Category Archives: Vancouver Votes 2018

#VanPoli Civic Politics | The Death of Cynicism | Part 2 of 4

May 7, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018Raymond Tomlin

Vancouver City Council, 2018 - 2022 | Melissa De Genova, Lisa Dominato, Michael Wiebe Vancouver City Council, to serve from 2018 thru October 2022, clockwise: Councillors Rebecca Bligh, Christine Boyle, Adriane Carr, Melissa De Genova, Lisa Dominato, Michael Wiebe, Jean Swanson, Sarah Kirby-Yung, Colleen Hardwick, and Pete Fry.

VanRamblings’ four part series this week on the state and nature of civic politics, as practiced in the City of Vancouver, continues.
Today, we’ll provide a bit of history and insight into Councillors Melissa De Genova, Lisa Dominato and Michael Wiebe, all elected to Council this past October, providing as well a brief insight into how each is faring in the current term of office at Vancouver City Hall.

Second term Vancouver City Councillor Melissa De Genova, Chairperson of Council’s standing committee on City Finance and Services, and Council delegate to the Metro Vancouver Board, where she will be joined by her first term NPA colleagues, the estimable Colleen Hardwick and Lisa Dominato, as well as OneCity Vancouver’s entirely tremendous Christine Boyle, and the Green Party of Vancouver’s Adriane Carr, who will joined on the Metro Vancouver board by her Green Council colleague, Michael Wiebe.

Vancouver voters first elected the quite wonderful, on our side, Melissa De Genova to office in 2011, to our city’s much cherished Park Board — but, at the time, woefully underfunded, due to the Vision Vancouver City Council of the day’s demolition of the Park Board budget — securing for herself and the party with which she ran and remains a member, the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association, a fifth place finish, securing 56,501 votes, exactly 6,622 votes more than Vision’s Trevor Loke’s seventh (and last) place finish. Vision Vancouver + the NPA = trouble writ large.
The Vision Vancouver-led Park Board, first elected to a majority in the 2008 election, were quite something to behold, good people but very much loyalists to their party, often at the expense of serving the public interest.
From the outset, given Vision’s poor treatment of Ms. De Genova, and her NPA Park Board colleague, John Coupar, in her first term in elected office, Melissa (“Melissa, just call me Melissa”) knew she was in for the fight of her life — to know Melissa is to know that she was very much up to the task. Park Board Commissioner De Genova never gave an inch to her opposition on the Board, making it abundantly clear she felt they were scoundrels.
During her now eight years at the seat of political power in our city, Melissa De Genova, to be effective, has always needed a foil. At Park Board, in Aaron Jasper, Niki Sharma, Sarah Blyth, Trevor Loke and Constance Barnes, Ms. De Genova had foils times five, although she reserved most of her disdain for Mr. Jasper, Ms. Blyth, Ms. Sharma and Mr. Loke, in that order — more often than not, letting the admirable Ms. Barnes off scott free.
In her second term on Council, Ms. De Genova has acquitted herself well, adjusting to the more collegial approach to governance that has come to define our new Council. But ever in need of a foil, most unfortunately Councillor De Genova has chosen her very bright NPA colleague, first term Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung (the latter, VanRamblings’ favourite Councillor). Almost makes one harken for the good ol’ toe-to-toe battles Councillor De Genova waged with Vision Vancouver climate change warrior, Andrea Reimer, who always gave as good as she got — a worthy adversary, indeed.

[In an article from The Georgia Straight]. “Recently, Councillor De Genova was one of the five members of Council who voted against Council’s tax shift burden motion, joined by Mayor Kennedy Stewart and councillors Christine Boyle, Colleen Hardwick, and Jean Swanson.

‘That doesn’t mean that I voted against supporting small businesses, Ms. De Genova told The Straight’s Carlito Pablo in a phone interview.

Councillor De Genova said there are other ways of reducing the tax burden on businesses without pitting them against homeowners. One example she cited is for the city to work with the province to modify the business-property class so multinational companies pay higher taxes. Revenues can be passed on to help local businesses.”

Note should be made that Councillor De Genova was part of a recent unanimous vote to pass a precedent-setting climate action plan for our city.

Lisa Dominato, another one of VanRamblings’ favourite new Councillors, the quiet intellectual heft behind this new Council, a Councillor who really knows how to consult and listen (and do her homework), a communicator par excellence, a woman of great accomplishment (as may be seen below), one of the four millennials on Council — in fact, one of the more than two dozen millennials elected across our region this past October — and a recent outstanding Vancouver School Board trustee, who served with distinction on Vancouver School Board following the 2017 by-election.

[From the City website]. Ms. Dominato is a a public servant who has held several senior management portfolios with the Government of British Columbia, specializing in social policy. A former chief of staff to the Deputy Premier and Minister of Education, and a senior advisor to the B.C. government’s Minister of Management Services, throughout her time in the public service, Ms. Dominato became known for her collaborative and pragmatic approach to tackling complex issues and building strong relationships to achieve common goals.

Graduating with a Master of Arts in Leadership from Royal Roads University, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from UBC and University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, Ms. Dominato is fluent in French and English, a recipient of the Premier’s Annual Innovation and Excellence Awards, and (am I allowed to say this?), a loving and attentive mom.

An utterly charming person with whom to speak to and interact with (pretty rare in this day and age of too often rank partisanship), Councillor Lisa Dominato continues to live in Hastings-Sunrise with her husband, Dale, and their two daughters, who are aged 7 and 5.
Truth to tell and unsurprisingly, Councillor Dominato has proved to be one of the more fiscally conservative (or is that, fiscally responsible?) members, among her new colleagues on Council (but not socially conservative, by any stretch of the imagination), who among other initiatives, recently supported Council’s 2% tax shift from small business to homeowners …

“The small businesses are really fundamental to the character of our community, to our city, and when I talked to homeowners about [a tax shift], it was welcomed — they understand that it might be $40 or $80 more on their property tax,” Councillor Dominato recently told Vancouver Courier civic affairs reporter, Mike Howell. “I didn’t feel there was a divide of homeowners versus businesses. It was very much that we value our small businesses, we value having jobs in our community so people can work here and live here.”

On the environmental front, Councillor Dominato was one of the strong voices on Council supporting Councillor Christine Boyle’s activist and necessary climate action motion, and when responding to a query from the TriCity News’ Grant Lawrence averred that Vancouver is considering a plastic bag ban by 2021, referring Mr. Lawrence to the City of Vancouver’s director of waste management and resource recovery, who told the reporter that “a recommendation for a bag ban may come sooner than 2021.”
Councillor Dominato is also a heritage advocate, recently expressing concern at a public hearing about the pending demolition of the 71-year-old Kitsilano Lutheran Church, at 2715 West 12th Avenue.
Councillor Lisa Dominato sits on the Metro Vancouver Board, and in November 2018 was appointed as the Chairperson of the Pacific National Exhibition Board.

Arising from an often raucous 2018 change election, Vancouver City Councillor Michael Wiebe represents one of four millennial voices on Council — Vancouver’s other millennial councillors, Rebecca Bligh (NPA), Christine Boyle (OneCity) and Lisa Dominato (NPA) — has emerged as our city’s most passionate arts advocate, and staunch representative of small business (himself the owner operator of eight 1/2 Restaurant Lounge, just off Main on East 8th Avenue), last week supporting Council’s motion to shift the tax burden away from small business operator to homeowners.
Councillor Wiebe was one of only a few Councillors who supported granting the 4/20 organizers a permit, as he did last term, when he sat as both a Park Board Commissioner, and later as the Park Board Chairperson.

“If we permit them, we would be able to deal with the stage. We could work to make [the event] smaller, to make sure there are enough washrooms, and work to establish a site plan,” Councillor Wiebe told the CBC. “In a non-permitted event, we don’t have those controls.”

Councillor Wiebe also spoke in favour of finding the capital funding for rebuilding Coal Harbour’s shuttered Harbour Green Dock, the closure of which in 2018 meant the end of a Bowen Island commuter passenger service provided by Bowen Land and Sea Taxi since 2010.
Councillor Wiebe, along with his Green Party Council colleagues and the full contingent of NPA Councillors, in December 2018, voted with a Council majority 7-3 to ask the B.C. NDP government to withdraw the province’s school surtax levied on homes valued at $3 million, or higher. Mayor Kennedy Stewart, and Councillors Jean Swanson and Christine Boyle of the Coalition of Progressive Electors and OneCity, respectively, cast the negative votes. NPA Councillor Lisa Dominato was absent during the vote.
Truth to tell, Councillor Michael Wiebe is still finding his feet on Council, attendant to the voices of City Hall staff, and his fellow Councillors.
To date we’ve not heard much from Mr. Wiebe on either of the critically important affordable housing or transit files — a circumstance that is likely to change this upcoming September, when City staff report back to Council on proposed changes to the Rental 100 programme. Mr. Wiebe’s fellow Green Councillor, Adriane Carr, has already spoken in favour of mandating that developers set aside 20% of units in all new rental (and we would hope, condo) construction at the CMHC / Council “moderate rental rate” — $950 for a studio unit; $1,200, one bedroom; $1,600, two bedrooms; and $2,000, three bedrooms (with lower “moderate rents” on Vancouver’s eastside), for those earning between $30,000 and $80,000, which would be one component of Council’s upcoming affordable housing strategy.

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#VanPoli Civic Politics | The Death of Cynicism | Part 1 of 4

May 6, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Canada, Environment, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Vancouver City Council, to serve from 2018 thru October 2022, clockwise: Councillors Rebecca Bligh, Christine Boyle, Adriane Carr, Melissa De Genova, Lisa Dominato, Michael Wiebe, Jean Swanson, Sarah Kirby-Yung, Colleen Hardwick, and Pete Fry.

The time has arrived once again for VanRamblings to weigh in on the state and nature of civic politics, as practiced in the City of Vancouver.
Today’s post will begin a brief insight into the 10 City Councillors who were elected this past October, and how each is faring in the current term.

As per the graphic above, Councillor Rebecca Bligh is Vancouver City Council’s delegate to, and a Board member of, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, replacing retired City Councillor Raymond Louie in that role.
The socially-skilled Ms. Bligh has emerged, as might well be expected given her background in business, as one of the more conservative voices on Council — although, as is the case with her Non-Partisan Association colleagues, a fiscal conservative and certainly not a social conservative.
Working with her fellow elected, progressive and feminist NPA City Councillors, Council Finance Chair Melissa De Genova, Lisa Dominato, Colleen Hardwick and Sarah Kirby-Yung, Ms. Bligh’s focus has tended towards looking after the public purse, keeping taxes low and, most recently, championing the shifting of the tax burden away from small business owners — who you may have noticed have been going out of business in record numbers these past months, with vacancy signs on arterials throughout the city — to homeowners — receiving support for this important initiative from councillors Sarah Kirby-Young, Lisa Dominato, Michael Wiebe, Adriane Carr and Pete Fry. Note should be made that small business bears up to 49% of the tax burden in the City of Vancouver.
Note should also be made that the passage of the tax shift motion represented the first time this current term Councillors voted contrary to staff wishes, who unsurprisingly emerged as the only voices in opposition to the tax shift — for a Council that has tended to be in sway to City staff, Councillors’ decision to act in the public interest rather than bureaucratic staff interest, represents hope on the horizon that Council, in future, may more consistently vote for us, rather than adhere to bureaucratic wishes.

Councillor Christine Boyle (pictured above) has emerged as Vancouver City Council and our city’s leading climate change warrior, this past January introducing a ground-breaking, precedent-setting motion that in the process of declaring a climate emergency, mandated Six Big Moves …

1. That 90% of Vancouver citizens will eventually live within an easy walk or stroll of their daily needs. That implies much more densification in South Vancouver, where this is mostly not the case — apart from in Marpole, Oakridge, Dunbar, Kerrisdale, and South Hill;

2. Council will set a target of 50% of kilometres driven in 2030 will be made in zero-emission vehicles. This implies a sharp increase in electric-vehicle charging stations and far more extensive efforts to make these available to tenants, who comprise 53 percent of the city’s population;

3. By 2030, two-thirds of trips will be by walking, cycling, rollerblading, and transit. This implies that more road space for motor vehicles will be taken away to accommodate non-motorists. This process has already begun on the Granville Street bridge;

4. That all new replacement heating and hot water systems will deliver zero emissions, which implies a sharp expansion of neighbourhood energy utilities and the use of heat pumps;

5. Setting a target of reducing embedded emissions in new buildings and construction projects to 40% of 2018 levels by 2030, which as Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith writes, “would inevitably lead to far more wood construction and far less use of cement, as well as fewer underground parkades”;

6. Passing policies that will remove one million tonnes of carbon annually by 2060 through regeneration of local forests and coastal ecosystems, which as Mr. Smith writes, “… implies a whole lot of tree planting.”

This past week Council unanimously approved the climate action initiative.
As VanRamblings has long contended, 34-year-old Councillor Christine Boyle represents the hope of our future, a visionary leader made for our times, a humble political figure who surveys a broad cross-section of public opinion (listening, really listening) before acting, a Tommy Douglas-like figure (although, she’s not there yet — but she will be!) who inspires, has consistently proven she can work productively with others, and whose clarion voice — as is the case with many of her Council colleagues — is undeniable, honest and true & in Ms. Boyle’s case, authentically her own.

Vancouver City Councillor Adriane Carr celebrating Pride Day in our city, in 2018.

After serving two terms in office leading the charge at City Council on behalf of citizen interests, three-term Councillor Adriane Carr has taken somewhat of a back seat to her more vocal, recently-elected, activist, and ambitious colleagues on Council: think Councillors Christine Boyle, Sarah Kirby-Yung and Ms. Carr’s Green colleague, Pete Fry, in particular — all of whom have proved, as well might be expected to anyone in the know, as the most media savvy of our Vancouver councillors, consistently articulate, the most progressive and forward thinking, plain spoken and engaged councillors, and absolutely tireless in their service of the public interest, out and about our city engaging with the broadest range of citizens in every neighbourhood across our city every opportunity they get … and who, for the record, constitute VanRamblings’ favourite councillors.
Still and all, we’re talking Vancouver City Councillor Adriane Carr here — two elections in a row emerging as Vancouver’s most beloved City Councillor, reflected in poll topping numbers on election day in both 2014 and 2018 — no piker she. As the Chairperson of Vancouver City Council’s Standing Committee on Policy and Strategic Priorities (Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung is vice-chair), chairperson of the Metro Vancouver Board Climate Action Committee, and since 2009 the co-chair of the Canadian Women Voters’ Congress non-partisan Women’s Campaign School, Ms. Carr has long worked on behalf of citizens, as she continues to do to this day.
Councillor Carr has argued articulately and well in the current term for awarding extra density to developers in exchange for renting 20% of the suites in new construction at CMHC (and Council’s) “moderate rental” / median market rental rents, rents well below market, the best example of which is the proposed Kitsilano development at 2nd and Larch.
Let us all hope that Councillor Carr carries the day on this important initiative, a constituent element of a broader affordable housing strategy.
At present, under the existing Vision Vancouver-initiated Rental 100 programme, in exchange for extra density, developers offer rents only slightly below market rates (e.g. $1,768 for a studio, $2,056 for one bedroom, $2,703 for two bedrooms, and $3,559 for three bedrooms), as opposed to $950 for a studio unit; $1,200, one bedroom; $1,600, two bedrooms; and $2,000, three bedrooms (with lower “moderate rents” on Vancouver’s eastside), as the “moderate rental rates” proposed by Councillor Adriane Carr, for those earning between $30,000 and $80,000.
In case you were wondering: yes, Adriane Carr remains very much on our side, as we presume will continue to be the case throughout the term.

For anyone paying attention to the goings-on at Vancouver City Hall this past six months, you have to know that our new Council is the most action-oriented, public interest serving, neighbourhood-consulting and activist City Council Vancouver voters have elected to municipal office in years.
Although, the new Council members sometimes lose the thread of the argument that got them elected (which we’ll write about on Thursday), most Councillors consistently finding themselves in these early days of their four-year term too often in the sway of bureaucratic staff. In consequence, even given their activist bent, our new Council has emerged as quiescent.
VanRamblings believes that our current very bright and dedicated group of Councillors by this autumn will finally have begun to find their feet (and independent activist, community-serving voices), leading to a new era of hope in our city, and as we suggest in the headline of today’s VanRamblings’ posting, the death of cynicism in Vancouver civic politics.

#VanPoli | Planning | How Did We Get Ourselves into This Pickle?

November 28, 2018#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Harland Bartholomew (September 14, 1889 – December 2, 1989) was an American urban planner. Although a civil engineer by training & disposition, from 1911 through until the mid-1950s, Mr. Bartholomew emerged as the most influential urban planner of the first half of the 20th century, his considerable influence now thought to have had a profoundly negative impact on city development, administrative evil masked as “moral good”.
During the course of his lifetime, Mr. Bartholomew created comprehensive city plans for urban centres across North America, including …

1911-1915 Newark, New Jersey;
1916-1920 St.Louis, Missouri;
1920 Memphis, Tennessee;
1920-1921 Lansing, Michigan;
1921-1922 Wichita, Kansas;
1926-1930 Vancouver, BC;
1930 San Antonio, Texas;
1930-1934 St.Louis, Missouri;
1932 Louisville, Kentucky The Negro Housing Problem;
1953-1959 Washington, DC.

Before, during and after WWII, Mr. Bartholomew was appointed to the United States’ Federal Planning Committee by three Presidents, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1952, President Eisenhower appointed Mr. Bartholomew chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, a position he held for seven years.
Mr. Bartholomew was an early advocate of slum clearance & city planning, serving on the U.S. Slum Clearance Advisory Committee. His ideas helped shape the Housing Act of 1937 & the Housing Act of 1949, and had a profound effect on the segregation of city neighbourhoods, ensuring that immigrants and the urban poor would be designated to one blighted city neighbourhood — including in Vancouver, skid row (now called the Downtown Eastside), the urban planning handiwork of Mr. Bartholomew.

In his June 17, 2017 essay on Vancouver’s Abundant Housing website, urbanist Reilly Wood records the following …

“When Bartholomew asked what abuses he should consider in the interim zoning by-law of 1927 he was preparing, the chairman replied that ‘the only serious abuse… is the intrusion of undesirable apartment houses into residential districts'” (Zoning and the Single-Family Landscape, p. 60)

Recently, at the November 13th meeting of Vancouver City Council, newly-elected OneCity Vancouver Councillor Christine Boyle moved an amendment to a motion calling for an updated City Plan that would have included in its mandate “a city for all, such that all neighbourhoods in Vancouver would include all types of housing, rental, co-and-co-op housing, and social housing.” Councillor Boyle’s amendment was supported only by Mayor Kennedy Stewart and COPE City Councillor Jean Swanson.
Old ideas die hard, it would seem, and the legacy of Harland Bartholomew looms large in the planning process within the City of Vancouver.
Nonetheless, VanRamblings believes that as a new, inclusive and neighbourhood sensitive City Plan is developed, the intent of Councillor Boyle’s heartening and necessary amendment will carry the day, with the near unanimous consent of the Mayor & her fellow City Councillors, persons of conscience, grit & integrity to their core, who mean well for our city, not just over the course of the next four years, but for generations to come.
How did Harland Bartholomew’s Ideas Shape Vancouver?

“Few cities possess such a combination of nearby natural resources, a splendid harbour, a terrain ideally suited for urban use, an equable climate and a setting of great natural beauty.

Vancouver is the most important Pacific port of a great country. Here, if anywhere, should develop a great city. Circumstances of such character call for a city plan of substantial scale.”

A Plan for the City of Vancouver, Harland Bartholomew & Associates, 1928, p. 10

From the outset, Harland Bartholomew was clear in stating his preference for single-family homes throughout the city, with Vancouver Town Planning Commission chairman Arthur Smith setting the tone by praising Point Grey’s early bylaw, explicitly segregating Vancouver by class, and noting the retention of single-family homes as a major goal …

“The wise foresight which Point Grey has used in planning at an early stage of its growth should provide Vancouver with one of the most desirable residential districts possessed by any city on the Continent, and those who have to gain their livelihood by manual labor should find in Hastings Townsite, and in a replanned South Vancouver, a place where they can build up modest homes which should differ only in size from that of the more opulent employers. The retention of Vancouver as a city of single family homes has always been close to the heart of those engaged in the preparation of this plan.” (A Plan for the City of Vancouver, p. 26)

Bartholomew further clarified his preference for single-family homes …

“As has been mentioned, Vancouver is largely a city of one-family homes and is surrounded by similar development in the adjoining municipalities. Large areas are now available for such development, though a considerable proportion has yet to be served by utilities. That the one-family dwelling is the desirable unit for happy living is the general concensus (sic) of opinion of all authorities. (A Plan for the City of Vancouver, p. 233-234)

Bartholomew was keen to keep stores out of residential neighbourhoods …

“The scattering of stores promiscuously throughout residence districts has done considerable damage to the city’s appearance. The nearly universal custom of building stores out to the street line has hurt the appearance of a good many residence streets and at the same time has injured adjoining lots by making them less desirable for living purposes and reducing their saleable value. The zoning by-law will remedy this condition and tend to prevent residence districts from becoming blighted.” (A Plan for the City of Vancouver, p. 247)

As Reilly Wood writes in his Abundant Housing essay …

“The contrast with modern-day Vancouver is remarkable, given that neighbourhood stores built before Bartholomew’s Plan are now many neighbourhoods’ most cherished jewels. Who would prefer the East Side without the Marché St. George, or the West Side without Arbutus Coffee? Bartholomew sought to completely eradicate small-scale retailers and meeting places from residential neighbourhoods, without questioning whether people might want to live near such amenities.”

Bartholomew advocated for and succeeded in creating exclusionary neighbourhoods, imposing extravagantly large minimum lot sizes and yards, and as Wood writes could “be more accurately described as a suburban plan, designed by a man with a profoundly anti-urban bias. It would be laughable if we weren’t still living in its shadow.”

Franklin Avenue looking East from 9th, 1928. Landmarks Association of St Louis.

Bartholomew’s urban plan for St. Louis, Missouri, is particularly instructive:

“City planner Harland Bartholomew rose in prominence along with the popularity of scientific city-efficient planning during the early to mid-twentieth century. In the pursuit of solutions to urban problems, Bartholomew concluded that the most efficient way to revitalize St. Louis, Missouri, was through the clearing of slums. In an attempt to solve the city’s economic and demographic problems, slum clearance destroyed and displaced Black neighborhoods whose 70,000 residents were seen as detrimental to the city’s success.”

In fact, as Dan Chapman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writes …

“The region’s psychic scars run deeper. St. Louis once was the nation’s fourth most populated city, a manufacturing and transportation colossus. It was the proud Gateway to the West, idealized by the soaring steel Arch along the banks of the Mississippi River.

A century ago, city fathers realized that blight, traffic, poverty, and fragmented government threatened St. Louis’ success. They hired a city planner in 1916 who, a year later, published the “Problems of St. Louis.” The city was at a critical juncture, an inflection point where long-term success might be guaranteed if the right civic decisions were made.

Harland Bartholomew, the planner, hoped that his report would “ultimately result in some action and action is St. Louis’ greatest need.” Action ensued, but not always the right kind.

St. Louis today ranks 27th in population and 45th in job growth among the top 50 metro areas. In hindsight, few imagined that the year 1916 would figure so prominently. Bartholomew’s embrace of urban renewal and highways-to-the-suburbs fueled the exodus from St. Louis as well as the region’s fragmentation and racism.

A residential segregation law passed that year established an ongoing pattern of racial separateness. The law was overturned, but the scars remain. Ferguson, for example, is two-thirds black, yet at the time of the shooting the mayor and five of six council members were white.

“Ferguson affirms that we in St. Louis are in the geographic and cultural heart of America with all its issues and foibles,” said the Rev. Starsky Wilson, pastor of St. John’s United Church of Christ in St. Louis. “These are American problems.”

Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood was developed with narrow lots before Harland Bartholomew’s ideas were adopted. UBC urban geography professor Patrick Condon wants it known that in the 1960s, consequent of a state-sponsored urban renewal initiative, government sought to declare Strathcona a “slum”. David Gibson wants it known that “Strathcona was saved by the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants’ Association (SPOTA), The Electors’ Action Movement (T.E.A.M.) Council of the early 1970s, supplemented by federal Opportunities for Youth (OFY) & Local Initiatives Projects (LIP) grants, “such that Strathcona continues to thrive to this day.

Blatantly racist development policy, intolerance, exclusive neighbourhoods where the working poor, persons with disabilities, seniors, those on social assistance, immigrants and refugees are all but forbidden from residence, and a blighted downtown neighbourhood riven with crime, hopelessness and an opioid crisis that is killing our city’s residents by the thousands — these are the critical challenges faced by our new Mayor and City Council.
A good place to start?
Undo and reverse the legacy of Harland Bartholomew, and begin anew.

#VanPoli | Orientation | Happiness | Collegiality | City Council

November 26, 2018#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

The glorious, thrilling and edifying 30-day orientation for the members of our new Vancouver City Council continues first thing this morning.
Clearly, Vancouver Non-Partisan Association Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung and OneCity Vancouver Councillor Christine Boyle have proven to be the best communicators among our new crop of electeds — their social media feeds informative and an absolute delight to follow, with first-rate reportage to the tens of thousands of you who voted them into office. Good on them.

If you’re not already following Councillor Christine Boyle on Twitter, you can do so at @christineboyle, while the incredibly wonderful Sarah Kirby-Yung at @sarahkirby_yung is another must follow — which you ought to do.