Audrey Anne Guay, powerbroker, Simon Fraser University Masters student in Urban Studies, Chairperson of the Metro Vancouver Alliance Affordable Housing Action Team, community activist, organizer, an inspiration to all who know her & hope of our future.
THE ROLE OF THE METRO VANCOUVER ALLIANCE IN WORKING WITH FAITH GROUPS TOWARDS THE PROVISION OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING ACROSS THE METRO VANCOUVER REGION
Audrey Anne Guay, 26, arising from a research grant bestowed by Simon Fraser University for the past eight months to spearhead the Metro Vancouver Alliance’s (MVA) Affordable Housing Action Team has, this past year, emerged as one of the key figures in the continuing discussion on the provision of affordable, low cost housing in the Metro Vancouver region.
The Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA) is a broad-based alliance of 75 civil society institutions who work together for the common good, comprised of members of 60 faith groups across our region, and representatives from 15 labour unions, including the British Columbia Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU), and the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
In fact, democratic, activist grassroots MVA members (and sponsoring) organizations together represent more than 200,000 citizens across the Metro Vancouver region, and over 700,000 citizens across our province.
Here is the erudite, socially conscious and, often, emotionally trenchant Ms. Guay, in her own words, on her work with MVA and faith groups across our region who, together, are creating the conditions that will lead to the construction of affordable housing across our region …
“There’s a great deal of energy in the faith-led sector to develop land owned by places of worship across the Metro Vancouver region, for the provision of low cost, affordable housing. The research conducted by MVA has provided insight into both the motivations of the faith groups, and the challenges they face.
A secondary, but still important, focus of MVA’s Housing Team revolves around the role of Community Land Trusts, arising from the successes of MVA’s sister organization in London where as just one small but significant component of the work they’ve successfully completed, involved the construction of 23 affordable homes in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in London. The Land Trust model, going strong in Vancouver (1500 affordable homes are now under construction in Vancouver!), is of particular interest to MVA, in that it involves community leadership in developing affordable housing solutions.”
Much of Audrey Guay’s work has involved speaking with faith leaders, who may or may not be members of the Metro Vancouver Alliance, who have indicated an interest and begun a discussion on making their sites available for the building of much needed low cost housing.
In addition, over the past year, Ms. Guay has met and had in-depth discussions with city planning staffs in municipalities across the region, City Councillors, affordable housing development staff at the Pacific regional office of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, various non-profit associations across the region, and community-oriented developers like Robert Brown’s Catalyst Community Developments Society, and Stuart Thomas, Simon Davie and Jim O’Dea, among other development staff, at Terra Housing.
Audrey Anne Guay is a name you will hear for years and years to come — a critical and necessary voice of change in a society in flux, and a splendidly energized and energizing difference maker, an undeniable presence in all of our lives, whether you are aware of her or not (and you should be!).
Want to gain an understanding of what’s going on in the faith-based and non-profit affordable housing development front? Well, then, your attendance at tonight’s Metro Vancouver Alliance Housing Forum is absolutely mandatory (and, it will be fun and informative!). Organized by MVA Executive Director Tracey Maynard and MVA Housing Leadership team leader, Audrey Anne Guay, information on the where and when of tonight’s critically important housing event may be found in the poster below.
The Oakridge Lutheran Church affordable housing development | 5688 Ash Street, west of Cambie on 41st | a 6-storey, mixed-use building, retail at street level, a new church and community space on the 2nd floor, and four levels of affordable rental housing above the church | Occupancy, Autumn 2019 | Catalyst Community Developments Society
Working with the B.C. Assessment Authority, the Community Services Division within Vancouver City Hall’s Planning Department have identified 364 places of worship in the City of Vancouver that — with the assistance and co-operation of Vancouver City Council, and the provincial and the federal governments — could become prime development sites for the provision of seniors and affordable rental housing, and a plethora of community service spaces, including child care centres and seniors centres.
On Tuesday of this past week, representatives from almost every department at Vancouver City Hall met at CityLab, on the northwest corner of Cambie and West Broadway, with representatives from across Vancouver’s religious landscape, including Baptists, Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Buddists and Mennonites, as well as a representative cross-section of members of the Jewish, Islamic, Sikh, Salvation Army, Lutheran & United Churches across our city to continue a dialogue with Vancouver’s faith groups on the redevelopment potential of their places of worship.
Located on the Burrard Peninsula, with water surrounding two-thirds of our city’s urban landscape, development potential for affordable housing and community spaces is limited by the dearth of developable land on which to provide below market housing, and community services. Since the 1960s, the development ethos in our city has been “build up”, such that skyscrapers not only dot the landscape, in areas such as the West End and northeast False Creek almost smother Vancouver, all in service of densification, long our city’s informing planning & development buzzword.
With the growing shortage of community spaces on which to provide needed community services, such as child care centres — largely due to increasingly out-of-control development pressures, leading to skyrocketing land costs and increasing income inequality — the city is turning to faith groups across Vancouver to partner with the three levels of government to help alleviate economic disparity and our city’s unaffordable housing crisis.
The City, in partnering with the faith community, is looking not only to build low-cost and below market housing on lands owned by the places of worship, but partner with faith groups, as well, in providing community gardens and food programmes, community clinics (tax, ESL), addiction workshops and support services, job training, performance spaces, active living programmes & child care centres, in the hope of fostering community.
In Tuesday’s VanRamblings we’ll discuss the issues of declining membership in our city’s places of worship, the dilemma of aging infrastructure and the dearth of funds available for physical maintenance, and the attendant and inherent consequences places of worship face in attempting to fulfil their mandate of service not just to their membership, but to the community.
In Wednesday’s instalment of this week’s faith group / affordable housing / community services series, VanRamblings will explore the role of the Metro Vancouver Alliance, which has partnered with city staff and faith groups across our region — as well as with members of Metro Vancouver’s development community — towards the provision of affordable housing.
In addition, VanRamblings will seek to provide insight into why Vancouver’s underutilized places of worship may very well emerge as a critical component in our city’s plan to build community, to address income inequality and the attendant issues of access & succour encompassing the vast majority of our city’s socially and economically beleaguered residents.
From a diehard VanRamblings reader (and friend and associate, who holds VanRamblings to account), a former Park Board Commissioner, longtime politico, keen observer of Vancouver’s civic political scene, a well-respected local architect and designer, a city-builder, world traveler, husband and father, and sometimes, just sometimes, a bit of a curmudgeon…
“Not sure why you think these Councillors are doing such a great job!
In addition to being overly swayed by staff, these novice Councillors continue to sit back and leave the Vision Vancouver agenda intact, an agenda which got Vision un-elected, decimated, and an agenda that has resulted in so much damage to our City. As well, in each of your examples in your series this week on our City Councillors, the initiatives you think are so wonderful are contradicted by other decisions they have made.
In particular, Councillor Boyle’s energy shift sounds great if it is meant only to be read. But, think about how each of these ideas can be realized. She wants all neighbourhoods to be walk / bike / transit-friendly, and to use wood frame construction, and yet she voted to support the Skytrain SUBway, and it’s greenhouse gas-spewing green glass concrete towers, unfriendly to neighbourhoods, our seniors’ population and young families.
If Councillor Christine Boyle was really as good a listener as you suggest she is, as a first term Councillor she could have taken advice from knowledgeable people (think: Patrick Condon) that the two approaches are not compatible. Only Councillors Colleen Hardwick and Jean Swanson seem to have their heads screwed on straight on the transit file.
I am surprised (and disappointed), as well, to learn that Councillor Adriane Carr continues to support bonus density policies that have long proven to be and are destructive to neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, her Green seatmate on Council, Pete Fry, is trying to get everybody to drive no faster than 30kph when the most energy efficient speed is 38-40kph. While that gets him media coverage, is that sensible Green policy?
Perhaps a better sum up of Council’s performance to date is a ‘hmmm‘”.
- Bill McCreery, architect, VanRamblings reader, politico, keen city observer.
Much of what Bill McCreery writes in indisputable; he, like many across our city, is frustrated at the slow pace of change at City Hall and the cumbersome nature of decision-making, not to mention an unbecoming naïveté and acquiescence to staff, masked as the defining, seemingly newfound ethos at City Hall, now guided by “being respectful of others.”
There’s a lot of that going on at Vancouver School Board, as well - which not only makes for dull politics, it makes for unproductive, unfocused politics, politics too often in the sway of an entrenched bureaucracy, with the decision-making that takes place not for the people, but rather at the expense of the interests of the very people who elected our city officials into office, responding to a campaign of hope for better, when all we’re getting now is the same ol’ same ol, an utterly unacceptable status quo.
The lack of action thus far in civic governance is frustrating, maddening.
Swept into office on a wave of optimism and the belief that change, change for us, for parents & for children, for seniors & for renters, for the disenfranchised, for the struggling single mother and all the struggling families across our city was possible, and as assiduously as our electeds apply themselves to their work at City Hall, day-by-day, and week after frustrating week, the hope the electorate felt emboldened by last October fades into the miasma of an “I’m alright, Jack” ethos that has set our well-heeled civic officials apart from the “hoi polloi” who thrust them into office.
Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, the City Manager of Vancouver, British Columbia, the CEO.
When Mayor Gregor Robertson and his majority Vision Vancouver Council assumed office at City Hall in December 2008, the first order of business for the fledgling party was to appoint a new City Manager to carry out the programme the party had announced, run on and committed itself to during the course of their thirty-day (and night) winning campaign for office.
From 1999 until 2008, when she was unceremoniously turfed from City Hall, Judy Rogers was the city manager for the City of Vancouver, our city’s first female city manager. At the time of her dismissal by the new Council, Ms. Rogers had worked for the city of Vancouver for 25 years, spending 10 years in the role of city manager, after having become assistant city manager in 1994, and deputy city manager in 1996. She started her new employment as Vancouver City Manager on New Year’s Day in 1999.
In 2008, within one week of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson taking office, Rogers was fired by Robertson to be replaced by Dr. Penny Ballem — who had only recently voluntarily left her role as Deputy Minister in the province’s Ministry of Health — as the new head of Vancouver’s civic administration, to provide a “fresh start” for Robertson’s and Vision Vancouver’s agenda. Ms. Rogers received $572,000 severance pay.
The catchphrase around Vancouver City Hall from late 2008 until September 15, 2015, when Mayor Robertson announced that Dr. Ballem’s service had “concluded” and Sadhu Aufochs Johnston would be her replacement was “get ‘er done.”
Dr. Ballem well understood her role: fulfill Vision Vancouver’s agenda, don’t second guess the decision-making of the new Vision Vancouver Councillors and Mayor, pave the way for substantive change and remove any impediments to change, and under no circumstance, ever, ever, ever use the word “no” when addressing Vision Vancouver Councillors, and the Mayor, during Council meetings, or when Council was in session at City Hall.
Finally, though, the people of Vancouver (and the Vision Vancouver Council) had had enough of Dr. Ballem’s strong-armed tactics, as the years went by her loyalty to her “masters” proving increasingly counterproductive to the carrying out of the Vision Vancouver agenda. Mayor Gregor Robertson all but promised the electorate during his 2014 campaign for office that he’d get rid of the cantankerous, and to many off-putting, Dr. Ballem — and after a 10-month delay, on Sept. 15, 2015 he proved true to his word.
Dr. Ballem received $556,595 in a severance package when she left Vancouver City Hall.
On September 1st, 2009 Dr. Penny Ballem announced that Sadhu Johnston would be hired as Deputy City Manager to lead the city’s environmental efforts. Note should be made that Mr. Johnston’s hiring was not that of Dr. Ballem, but of Mayor Gregor Robertson and the Vision Vancouver braintrust, who had come to know and like Sadhu Aufochs Johnston through their mutual association at Cortes Island’s Hollyhock “Lifelong Learning Centre”, which a few reporters have inferred is a “cult”, as Georgia Straight reporter Shannon Rupp wrote in an article published in The Straight on March 28th, 1996, with Rupp writing that the …
“… artificial feeling of love & acceptance is what people are paying for, but I have to admit I find these get-togethers oppressive. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of Hollyhock is its culture of conformity — Goddess forbid anyone should question anything. After five days here, I’ve found Hollyhock is really two places: the site itself is delightful, but the half-baked spiritual and psychological concepts it peddles make me uneasy.”
Over the course of the past six months as the new Mayor and eight novice Councillors have settled into their term of office and their newfound responsibilities at City Hall, as VanRamblings has attended or watched City Council and committee meetings, we have observed city manager Sadhu Johnston consistently, egregiously and unremittingly turning into “Dr. No.”
When Vision Vancouver were in power, telling the Mayor and Vision Vancouver Councillors that they couldn’t do something they had their minds set on, or even implying that there was a “no” in his address to Vision Vancouver electeds would have been tantamount to a tendering of his resignation — Sadhu Johnston was kept on at City Hall after the dismissal of Dr. Penny Ballem, to carry out Vision’s agenda, which he does these days every time he speaks at Council, and every time he scolds a Councillor with a near denunciation of their naïveté, that his is “the way things are done.”
Malcolm Bromley, General Manager of Vancouver Park Board since July 2010
The time is nearing for our current City Council to put their stamp on civic governance in the city of Vancouver.
More than one Councillor — and dozens of VanRamblings’ readers — has expressed a concern about how, as Bill McCreery puts it at the outset of today’s post, that some Councillors have been “overly swayed by staff” and that a change of city staff will be required in order that our new Council might fulfill their campaign commitments to the people of Vancouver.
“There are those of us who’d like to see a change at the top,” various Councillors have told VanRamblings, “but having to pay more than $550,000 in severance pay to the city manager, or the $1.2 million Vision Vancouver paid out in severance money to 11 employees in 2016 is just not palatable, to Councillors or the public.”
VanRamblings is not suggesting that Sadhu Johnston be fired or dismissed, rather that the accomplished Mr. Johnston be transitioned into another position of authority at City Hall, while maintaining his current salary.
Vancouver’s Mayor and Council need a leader at the top of the City Hall bureaucracy who will carry out their agenda, and not the defeated Vision Vancouver agenda. Who would that person be to replace Sadhu Johnston?
Take a look at the photo above — that is Malcolm Bromley, the current General Manager of the Vancouver Park Board, who is one of the most passionate persons with whom VanRamblings is acquainted about city-building. Most of the members of Council are familiar with the many accomplishments of Mr. Bromley, his commitment to democratic engagement, and finding a path that will enable the electeds to carry out their commitment to the citizens who elected them to office.
Councillors Melissa De Genova, Sarah Kirby-Yung and Michael Wiebe sat on Park Board when Mr. Bromley was GM. In 2014-15, when Sarah Kirby-Yung was Park Board Chairperson, Malcolm Bromley was instrumental in helping Ms. Kirby-Yung fulfill her commitment (and it was her commitment to the people of Vancouver, and not to her Non-Partisan Association party) to ban cetaceans (whales and dolphins) in captivity in Stanley Park.
VanRamblings has written previously that UBC’s Patrick Condon, Park Board’s Malcolm Bromley, and the Green Party of Vancouver City Councillor Pete Fry are the finest minds in our city on the topic of city-building, the three seasoned urban geographers familiar and admiring of the work of each member of the triumvirate VanRamblings has identified above.
Fiscal responsibility is always a concern in governance. Transitioning Malcolm Bromley from Park Board General Manager to the role of city manager, while maintaining his current salary (although he’s due for a raise), perhaps transitioning Sadhu Johnston into the role of GM of Environmental Innovation, while maintaining his salary, downsizing City Hall’s bloated communications department, would mean savings in staffing costs — and a better run city, with a bureaucratic governance in place that will facilitate the agenda of Mayor & Council, rather than appear to impede.
As we say above, “the time is nearing for our City Council to put their stamp on civic governance in the city of Vancouver,” to let the public know that they’re in charge and ready to get to work on the people’s business.
“The Death of Cynicism,” the name VanRamblings has assigned to this week’s series?
As VanRamblings has suggested throughout the week, the electorate of Vancouver displayed their unerring wisdom on Oct. 20 2018 in electing the finest group of change makers ever to sit around our city’s Council table.
Last year, when writing about the incoming Council, we wrote that it would take a year and half for our new Councillors to “find the bathrooms,” a metaphor for how long it would take new Councillors to begin to implement their agenda. And so it is, and is proving to be. Only by shaking up the bureaucracy at Vancouver City Hall, putting their own senior staff in place to carry out the new Council’s agenda, will this Vancouver City Council achieve their goal of creating a healthier, fairer and more just city for all.
VanRamblings remains confident that our new Council will usher in generational change, and that by 2022 the vast majority of the electorate will come to view governance in our city differently, knowing that the Mayor and all 10 Councillors are on their side, working for them, while achieving and putting into practice the change that will serve us all, each and every one of us, on the road to the death of political cynicism and the renewal of hope in our city, in every neighbourhood, across every diverse community.
Vancouver City Council, 2018 thru 2022, left to right: Councillors Rebecca Bligh, Christine Boyle, Colleen Hardwick, Pete Fry, Adriane Carr, Mayor Kennedy Stewart, Melissa De Genova, Jean Swanson, Michael Wiebe, Lisa Dominato, and Sarah Kirby-Yung.
Part 3 of The Death of Cynicism series offers again a brief insight into, this time, four Vancouver City Councillors: the “she’s the only Councillor who has kept her focus on why Council was elected” Jean Swanson; the incredibly articulate and bright (and, dare we say, hope of our future), Sarah Kirby-Yung; the indefatigable, hard-charging, never-say-die Colleen Hardwick; and the ‘wears his heart on his sleeve’, ‘man of the people’, who by the way is also incredibly bright and articulate (and a great writer, to boot), migawd are we glad he’s on Council, hard-working for us, Pete Fry. Note. Today’s posting represents a bit of a departure from the ‘survey of what they’ve done’ coverage of the six Councillors we’ve written about to date this week — today’s column more an impressionistic take on the four Councillors we write about (glowingly, as it happens) in this column.
Much beloved Vancouver City Councillor Jean Swanson, pictured with Council ‘helpmate’ (who offers Jean support at Council meetings), former COPE Councillor, Anne Roberts.
There’s a reason Jean Swanson was elected in the top four of City Councillors thrust into office in Vancouver in the October 2018 municipal election. Councillor Swanson (“Jean, call me Jean — I mean, really“) made it abundantly clear during last year’s raucous election cycle that she was about one thing and one thing only: making ours a fairer and more just city, to wit … that housing is a human right, and that she would be dogged in working to secure social housing for those most in need, and affordable housing for women and men and families who are being driven out of the city by Vancouver’s unaffordable housing prices, and sky-rocketing rents.
And true to her word, Councillor Jean Swanson has done just that.
Councillor Swanson’s frustration at the unfocused, off-topic flights of fancy in which her Council colleagues often engage — forgetting all the while, and seeming to utterly ignore that job one for this Council is the provision of affordable housing — has only kept her more single-minded in her pursuit of social justice for the 80% of Vancouver residents who are having a hard go of it in Vancouver, and look to her to resolve the morass that life in our city can sometimes prove to be resultant from an economic unfairness.
Although Councillor Swanson initially found the process of decision-making and the adherence to Roberts Rule of Order at Council meetings contrary to what for her constituted good governance — which is to say, getting on with the job she, and her Council colleagues were elected to perform … by which she means, an immediate restructuring of decision-making at City Hall in order to undertake the massive task of ensuring the provision of affordable housing in our city — in recent months, as she has become aware that a mastery of Roberts Rule of Order was mandatory if she were to be effective in promoting our cause at the Council table, Ms. Swanson has proved an effectual and determined Council procedural whirlwind, while having to develop patience with a contingent of her younger Council colleagues who far too often seem to be held in sway to the wishes of city staff, and most egregiously to gainsaying City Manager, Sadhu Johnston.
Vancouver City Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung (in the middle) on one of her many forays into the community, at this year’s S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Gala, flanked on her right by the organization’s CEO, Queenie Choo, and Pete Fry’s long-suffering but loving wife, Donna, and on her left, Councillor Pete Fry, and her NPA Park Board colleague, Tricia Barker.
One of the three most media savvy Vancouver City Councillors (the other two, Councillors Christine Boyle and Pete Fry, although we would be remiss not to place truth-telling, far from naïve, ‘always speaks her mind’ Councillor Colleen Hardwick in this category), VanRamblings’ favourite City Councillor, focused and on our side to a fare-thee-well, for us the star of this Council, the camera loves her and so do we (and by ‘we’ I mean the people of Vancouver, and our sometimes cynical press), Sarah Kirby-Yung.
Sarah Kirby-Yung is a populist of the first order (and, no, not a Trump-like populist), who practices the ‘politics of the people’ in much the way that the much-missed Rafe Mair did when he was in office. Calm, reasoned and reasonable, a woman anyone who knows her or listens to what she has to say becomes quickly aware that while articulate, informed and forthcoming on a range of topics of concern to the public, that when Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung speaks, she is speaking directly to you, plain-spoken always, her words measured, substantive and easy to ‘grok’, her reassuring voice tinged with just a hint of an upbeat, hopeful and inspiring tone, leaving all who know or have heard her with a sense that “this Sarah Kirby-Yung person, she’s on our side, she’s the real deal, a woman we can count on.”
Councillor Kirby-Yung is by far the best communicator on Council (although she has competition on that front from the tireless, always on our side, Christine Boyle). We have written previously, and will write again, that it is mandatory that all citizens in Vancouver follow Ms. Kirby-Yung on Twitter — at the moment, Sarah Kirby-Yung has 2,875 followers on Twitter (and 9251 tweets! … that’s double, triple, quadruple and as much as 10x as many tweets - that’d be tweets to us - as any of her earnest Council mates).
Sarah Kirby-Yung oughta have 28,740 followers on Twitter! Make it happen!
Just last week, we were speaking to a revered community activist of our acquaintance, an almost scarily bright and informed and accomplished woman of an age who, in the midst of a discussion of Board of Variance ‘third party appeals’ (of which Council will be hearing much from VanRamblings in the months to come) when, during a reflective pause in the conversation, my well-schooled interlocutor calmly stated to me …
“Raymond, Sarah Kirby-Yung is, by far, my favourite City Councillor - she listens well and responds to questions put to her in an authentic manner, hears what the questioner has asked, and actually answers the questions. The more I see and hear of her, the more interviews I read with her, the more I hear her speak at community functions, the more I’ve become impressed with what a treasure Councillor Kirby-Yung is proving to be.”
And this, from a woman on the left, an activist difference-maker, well-educated, erudite and — again — an informed activist very much on the left side of the political spectrum, a woman of great acccomplishment who has done much for the livability of our city as a longtime social justice warrior.
In having covered politics for 50 years, I’m not sure that I’ve ever ‘covered’ a political figure who speaks to & for citizens across the political spectrum, as cogently as Sarah Kirby-Yung does every single day of her political life.
For VanRamblings, Councillor Colleen Hardwick has proved to be the biggest, and most pleasant, surprise for her many important contributions during her now six month tenure on Vancouver City Council.
Throughout last year’s municipal election, those in the know - regular VanRamblings correspondents who have worked in and around civic politics in our city, sometimes for generations - kept protesting to VanRamblings …
“Raymond, why the hell are you not throwing your support behind Colleen? You know her, you know how accomplished she is, and you agree with all of the positions on the issues she espouses and has long espoused, yet you’ve been sparing in your support of her. Give your head a shake, man! Colleen is a lock for Council, and she’s going to prove to be a difference-maker. The sooner you get on board, the better off you’ll be.”
Lo and behold, VanRamblings’ many friends were absolutely correct in their assessment of Councillor Colleen Hardwick’s effectiveness on Council, often a lone voice - on the transit file, for instance, where her support for light rail remains unchanged (in the long run she will be proven right), and on which position, VanRamblings is 100% in accord with the good Councillor.
As we have reported directly to Councillor Hardwick, not a day has gone by this past six months when a friend of ours living in one of Vancouver’s 23 neighbourhoods has not extolled the virtues of Ms. Hardwick, and because we tend to run with a socialist crowd we’re talking left-wing activists here. Just yesterday, in fact, our friend Terry Martin (whose 65th it is today, by the way!), the Chair of the Board of Variance on which we sat a decade ago and more - all but gushed throughout our lunch together about how …
“Colleen is the only truth-teller on Council, she is the only one not in sway to despicable elements within City staff who have ridden roughshod over Council since they were elected last October. Not to mention, Colleen Hardwick emerged as the only Councillor who stood opposed to that white elephant, neighbourhood-destroying, Geoff Meggs promoting Broadway subway line. Seems to me that your friend Colleen is the only Councillor willing, able and capable on getting on with things.”
We’ve not heard much from Councillor Hardwick this past little while (she’s missed some Council meetings) due to a bout of illness — VanRamblings believes that Colleen was simply experiencing sympathy pains for VanRamblings’ own, recent health travails (we sit in the same pew together at church; perhaps whatever I had was catching?).
At church this past Sunday, Councillor Colleen Hardwick assured us that she is back (!), fully recovered, raring & ready to go, all set to once again apprise her Council mates and the electorate that Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick is a force of nature, a woman who will not be denied, who will continue to fight for what she believes in even if hers is, on occasion, a lone voice on an issue of contention. A voice on our side, fighting for us.
Pete Fry, supporting the creation of a Vancouver Junior Roller Derby League for our city! Gathered with skaters — the next generation who will cast a ballot for him, because Pete Fry is going to be around for a long, long time — looking for a space for this healthy, fitness achieving and popular and growing sport in our city.
As is the case with Vancouver City Councillors Sarah Kirby-Yung and Christine Boyle, VanRamblings is simply over-the-moon about Councillor Pete Fry’s ascension to a position of political power in our city, who we fittingly described at the outset of today’s posting. The Death of Cynicism? How to achieve that in Vancouver civic politics?
Thy names are Sarah Kirby-Yung, Christine Boyle and Pete Fry who, by 2022, working with their colleagues on Council, will have begun the process of transformation in our city that will endure for generations to come, each a member of the city of Vancouver Council triumvirate that by dint of their hard work, dedication, intellect, passion and compassion, and visionary leadership will have created the conditions that will see the realization of a city for all, with every economic and social strata, with members across every ethnic community, indigenous and First Nations groups, and the breadth of the gender variant spectrum resident in every neighbourhood in our city, housed when such is required in affordable housing, where families will flourish, where our parks and recreation system and community centres will once again thrive and serve the interests of our burgeoning community.
Pete Fry’s is one of the voices you hear, read and have read about most often these past six months (along with Councillors Kirby-Yung and Boyle), is the Councillor who most believes in community consultation and collaboration — as a democrat, and longtime supporter of the work of the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods — who takes responsibility for the decisions he takes at Council, and apologizes when he deems it appropriate (willing always to be held to account, reconsidering his position on an issue following democratic input from the public — all of which, of course, makes Pete Fry a mensch, given that only healthy men, and women, know when it’s appropriate and necessary to take responsibility, apologize and reconsider an issue when they deem it fit to do so).
Councillor Pete Fry is also willing to make the hard decisions, telling Globe and Mail freelance reporter Adrienne Tanner that he won’t shy away from controversial political conversations, even about Council’s continued funding of school lunch programmes “just because it’s politically unpalatable.” Note. The province, as part of its poverty reduction strategy, as of March of this year, has accepted responsibility for the funding and administration of hot lunch programmes in school districts across our province.
There is about Councillor Pete Fry a gregariousness and warmth, an authenticity and sense of purpose, a humanity and caring that all at once acknowledges social responsibility that is tempered by fiscal responsibility, and appropriate jurisdiction. Heart and mind: that’s Councillor Pete Fry, in your corner, always there and available to listen, approachable and kind, a renaissance man for our age & an historic difference maker for the better.
Audrey Anne Guay, powerbroker, Simon Fraser University Masters student in Urban Studies, Chairperson of the Metro Vancouver Alliance Affordable Housing Action Team, community activist, organizer, an inspiration to all who know her & hope of our future.
