Category Archives: Vancouver

VanRamblings Announces Campaign to Buy Vision Vancouver

July 26, 2014Decision 2014, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Buy Vision Vancouver

VanRamblings would like to announce today, the creation of a Kickstarter campaign to Buy Vision Vancouver.
As part of VanRamblings’ one billion dollar Kickstarter campaign, at the time of his resignation, on or before November 14th, Mayor Gregor Robertson would receive the sum of $5 million; thereafter, Mr. Robertson would receive the sum of $1 million per year, for a period not to exceed 75 years.
Current Vision Vancouver City Councillors, as well as the new Vision Vancouver Council slate member, and the lone incumbent Vision Park Board Commissioner seeking re-election in 2014, would receive an immediate payment of $1 million at the time of their resignations, plus the sum of $200,000 per annum for a period, again, not exceeding 75 years.
The campaign will also provide $10 million to Trish Kelly — just because.

The offers made above do not extend to the members of the Vision Vancouver Board of Education. Vision Vancouver members of the Board of Education will have to run under a banner other than Vision Vancouver.
At the conclusion of a successful Buy Vision Vancouver Kickstarter campaign to raise one billion dollars, in addition to the payments made to sitting members of the Vision Vancouver caucus, VanRamblings would seek to make available an immediate payment of $1 million to each of the core members of the Vision Vancouver campaign team.
VanRamblings is fully cognizant that such a campaign, and the proposed commitment of monies that is suggested above, would most probably find competition from Joel Solomon, the Tides Foundation, and Vancouver-based developers, including Wall Corp., Westbank, Polygon, Concord Pacific, and others, but we feel well assured that in raising the sum of one billion dollars that we would be fully able to meet any prospective competitive bid for the attention of members of the Vision Vancouver team.
As part of VanRamblings’ Kickstarter campaign to Buy Vision Vancouver, and given that Vision Vancouver would no longer run for elected office in 2014, or in the future, and so as to ensure that come November 15th there is no municipal party that might gain a majority foothold at City Hall, the campaign would make available to each of the Coalition of Progressive Electors and the Green Party of Vancouver, the sum of $6 million, in order that both of these municipal parties would find themselves well-funded and able to compete fairly for the voters’ attention — fair’s fair, after all.
Just go to www.LetsBuyVisionVancouver.ca.
If you want to see this happen, if you want to be rid of Vision, make a pledge for whatever you can afford, $5, $10 — just keep in mind, we need one billion dollars! Gifts for those who donate: for $10,000, you can enjoy a 1-week summer vacation in Stanley Park; for $25,000 you get to spend the day with VanRamblings, which as we all know, is every person’s dream.
With Vision Vancouver having withdrawn from the electoral process, on November 15th we could all look forward to the election of a government of municipal unity, most probably comprised of members of the Coalition of Progressive Electors, the Green Party of Vancouver, and the Non-Partisan Association — with no municipal political party gaining a majority at City Hall, or Park Board. Thereafter, the good citizens of Vancouver may well look forward to the return of good government at City Hall, and Park Board.
Addendum: In the interests of transparency, it is necessary contributors to the Buy Vision Vancouver Kickstarter campaign understand that VanRamblings would receive a small administrator’s fee out of the monies raised from the Buy Vision Vancouver Kickstarter campaign, such monies not to exceed $1 million per year — adjusted for inflation, of course.

Settle down now. We’re kiddin’. We’re joshin‘. Just havin’ a little fun. There’s no Kickstarter campaign to buy Vision Vancouver. What’s that? Ah, all right, I see (“They’re already bought-and-paid for” — hmmm, if you say so). That’s it. Nothin’ to see here folks, move along now.

At Issue: Form of Development, and the Livability of Vancouver

July 24, 2014#VanPoli Civic Politics, Decision 2014, Vancouverform of development, vancouverRaymond Tomlin

For VanRamblings the single most important issue that voters will address in the 2014 Vancouver municipal election is: form of development. The key question in this civic election: what kind of city do we want going forward?

Form-based code addresses the issues of land use, urbanism, building structure (i.e. low and mid-rise vs tower), heritage preservation, the scale and types of streets and blocks that we live on, development density, design guidelines and neighbourliness, transportation infrastructure, affordable housing, the development of green space and the accessibility of our community recreation centres, and perhaps most importantly of all, community visioning, neighbourhood consultation, and community planning.

Almost all of the civic issues related to form-based development are addressed by, and are almost solely within the purview of, our city government through the adoption and enforcement of municipal regulation.

The Greening of Our City: Envisioning Vancouver’s Future

At present, with a majority Vision Vancouver government at City Hall, we have a municipal administration that is more strongly tied to the concept and practice of high density, podium and tower high-rise development — as if Vision Vancouver is deep into the pockets of Westbank, Wall Corp., Concord Pacific, Polygon, and a handful of other large development companies — than any Vancouver city government since the woeful days of Terrific Tom Campbell’s ‘development at all costs’ municipal administration.

Under a Vision Vancouver civic administration, over the past six years, our city has become almost unrecognizable from the city we have so long loved as the pace, and podium and tower form, of development has cloaked and distorted the concept of the livability of our city, almost beyond imagining.

In 2012, working with a group of fourteen landscape architecture and three planning students, Patrick Condon — University of British Columbia Chair of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture — addressed the question of how Vancouver might reasonably approach the reduction of energy use and consequent greenhouse gas production in the city by at least 80 per cent, by 2050, and how that laudatory & necessary goal might be accomplished.

The answer: the construction of compact, low-rise structures across the city, along its arterials and throughout its neighbourhoods, as a greener, more workable, more energy-efficient alternative to the present form of high-rise development that has so captured Vision Vancouver’s imagination.

Dr. Condon and his students wrote that with the expansion of the footprint of the West End and Yaletown towers into neighbourhoods across the city:

“First, if you follow that approach you end up with two cities. A city of gleaming glass towers spread like beads on the string of the Skytrain line, disconnected with the surrounding areas they overshadow.”

“Second, it sentences neighbourhoods between stations to a future of slowly aging residents, gradually shrinking populations, more empty classrooms, restricted access for young families, fewer commercial services, and an increased dependence on the car to get around.”

Third, “While it is true that high-rises, when combined in large numbers, create GHG-efficient districts, the buildings themselves are not as efficient as mid-rise buildings. High-rises are subject to the effects of too much sun and too much wind on their all-glass skins. And all-glass skins are, despite many improvements to the technology, inherently inefficient. Glass is simply not very good at keeping excessive heat out, or desirable heat in. High-rises, according to BC Hydro data, use almost twice as much energy per square metre as mid-rise structures.”

Fourth, “While high-rises are an attractive option now, how will they age? And how adaptable are they to changes in family circumstances.”

Fifth, “High-rise buildings built largely of steel and concrete are less sustainable than low-rise and mid-rise buildings built largely of wood; steel and concrete produce a lot of GHG. Wood traps it. Concrete is 10 times more GHG-intensive than wood.”

“Sixth and last, our guest lecturers made us painfully aware that people living in single family homes do not appreciate high-rises as neighbours. Politically, it is a nonstarter. So the prospect of supplying the tens of thousands of housing units that our young families and elderly need through the construction of high-rise structures seems naive at best.”

Dr. Condon and his students explored an alternative strategy.

What might happen if the population of the city doubled, and all new residents were placed in areas outside of the downtown core, avoiding wherever possible the problematic high-rise? The outcome?

The retention of existing neighbourhood quality, the supply of enough units to house the burgeoning wave of elderly, energy efficiency, housing for young families, housing equity, and neighbourhood preservation through the gentle infill of existing residential streets.
The construction of tens of thousands of primarily mid-rise wood frame mixed use commercial / residential buildings on arterial streets.

Typically, four-storey structures replace rudimentary one-storey commercial buildings. When completed, the same or similar commercial enterprises re-occupy the ground floor commercial space. As units are gradually added, neighbourhood commercial services and transit become more viable, as thousands of new potential customers live near bus or streetcar stops, and commercial services. Such a salutary scenario offers particular benefit to (the fastest growing portion of the population) elderly residents, who would have the advantage of walking distance access to transit stops, neighbourhood clinics, inexpensive cafés, and social support facilities.

VanRamblings has just begun the conversation on form of development.

In the coming months, we will be return to the subject again and again and again, as in the next instalment we set about to explore streetcar development as a workable, human-scale alternative to Vision Vancouver’s ‘too developer-friendly for words’ dark-and-dreary tunnel down Broadway.

Patrick Condon. “For the cost of one Skytrain tunnel along Broadway, the city could build a streetcar infrastructure across the entire region.”

Are you listening, Non-Partisan Association (in particular, you, Mr. LaPointe), Coalition of Progressive Electors, Green Party of Vancouver?

The Greens’ Stuart Mackinnon Blogs on Parks and Recreation

July 21, 2014Environment, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

July? Must be the silly season in Vancouver politics

Being an election year, this summer is a lot more political than usual. In non-election years the local press often has difficulty finding stories of interest on the civic scene. Not this year. Not a day goes by that there isn’t some sort of story to shake things up.
What seems lost in most of these stories is what I think is most important to voters: Vancouver. Not infidelity, not youthful exuberance, not the internal machinations of giant political machines. Vancouver. The city and its problems. Its future. Its plans.
I hope we can all get back to what is important soon. For me and for this blog that would be parks and recreation. I hope that in this year’s election we can have a real debate about what the Park Board actually does. The Park Board website describes it this way:

“exclusive possession, jurisdiction, and control over more than 230 public parks in Vancouver and a large public recreation system of community centres, pools, rinks, fitness centres, golf courses, street trees, marinas, playing fields, and more.”

I hope in this election this is what we will discuss.
We need to talk about the state of our parks and playing fields. We need to discuss governance and volunteerism at our Community Centres. We need to debate fees and access. We need to talk about future growth and current maintenance. We need the electorate to understand the importance of these public assets.We need candidates that are concerned about the things the Park Board actually does.
So here’s a challenge: From now until the election on November 15th, let’s talk about Parks and Recreation.

–

Stuart Mackinnon has granted VanRamblings permission to re-publish his Better Parks column.

Vision Park Board Candidate Trish Kelly Withdraws From the Race

July 18, 2014Decision 2014, Politics, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

(Update: Read Demand That Trish Kelly Be Reinstated to Vision’s PB Slate)

On Thursday afternoon, Vision Vancouver Park Board candidate Trish Kelly made the very difficult decision to withdraw her bid for elected office.
Ostensibly, according to community buzz on social media, Ms. Kelly chose to drop out of the race for Park Board, resultant from a “shaming” campaign that it is alleged VanRamblings had commenced earlier this week, with the July 14th publication of a blog post on VanRamblings.
Ms. Kelly is quoted in the July 17, 2014 press release issued at 4:02pm by Vision Vancouver …

“After 25 years of serving my community, I put my name forward as a Park Board nominee to move my life as a community activist fighting for social justice issues, to claiming a seat at the decision-making table. Unfortunately, my work in theatre and as a sex-positive activist is being sensationalized — and will clearly continue to be distracting from my efforts in the community and in the election campaign,” said Trish Kelly.

“I have never hidden from this work. I hold no shame nor regret for the work I have produced,” continued Kelly. “I have dedicated, and will continue to dedicate, much of my life to contributing to my community, to having difficult conversations, and to making myself vulnerable in order to make space for others.”

I sincerely regret that Ms. Kelly has chosen to withdraw from what was certain to be a very difficult campaign for office for Vision Vancouver this autumn electoral season. I could not reasonably have expected, or imagined, nor did I wish for Ms. Kelly to withdraw from the Park Board race.
In laying out the next four months of VanRamblings posts, I had at least three posts that were to be published regarding Ms. Kelly’s appropriateness for office, each one of which would be explicity supportive of her candidacy.
I anticipated endorsing Ms. Kelly, as I will current Vision Vancouver Park Board Commissioner Trevor Loke, because I think it is crucial that there are strong, reasoned and passionate voices on Park Board who are committed to advocating for the early implementation of the recently-approved Park Board Trans and Gender Variant Inclusion Policy. I believe that Trish Kelly would be a key advocate for moving the policy forward — hers was, and is, a powerful voice, on this very important issue. Ms. Kelly’s withdrawal from the Park Board campaign race may jeopardize early implementation of the policy, and under no circumstance would I — nor would many, many other members of our community — wish that to be the case.

Perhaps you haven’t read the VanRamblings post that in having gone viral has caused so much consternation in the community — you should. And, please, read past the inflammatory title, into the actual content of the post.
In making the decision to make the waywardwest.tv video available to the general public, and voting electorate of Vancouver, as I suggest in the post, I deliberated on “the morality and appropriateness” of publishing the video.
Finally, in the hours and minutes prior to the publication of the post, and Ms. Kelly’s — as I say in the post, “entirely necessary“ — video, I asked myself the question …

If the Toronto Star were to be provided with a copy of a potentially controversial video of a top vote-getting candidate for civic office, would The Star act as a gatekeeper of such ‘news’, and forego the public interest in keeping the video to themselves, and therefore out of the public debate?

The answer was clear: in the interests of openness and transparency, and in the public interest, The Star would run with the video.

Thus, early on Monday morning — under the fair use provisions of Canadian copyright law — the post first appeared on VanRamblings.
Since publication, my many detractors on social media, and elsewhere, have called into question my integrity, my ethics, my commitment to social justice, and my humanity, one commenter on Facebook writing about …

” … the tripe that passes for prose in this sad little blog post … I unfortunately live in South Surrey and can’t vote for Ms. Kelly. But if she would pledge to introduce a bylaw banning VanRamblings I would happily organize friends and family to vote for her.”

The comment above is one of the kinder things that have been written about me in recent days, and the worthiness of VanRamblings. You will find a sampling of social media commentary at the end of today’s post.

Knowing of my penchant for writing at length, in recently commencing coverage of the upcoming Vancouver municipal election race, I made a conscious decision to keep the posts short and, wherever possible, pithy.
Not today.

I am a feminist. There is no more important issue to which I have dedicated my life than support of the women in my life, the promotion of women’s rights, and the realization of an utterly safe and productive environment for all women and children, here and elsewhere across the globe.
The untoward suggestions that have been made about my character, and the notion that in publishing the “offending” July 14th post I, in any way, meant to shame, cause injury, or sought to inhibit Ms. Kelly’s campaign for elected office, are anathema to the core beliefs that are fundamental to the way I have brought myself to the world, and the struggle in which I have engaged all of my adult life to promote the fair treatment of women.
I have a daughter who I love with my whole heart, who as a young girl was raised with feminist values that were incorporated into the very fibre of her being — an education on the role of women that was valiantly supported by her mother, who is among the strongest women I have ever known.
I say “among” because my daughter is the toughest-minded, the strongest, the most socially-conscious activist woman I have ever met, and she has been so from the youngest age, through her PhD, and beyond. There is no one of whom I am more proud — Megan’s life, and how she brings herself to the world, is fundamental to hers, her mother’s and my core principles on the absolute necessity of a more just world for women.
The notion that I set about to hurt Trish Kelly is akin to suggesting that I would hurt my daughter, or the women I love — such a notion is abhorrent.

In the pre-feminist days of the 1970s (yes, Betty Friedan had published the seminal feminist text The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and Simone de Beauvoir was an activist feminist writer from an earlier age, as was anarchist political activist Emma Goldman), in the days before the 1972 publication of Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s Ms. Magazine — which gave popular voice to the notion of women’s equality and women’s rights (yes, for you younger folks, there was actually a pre-feminist era when all that is now taken for granted was but a fairy dust dream) — Cathy, my once and forever beloved, and mother to our daughter — would each Wednesday meet with other women in a “women’s consciousness raising” group.
During the course of those consciousness raising sessions, my job was to remain at home, to cook, to clean, but most importantly, to set about working with Cathy to create the conditions for a relationship that would be based on equality of opportunity and circumstance.
Throughout the early 1970s, Cathy and I picketed the aboriginal restaurant on Davie, whose Swedish flight attendant owners discriminated against and exploited their aboriginal female staff. Cathy and I would drive down from the Interior, where I was teaching and Cathy was working for the Ministry of Human Resources, to join the picket line at Bimini’s on West 4th, when the owners refused to negotiate a first contract for their largely female staff.
As the first paid ‘Co-ordinator’ / Executive Director of the Tillicum / Fed-up Food Co-operatives, the realization of a workplace based on equality was central to the work I took on. In another post, I will write about my work with a pioneering group of lesbian feminist women — an activist adventure that was among the most satisfying political experiences of my life.
As an editor at the Peak newspaper, at Simon Fraser University, I wrote searing essays that resulted in the realization of The Association of University and College Employees Union, a union mainly composed of women, and from then on the negotiation of a first contract. Those essays also served to create the conditions to break the “glass ceiling” that then existed — where women were assigned to the “menial work” (when we all know such work is hardly menial), and never provided the opportunity for advancement — in the end, after months of activist advocacy writing, several men resigned their senior administrative posts, and in every case an able woman was promoted to take the place of her former boss.
In 1973, arising from my work with an activist NDP government in creating Student Employment Offices at post-secondary institutions across the province, rather than place myself in a senior administrative position, I took on the job of secretary — because, again, as we all know that is where the “real work” takes place, the typing of letters, the answering of phone calls, the arranging of schedules, the creation of a filing system, and all that goes into running an efficient and productive office.
In the latter half of the 1970s, as an activist BCTF Learning and Working Conditions Chairperson, support and promotion of the women with whom I worked was central to the work I took on. I consistently refused offered posts that would have enhanced my career, in favour of ensuring that a woman would be placed in that post. In my time as an L&WC Chair, I worked with Linda Shuto at the BCTF, as she set about to create the first Status of Women office in any non-governmental agency on the continent.
In 1977, I led a movement — later taken on by the BCTF, the BC School Trustees Association, and finally the provincial government — to ensure that women kindergarten teachers would not have to suffer classes of 30 or more, as the school district set about, as it was finally determined, to abrogate the Schools Act. In the end, the senior administration of the school district had their employment terminated for cause, and the School Board was placed into trusteeship, as the provincial government set about to establish a new, more just formation of that Interior school district.

And finally, for now, allow me to tell you about the single most rewarding activist venture in which I was engaged this past decade.
Hired as the IT person at First Student Bus Lines, I was called into a meeting with staff early one 2004 September morning, where all bus drivers and attendants were informed by management that henceforth the hourly wage of $10 – $12 would be converted into a contract wage of $36.25 for a 12-hour, or longer, day. School bus drivers and attendants are not covered under existing labour legislation in the province — leaving the employer to demand of their largely recent-immigrant women staff virtual serfdom.

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