek South neighbourhood.

    Let’s expand affordable, resilient, mixed-income, mixed-tenure housing communities. Vancouver needs to protect and create more housing that is community centred, diverse, equitable, inclusive and secure that spans all leasehold housing tenures, including permanent housing for people who have experienced or are at risk of homelessness.”

    On October 5th in a motion presented to her colleagues on Vancouver City Council, Councillor Colleen Hardwick did just that in calling for security of tenure for the beleaguered residents of False Creek South, whose ongoing residency in the neighbourhood would be jeopardized by the redevelopment Plan published by the City’s Real Estate Department. Before that motion could be discussed around the Council table, the members of Council sought to hear feedback from the residents of False Creek South, as well as citizens from right across the city.

    Councillor Colleen Hardwick + retired CoV planner / RePlan co-author , Nathan Edelson

    Long story short, after hearing from some 171 residents of the City of Vancouver — many of them children, now adults, who had grown up in the False Creek South neighbourhood — in, perhaps, the most moving series of addresses this or any other Council has ever heard, in an amendment motion presented by Councillor Christine Boyle, all 10 Vancouver City Councillors, with an about face by Mayor Kennedy Stewart, unanimously rejected the City Real Estate Department’s Plan for False Creek South, instead opting to turn the process of the redevelopment of False Creek South to the City’s Planning Department, which planning process will include respectful and extensive consultation not only with False Creek South residents, but engaged residents across the city at-large.

#CdnPoli | Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and His Legacy Cabinet

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At the end of Tuesday’s Curse of Politics podcast, politico Scott Reid intones …

“Anybody who thinks this is Justin Trudeau’s last term in office, and that sometime before 2024 he’s going to resign as Prime Minister is a fool. That sort of punditry is nothing but lazy ass journalism. There’s absolutely no evidence to support that thesis. Why would you want to resign from the most important elected office in Canada, where change for the better that can be wrought with you at the helm? Never mind all the perks of the office. Those folks just oughta get over themselves, and stop that shit. It serves nobody’s interests. Fuck those assholes.”

Welcome to VanRamblings’ political world — it ain’t an easy life, lemme tell ya.


The 2015 campaign for office, with future Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at English Bay

VanRamblings has long believed that Justin Trudeau is a reluctant Prime Minister, who would rather spend time with his family, enjoying a life out of the public eye. Even so, Mr. Trudeau believes that he is uniquely positioned to both make a difference, and to maintain his father’s legacy of a fairer and more just Canada. For now, and the foreseeable future, he will make the sacrifices necessary, in order to maintain his family’s progressive vision for our nation.

In 2003, when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien tendered his resignation as Prime Minister of Canada, the first murmurings of what became known as the “AdScam Scandal” — involving illicit activities established to a fight a Parti Québécois government’s dreams of Québec independence, with tens of millions of dollars awarded to Liberal Party-linked ad firms in return for little or no work, where these ad firms maintained Liberal organizers, while donating much of their awarded monies back to Liberal party coffers — when in late 2005 a …

“Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities, headed by Justice John Gomery — which came to be known as “the Gomery Commission” — reported out, the Commission found that millions had been awarded in contracts without a proper bidding system, that millions more had been awarded for work that was never done, and that the Financial Administration Act had repeatedly been breached by the Liberal party government of Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien.”

The death knell of federal Liberal governments for a generation was sounded.

Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin lost the election he called in late 2005. The next federal Liberal Party leader, Stéphane Dion, lost again in the 2008 Canadian federal election, and in 2011 Liberal leader Michael “he’s just visiting” Ignatieff’s campaign saw the Liberals reduced to 34 meagre, ignominious seats, and fourth party status.

In late 2012, at the behest of family and longtime friends, political strategists Gerald Butts and Katie Telford — both senior policy advisors to Ontario Liberal Party leader Dalton McGuinty, dating back to 1999 — approached their former schoolmate and friend of some two decades, Justin Trudeau, and asked him to consider a run for the leadership of the federal Liberal Party of Canada.

On Sunday, April 14th, 2013, the son of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, not only won his leadership bid, with 80.1% of the vote to 10.2% for British Columbia MP Joyce Murray, his victory more a coronation.

Two and one half years later, on October 15, 2015, 42-year-old Justin Pierre James Trudeau was elected the 23rd Prime Minister of Canada, having mounted a stunning, come from behind victory that saw the Liberal Party form a strong majority government of 184 seats in the House of Commons in Ottawa.

And since that day, Prime Minister Trudeau has not known a moment’s peace.

The governments of Justin Trudeau have wrought change for the better.

  • The Canada Child Tax Benefit has provided thousands of dollars more to 9 out of 10 Canadians families, lifting more than 40% of Canadian families out of poverty;
  • Marijuana and its by-products have been legal in Canada since 2017;
  • Tax cuts for middle class families, not the wealthy, have benefited 9 million Canadian families each year for the past six years;
  • After 10 years of Prime Minister Stephen Harper muzzling scientists in the Environment and Fisheries and Oceans department, and across his government, federal scientists have, since 2015, been afforded the opportunity to speak openly on government policy;
  • The Trudeau government has quadrupled funding for women’s shelters;
  • $9 billion to train thousands of new, highly-paid personal support workers;
  • Mark Jaccard, a professor of sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management has written that the federal Liberal Party climate action plan is a “world best,” with the government’s closure of coal plants, and a carbon tax that will see greenhouse gas emissions in Canada reduced by 40% by 2030, among myriad other world leading initiatives;
  • Through the introduction of Bill C-14, the federal government introduced legalized medical assistance in dying, offering Canadians the choice to die with dignity to patients who are suffering intolerably.

Re-opening the Kitsilano Coast Guard base; providing support to 450,000 students by increasing Canada Student Grants by 50%; reopening and staffing nine Veterans Affairs service offices across the country — these are just a few of the accomplishments of the governments of Justin Trudeau over the past six years in what has emerged as one of the most progressive governments anywhere across the planet.

And yet, you just can’t get away from feeling that Justin Trudeau’s continuing sacrifice of the joys of a private life, and time with his family and friends, weighs ever more heavily on him with each passing day, the relentless attacks by the opposition parties and right-wing media (“Hello, Brian Lilley“), with the support of only 33.12% of Canadians at the polls in this most recent election — despite his 159-seat minority government win — ever more unbearable.

For however long this Parliament lasts, in what may be Mr. Trudeau’s final term in office, the next years will be ‘legacy years’ for his government on the issue of the environment — which is why, on Tuesday, he appointed Greenpeace activist and respected Québec environmentalist Steven Guilbeault as his newly-minted Minister of Environment and Climate Change, and the former activist Minister who held the portfolio, Jonathan Wilkinson, as the new Minister of Natural Resources, both Ministers set to work in tandem to address the issue of oil and gas extraction, and dedicated to moving Canada away from the extraction of fossil fuels.

A pan-Canadian, legacy $10-a-day child care plan already signed onto by seven provinces and one territory, with the Ontario government just wrapping up negotiations with the federal government, and both Alberta and New Brunswick, and the two other territories not far behind; $2.7 billion in increased funding for the National Housing Co-investment fund; $3 billion over five years to support the application of higher standards for long-term care homes; unprecedented investment in public transporation, from buses, commuter rail, and a 21st-century high-speed system of regional train systems; $18 billion over 5 years to improve quality of life and create new opportunities for people in Indigenous communities, while completing the work on eliminating boiled water advisories on Indigenous lands; 10 days of paid sick leave for federal workers; funding for improved ventilation in schools and legal protection for businesses that decide to require vaccinations — represent just a few of the necessary initiatives of the Trudeau government.

Scott Reid, Jenni Byrne and David Herle present below the most cogent analysis of the “shuffle” of the Trudeau Cabinet yesterday morning, in this third — and maybe, final — term of the Justin Pierre James Trudeau-led Canadian federal government.