With the well-attended protest Tuesday evening by residents of West Point Grey, Dunbar, Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy — demanding of our provincial government that Finance Minister Carole James reverse the imposition of a newly-created school surtax that will see homeowners living in homes assessed at more than $3 million (you know, the wildly sympathetic 1%) paying up to an additional $26,000 per year in property tax, or as Georgia Straight editor, Charlie Smith, writes in an opinion piece published today …
“It’s disingenuously called a school tax, but the money goes into general revenue. The so-called “additional school tax on high-valued properties” imposes a 0.2 percent levy on residential portions assessed between $3 and $4 million, starting in 2019.
That adds up to $2,000 in extra property tax per year.
For the residential portion above $4 million, there will be a 0.4 percent tax rate applied. That adds an additional $4,000 in property tax per $1 million in assessed value. Anyone who owns an $8-million home, for example, would end up paying an extra $18,000 in property taxes to the province.
Last evening’s Trimble Park protest of the wealthy following a day of boisterous and demanding protest at Vancouver City Hall, with protesters demanding of our civic and provincial governments, the immediate commencement of construction of thousands of new, affordable homes to house not just the homeless, the working poor and seniors, but those first responders and wage earners raising their families in Vancouver, a city where the average “affordable” studio apartment rent starts at $1750 (and this, on the east side of the city!), with $2450 a starting point for a one-bedrooms, $2800 to $3450 the range for a two-bedrooms, with more than $4000 each month established as the market rate for a three-bedroom apartment, the imposition by the John Horgan BC NDP of the “school tax” necessary to fund affordable housing, and to help the tens of thousands of children enrolled in British Columbia’s public education system to be lifted out of poverty and wont, where children might attend the school in the neighbourhood, having slept in a home that provides safe haven and security for them, an important provincial government social justice initiative, long overdue and absolutely and utterly necessary.
Protests garner attention, be they organized by the weathy or our society’s disenfranchised, the media eager to provide coverage.
Sometimes — but not often — the protests result in a near immediate change to government policy. Old fogey and democrat that we are, and as many protests as we are wont to attend — and we do, because it is of critical importance that we stand with our neighbours, friends, our sisters and our brothers to demand that citizen voices be heard on a societal issues of concern — VanRamblings believes even more strongly in a thoughtful and empowering engagement with government, in multi-faceted campaigns designed to impact on the decision-making of government.
Through the composition of and posting of pointed, poignant, thoughtful, well-researched and well-argued hand-delivered letters to the offices of our elected officials and government administrators; along with reams and stacks of hand-delivered, signed petitions containing hundreds and thousands of signatures, arguing to our electeds that citizen voices must be heard on issues respecting the livability of our city and province, we can make a difference.
Or, when a specific issue of concern to you and your neighbours has been placed on — as will be explored below, in this instance on — a City Council’s agenda, VanRamblings believes strongly in a thoughtful and empowering engagement with government, a respectful engagement that encourages reasoned and thoughtful input into the final decision-making that will take place around the Council room table, towards making ours a more just city, region and province.
Monday evening, an activist friend of VanRamblings presented to New Westminster City Council, having already forwarded to the members of Council an expression of concern regarding issues of ingress and egress from her multi-family dwelling condominium complex respecting a proposed condominium complex that is to be built adjacent to my friend’s existing multi-family building, being presented to Council on Monday evening, with a recommendation for approval by senior staff employed within New Westminster’s Planning and Development Services Department.
In addition to concerns respecting ingress & egress, in her hand-delivered letter to the Mayor and each Councillor, my friend expressed concerns as to privacy respecting the overheight, glass-fronted balcony, bay window facing “wall of clear glass” building that would have her new neighbours looking directly into my friend’s home, and that of her neighbours.
In respect of the proposed condominium complex presented Monday evening to Council for approval, not to put too fine a point on the matter, in its currently-proposed configuration, my friend argued, the new building was utterly unacceptable to her, her husband and her neighbours.
If changes were not made to the configuration of the proposed new condominium, my friend and her neighbours would suffer grievous harm.
The proposed new complex is to be constructed within the well-consulted-upon, neighbourbood-negotiated-and-approved RS2-CD77 zoned neighbourhood, and given that the complex in order for it to be built in its currently proposed configuration would require of Council their approval of several relaxations of the zoning bylaw, relaxations that would confer a much ‘healthier’ economic benefit to the developer bringing the proposal forward, to the detriment of the interests of my friend and her neighbours, my friend would argue, “relaxations” respecting height, density, frontage to the street, and overshadowing would result in a condominium complex that would work a hardship on her and her aggrieved neighbours.
My friend would argue to New Westminster City Council, that Mayor and Council must not approve the development at their Monday evening meeting, that Council must send the plans for the new condominium complex back to the Planning Department, not for further consultation — because no consultation had ever taken place with her, her husband or her neighbours, resident in the building that would be most greatly impacted by the proposed new condominium complex — and if Council were to do such, my friend would argue, it is entirely likely that the commencement of a respectful consultation process with she and her neighbours would result in the development of an in-character to the neighbourhood building, reconfigured to reflect the addressing of the concerns she and her neighbours had raised in their letters and presentations to Council.
Presenting to Council. Daunting that.
In the days prior to presenting to Council, VanRamblings was asked, “Do you have advice for me before I address Council on Monday evening, any pearly words of wisdom that will help make this most difficult situation I face in addressing Council somewhat easier for me, because speaking before members of an elected body is not something that is usual for me, and if I am to tell you the truth, hardly constitutes for me a comforting and welcoming diversion from the protean concerns of my daily life.”
Here is what VanRamblings wrote to my friend, advice that pertains to you should you ever present to Council, which VanRamblings believes you should do often, an aspect of your civic responsibility you should not — and must not — forego, if you are to feel the life of the city deep within you, your participation in civic affairs the lifeblood of our city.
1. Don’t be nervous. Sometimes, it’s okay to be nervous — but you don’t have to be. Focus on the information you’re imparting. When you set about to relay to Council the issues of importance to you, any
nervousness will fade into the background, because your presentation is not about you — it’s about imparting information of value to help the Councillors you’ll meet on Monday evening make the proper, the humane, the necessary and the right decision, for you, for them, and for New Westminster, a decision that will serve not only to represent you and your husband’s interests, but that of your neighbours, as well as all the citizens of New Westminster, and perhaps, most importantly, the interests of the City Councillors who you’ll be addressing Monday night — because you have to know that they want to do the right thing, they really do. Let them know that you believe they want to do the right thing.2. Introduce yourself, tell them a little about yourself and your husband, humanize yourself for them, let them know where you live — describing your neighbourhood in near-poetic terms. That’ll take 45 seconds of your allotted five minutes, but it’s a good, humanizing and important to do.
3. Stay calm, stay focused, don’t raise your voice, but do speak firmly, clearly and with authority, and with that good ol’ fashioned wit and charm for which you are so well known.
4. Be respectful.
5. Do not refer to the developer — or any good that the development might do (the developer can speak for herself quite well enough).
6. Decide on three (four, at the most) key points you want to make: the exhaust from the cars coming to and from the parkade of the newly-proposed building, exhaust that will filter directly into the apartments in your building, exhaust fumes that will be a hazard and will impinge on the quality of life for the resident owners in your condominium; the overview / privacy concerns; the necessity of sober second thought on the development proposal and the absolute necessity of Council sending it back to Planning for further consultation. DO NOT use the word disingenuous when speaking with the members of Council, do not call out the process — that will be off-putting for them, and for the members of the Planning Department who will be present Monday night — and who, if all works out well for you, you’ll be working with to come up with a new, livable and much more appropriate development for the neighbourhood.
And in closing, I reminded her, “You’ve got five minutes. Stay calm, focused, be of good cheer, but dead serious, be respectful, and be appreciative that Council is affording you an opportunity to speak to them.”
Alas. In the wee hours of yesterday morning, I learned from my friend — a person of salty countenance — that she had “slipped up” … twice.
During my friend’s address to Council, forgetting herself for a moment, she used the word “shitty”. Mayor and Council were aghast, my friend reports, as the electeds she was addressing experienced an onset of the vapours not seen since Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara’s feinting (the correct spelling) spells, my friend ever-so-gently chastised by the Mayor.
My friend could live with that. What she couldn’t live with is that midway through her address to Mayor and Council … she cried, her voice still one of authority, but catching, she finding herself perhaps in need of oxygen.
My friend wrote to me …
When they told me I could go on in a second round, I said no. I told them this was hard enough, I would finish then would just go outside and have a good old cry. Then, I stood at the back of the room and was seen wiping a tear from my eye. Then, I left the chamber, came back loaded for bear. Not an insincere act in that performance. I DID cry. That was my response. I just refuse to apologize for it.
I am so sorry for men (and the women who emulate them), who think there is something wrong with crying. I find it one of the most liberating of the physical autonomic responses.
VanRamblings responded as follows …
In my time sitting as a member of Vancouver’s Board of Variance, when each of the 30 appellant individuals or groups Board Chair Terry Martin, and my fellow Board members Quincey Kirschner, Jan Pierce and Bruce Chown on whose presentations of appeal we adjudicated — on issues of critical, life-changing import — not once, in hundreds of appeals, no matter how stoic the presenters, not once did an appellant get through their five-minute presentation without crying, wholly unexpectedly to them, but not for those of us who sat on the Board.
Thirty seconds or a minute in, you could see and feel the presenter’s demeanour change, an utter surprise to them, their voice catching, a look of roiling pain on their face, and then the first tear, and before they even realized it, they were crying, sometimes inconsolably, at times the meeting drawing to a halt, a recess necessary before proceedings could continue. Humanity and life, human existence laid bare in a large committee room with a long polished oak table, five members of the Board of Variance, the male members in suits and ties, resplendent in our freshly laundered and ironed white shirts, the women dressed in casual but elegant business attire, but these were not your regular and expected meetings of an august, quasi-judicial body of civic governance … this was spiritual transcendence writ large on the human tableaux we call life. Crying, you say. Good for you. Serves only to prove that you are human … but you knew that already.
Update: My friend writes to say that New Westminster Mayor and Council rejected the development application as proposed.
And so, today’s column draws to a close.
Later today, VanRamblings will publish our interview with former Vancouver City Councillor Tim Louis, on the Thursday evening première of The Rankin File: Legacy of a Radical — a world début for Teresa Alfred’s warts and all biography of Harry Rankin, one of the most impactful men ever in the governance of our city, a champion always for the working man and woman, the wage labourers whose concerns had so long been ignored by generations of right-of-centre civic government in Vancouver, dominated for generations by the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association.
