That handsome, despicablefellow you see pictured above is Kareem Allam.
We’re kidding. Honest. Just joshing. Sheesh, no one can take a joke these days.
Afford yourself the pleasure of listening to / watching B.C.’s most accomplished politico, Kareem Allam
Who is Kareem Mahmoud Abbas Allam?
Most political folks will recognize Mr. Allam as the architect of ABC Vancouver’s overwhelming victory at the polls on October 15, 2022, in that year’s decisive municipal election, where everyABC Vancouver candidate was elected to office.
Clearly, Kareem Allam is a master strategist, a superior motivator and a campaign manager par excellence, an individual who means to win, not necessarily at all costs, but still — and, if we might suggest, a man of principle and integrity who fights the good fight, in 2022 on behalf of the beleaguered citizenry of Vancouver.
In 2022, post pandemic, an irritated Vancouver public had become fed up with a do nothing, whiny, Kennedy Stewart-led (if in anyone’s wildest imagination, Mr. Stewart might have the appellation of ‘leader‘ applied to him) administration, where he worked within a disparate and wildly dysfunctional civic administration. Mr. Stewart is, fortunate for us, now back at the post from whence he came, as the defrocked and much mocked Simon Fraser University Political Science professor.
If you go to the Fairview Strategy website — where Mr. Allam is employed, Fairview Strategy an integrated public relations company which offers government relations liaison and expertise, communication, media relations, digital communication, Indigenous relations, and market research — you will read this …
With two decades of private and public sector experience in public affairs, Kareem has successfully leveraged his knowledge of people, policy and community into triumphant political campaigns at the municipal, provincial and federal levels.
Kareem managed the winning Kevin Falcon for BC Liberal Leader campaign and the ABC Vancouver municipal campaign, electing 19 out of 19 candidates, including Mayor Ken Sim. In 2023, Kareem achieved #9 status on Vancouver Magazine’s annual Power 50 list.
Kareem has served as a member of the Board of the Fraser Health Authority, and as a member of the Translink Screening Panel, among other appointments which serve the community interest.
Sarah Blyth, community advocate and organizer, founding member of the Overdose Prevention Society
Did we mention that Sarah Blyth holds Mr. Allam in the highest possible esteem?
One year ago, Mr. Allam left his post as Chief of Staff to Mayor Ken Sim. Suffice to say that Mr. Allam’s leave-taking — he was very unhappy — was none too pleasant.
After yesterday’s incredible announcement helping to fulfill our 100 police and 100 nurses, and on the heels of 24 months of full time campaigning, its time for me to go back to private life. Thank you everyone for such an unbelievable journey. #vanpoli#bcpolipic.twitter.com/NljTK4LzAj
Well worth watching and listening to the Hotel Pacifico podcast interview with Kareem Allam that you’ll find above — given that Mr. Allam will continue to be long into the future, a British Columbian of wit, intelligence, perspicacity and accomplishment, who will endure as an individual who will make a difference for the better in each of our lives, in the many, many years to come. Best to get to know Mr. Allam a little better now, to help provide a bit of context for your confounding life, and perhaps even inject a smidgen of hope for a better collective future for all of us.
In the mosaic of Vancouver’s civic infrastructure, the elected, independentPark Board stands as a cornerstone of citizen well-being, pivotal in shaping the city’s social fabric, environmental sustainability and recreational opportunities.
Established in 1888, the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation holds a unique position among municipal bodies, directly accountable to the citizens it serves. With its mandate focused solely on parks, recreation, community amenities, and preservation of the natural environment, the Park Board represents an essential conduit between Vancouver’s diverse populace and its natural and urban spaces.
First and foremost, the Park Board serves as a guardian of Vancouver’s green lungs, stewarding its vast network of parks, gardens, and natural areas.
From the iconic Stanley Park to neighbourhood playgrounds, these green spaces provide invaluable ecological benefits, serving as habitats for wildlife, mitigating urban heat island effects, and fostering biodiversity.
Moreover, they offer vital havens for residents seeking respite from the hustle and bustle of city life, promoting mental health and well-being.
Park Board serves to preserve and enhance these green oases, ensuring our city remains a livable community where nature and urbanity coalesce harmoniously.
Equally significant is the Park Board’s commitment to fostering inclusive and accessible recreational opportunities for all residents.
Through its diverse array of programmes, facilities, and events, Park Board actively promotes physical activity, social cohesion, and cultural exchange.
Whether it’s swimming pools, community centres, or sports fields, these amenities serve as vital hubs for community engagement and empowerment. Moreover, initiatives such as free access programmes for low-income families and barrier-free facilities ensure that socioeconomic disparities do not hinder citizens’ access to recreational pursuits. By championing equity and inclusivity, the Park Board plays a pivotal role in strengthening the social fabric of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods.
In addition, Vancouver’s Park Board serves as a nexus for environmental advocacy and sustainability initiatives, spearheading efforts to mitigate climate change and protect natural ecosystems.
Through tree planting initiatives, shoreline restoration projects, and sustainable landscaping practices, Park Board endeavours to enhance the resilience of Vancouver’s urban environment. The Park Board’s leadership in promoting active transportation, such as cycling and walking paths, not only reduces carbon emissions but also fosters healthier and more livable neighbourhoods.
By embracing innovative solutions and community partnerships, Park Board exemplifies Vancouver’s commitment to being a global leader in urban sustainability.
Moreover, the Park Board’s independence from municipal governmentensures it can prioritize the needs and interests of citizens without undue political influence.
Elected by Vancouverites, Park Board Commissioners are accountable solely to the electorate, allowing them to make decisions based on evidence, community input, and long-term vision rather than short-term political expediency.
This autonomy is fundamental in safeguarding the integrity and effectiveness of the Park Board’s operations, ensuring that it remains a trusted steward of public resources and a champion of citizen well-being.
The Park Board serves as a forum for civic engagement and participatory democracy, providing citizens with a platform to voice their concerns, aspirations, and ideas for the city’s parks and recreational amenities.
Through public consultations, advisory committees, and community engagement initiatives, it fosters a culture of collaboration and co-creation, where residents are actively involved in shaping the future of their neighbourhoods. This bottom-up approach not only enhances the legitimacy of Park Board decisions but also fosters a sense of ownership and pride among Vancouverites in their public spaces.
Vancouver’s elected, independentPark Board is an indispensable institution that serves to enrich the lives of citizens living in every neighbourhood across our city, while strengthening the social, environmental, and cultural fabric of Vancouver.
Through its stewardship of parks and green spaces, promotion of inclusive recreation, advocacy for sustainability, and commitment to participatory democracy, Vancouver’s much cherished, invaluable, independentBoard of Parks & Recreation embodies the values of livability, equity, and environmental stewardship.
As the city continues to evolve and grow, the Park Board’s role in shaping a more vibrant, resilient, and equitable Vancouver remains as vital as ever.
Note. The preceding text was generated in the ChatGPT AI chatbot, in response to the question, “Why is the elected, independent Vancouver Park Board essential to the citizens of Vancouver, British Columbia?” What you read above is ChatGPT’s response. If artificial intelligence can determine the value of Vancouver Park Board, why is it the human intelligence of the members of Vancouver City Council — without mandate to abolish our elected Park Board — cannot?
Vancouver’s West End in the 1960s, a comfortable family neighbourhood next to Stanley Park
In the 1960s, when Vancouver was still very much a village rather than the thriving metropolis we know it to be today, in those near soporific, pre-movement times, rare was the occasion when the citizens of our fine city got up on their hind legs to protest the status quo or what seemed like the inevitable, as wealthy old men of circumstance wrought change unchallenged, untrammelled by reflection.
Tom ‘Not So Terrific’ Campbell, controversial Vancouver Mayor, in office from 1966 to 1972
Such was the case in 1971, when Vancouver Mayor Tom Campbell and his Non-Partisan Association Council cohorts decided that the time had come to develop the Coal Harbour site at the entrance to Stanley Park, cherished green space of long duration, but not much longer if Mr. Campbell — and the provincial government, led by 17-years-in-power Socred Premier W.A.C. Bennett — had their way.
The Coal Harbour site, owned by Harbour Park Developments, a politically connected local group with strong ties to the Non-Partisan Association, developer Tom Campbell — who in 1966 ran for Mayor as an independent, and won — and the Socred government, first unveiled their development plans in 1965.
The Four Seasons Hotel chain came forward in 1965 with a $40-million development plan on the Coal Harbour waterfront. The initial plan would house 3,000 people in three 30-storey buildings, including a 13-storey hotel and townhouses.
Over time, the development plan was expanded into an unheard of at the time $55-million massive multi-tower plan, with 15 apartment towers, ranging from 15 to 31 storeys set to be constructed on the then green space, a veritable high-rise forest along the Georgia Street causeway entrance to Stanley Park.
As you might well expect, the massive tower development plan for the 14-acre Coal Harbour waterfront site turned into a contentious issue that lasted for years and years, causing increasing numbers of people to rise up in adversarial opposition. The public wanted the site preserved as green space. Developers, Tom Campbell, the Non-Partisan Association, and the Social Credit government had other ideas.
Each week, for years, the community rose up in high dudgeon.
After all, the West End at the time was a single family dwelling neighbourhood, the tallest structure in Vancouver was the Marine Building on Burrard Street.
In 1966, each weekend for the first couple of months, a rag tag group of community activists — who came to include a young storefront lawyer, Mike Harcourt, and Darlene Marzari, an employee of the City — protested on the deserted site. Over time, their numbers grew to five hundred, and then a thousand, rising up in protest and stark and strident opposition to development plans for the cherished green space.
Vancouver City Councillor and then Mayor, Art Phillips; Councillors Walter Hardwick and Harry Rankin
In 1968, a reform-minded Art Phillips and his friend, Walter Hardwick — an Urban Planning professor at UBC, and a community leader whose work would come to shape the city and Metro Vancouver region — ran for Vancouver City Council under the banner of a civic party they had created, The Electors’ Action Movement (TEAM), securing two seats on City Council, joining a young lawyer by the name of Harry Rankin, who had been elected to Council in 1966, sitting in sole opposition to the developer-friendly Non-Partisan Association City Council of the day.
Throughout their campaign for office in 1968, both Art Phillips and Dr. Hardwick stated their clear opposition to the Harbour Parks Development / Four Seasons plan for the green space at the entrance to Stanley Park, standing with the community, and with Vancouver City Councillor Harry Rankin. Would community opposition to the Coal Harbour development plan, in ever increasing numbers, carry the day?
Only the continued opposition of Vancouver citizens could and would tell the tale.
A model of the Harbour Park Developments proposal for the entrance to Stanley Park. The $55-million development would have constructed 15 high-rise towers. Photo: Selwyn Pullan / PostMedia
By the early spring of 1971, hundreds of community activists gathered each weekend on the Coal Harbour site at the entrance to Stanley Park, in protest.
June 7, 1971. All Seasons Park after squatters reclaimed the site. Photo credit: Vancouver Sun
On May 29th, 1971, seventy community activists (hippies they were called by the press) took matters into their own hands, ripping down a fence surrounding the site, storming onto the Coal Harbour waterfront site to plant maple trees, setting up a camp of tents and ramshackle huts, the protest squat sustaining for a year, each subsequent weekend joined by hundreds and hundreds of concerned, mostly young, Vancouver citizens, at what was now called All Seasons Park.
September 23, 1971. An A-frame squatter’s shack in All Seasons Park. Photo: Ross Kenward / PostMedia
In early 1972, bowing to public pressure, a combative Tom Campbell announced there would be a plebiscite on the Four Seasons development, but that only property owners could vote.
This was roundly denounced at a public meeting on June 21, when urban planner Setty Pendakur dubbed the project “the biggest abortion in the history of development in Canada.” Pendakur said the development would create traffic chaos at the entrance to Stanley Park, that Council was confusing people with its plebiscite.
Property owners voted to reject the Four Seasons proposal by 51%. Then the federal government stepped in. On February 10, 1972, Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s government killed the proposal by withholding the transfer of a crucial water lot.
1972. Alderman Harry Rankin talking to activists at All Seasons Park. Photo: Gord Croucher / PostMedia
With a new Mayor and majority progressive T.E.A.M. (The Electors’ Action Movement) Council voted into office in 1972 by a public eager for change, led by Mayor Art Phillips, with Walter Hardwick, Darlene Marzari, Mike Harcourt and Setty Pendakur securing seats on, perhaps, Vancouver’s most progressive Council ever, in November 1973, the City of Vancouver bought the entire site for $6.4 million.
The green space at the entrance to Stanley Park is now known as Devonian Harbour Park, but for some of us, it will always be All Seasons Park.
Some historical source material for this article provided by Vancouver Sun reporter John Mackie.
There is a correlation to be drawn between the movement leading to the defeat years ago of the Harbour Park Development project at the entrance to Stanley Park — championed by the City Council of the day — and the movement opposition of, now, 200 informed citizens (and more) who gathered at City Hall two weeks ago, and again this past Monday evening to state their opposition to the initiative of the Ken Sim-led ABC Vancouver City Council to eliminate Vancouver’s cherished, 135-year-old, independent and elected Board of Parks and Recreation.
Movements start off small, with generally only a few of our better informed citizens coming to the fore to state their opposition.
As time passes, more of our citizens become informed, inform themselves, taking the power to change for the better into their own hands, to rise up for the better, to work in common cause with friends and neighbours who share their concern to, in time, elect a more democratically-minded local government committed to the livability of our beloved city.
What is it with men who lack humility, intellectual heft, or have little character and no experience, and their unwholesome mistreatment of women?
In the case of Mayor Ken Sim, perhaps there is a partial answer to the multiple questions above, deriving from Mr. Sim’s use of the word “swagger”.
Social media response to former Park Board Chairperson, Anita Romaniuk
A Definition of Swagger
Pompous, arrogant, boastful. An insolent braggart, and from the definition of insolent: disrespectful, rude, insulting in manner and speech, and deviant.
Swagger. Think: that jerk on the beach in a too small swimsuit who believes he’s God’s gift to women, who moves with a near drunken stagger, on the prowl for a victim of his all-too-visible misogyny and disdain for women, a man who is lacking in fidelity of purpose, and a little man devoid of empathy, and humanity.
Mayor Ken Sim, the next time he uses the word swagger, think: misogynist, arrogant, pompous, lacking in character, intellect and empathy, boastful, braggart, rude, scornful, with no conscience.
Under the current provincial Police Act, the Mayor of Vancouver upon election becomes the de facto Chairperson of the Vancouver Police Board.
Faye Wightman led several high-profile agencies before Solicitor General Mike Farnworth appointed Ms. Wightman, a well-respected and accomplished member of our community, to the Vancouver Police Board, in September 2020.
In past years, dating back to 1990, Ms. Wightman served as CEO of the Vancouver Foundation, CEO of B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation, vice-president of the University of Victoria, Board Chair ofInspire Health, and interim CEO of the Canadian Cancer Society, appointed as a B.C. Housing Commissioner, and Coast Capital Savings Executive Director.
“The Vancouver Police Board is guided by the values of independence, fairness, objectivity and accountability in all that it does,” Faye Wightman wrote in a statement she issued last week, following her resignation from the Police Board. “I believe Police Board Chair Ken Sim, and certain directors of the Board have lost sight of these key values, and I resigned.”
Faye Wightman’s departure comes less than a year after Police Board member Rachel Roy resigned in June 2023. Stephanie Johanssen also lost her job as Executive Director in November 2022, after serving three years and seven months in the role. Note should be made that Ms. Johanssen’s departure came the same month Mr. Sim and his ABC Vancouver majority Council were sworn into office.
From Mike Howell’s Glacier Media story: “The Vancouver Police Board won’t say why its Executive Director Stephanie Johanssen (far right) is no longer on the job.” File photo Mike Howell.
In a follow-up interview with Glacier Media’s Mike Howell, Ms. Wightman states …
“If the Board is comprised of directors who have a professional reliance on the City of Vancouver for funding, or on maintaining a positive relationship with the Mayor, who also chairs the Police Board, then their objectivity is compromised,” Ms. Wightman said in her statement.
“That is the case with two of our directors at the [police board] and it was becoming clear they were in a position of conflict.”
Ms. Wightman also named Trevor Ford, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, when asked about her allegation of interference from Mayor Ken Sim’s staff.
“[Trevor Ford] came to an in-camera meeting, he phoned and directed Board members to fire the Executive Director,” Ms. Wightman alleged in the interview.
“He sat in on one-on-one meetings that the Mayor had with individual Board members. If that’s not political interference, I’m not sure what is.”
Vancouver Police Board Executive Director Stephanie Johanssen, Board member Rachel Roy and now Faye Wightman, who has stated that “Ken Sim, from the outset and throughout our tenure together on the Police Board repeatedly asked for my resignation.”
Gone.
Harassment of Ms. Wightman? Political inference from the Mayor’s Chief of Staff in the firing of Police Board Executive Director, Stephanie Johannsen?
VanRamblings, in reading Ms. Wightman’s statement, believes so, yes.
Readers. Do you notice a pattern?
Could it be that Mayor Ken Sim demanded the resignation of the three strong women of accomplishment written about above because Vancouver’s current Mayor finds strong women of character, integrityand accomplishment threatening, and as such they must be excised from his circle of influence?
Not to worry, though.
Although B.C. Solicitor General Mike Farnworth has been uncharacteristically silent following the resignation of Ms. Wightman as his chosen appointee to the Vancouver Police Board, fear not …
Premier David Eby in his GlobalBC interview on Police Act reforms, states …
“I understand there’s some concern in Vancouver right now. The reforms (to the Police Act) are clearly needed. We’ll be working with local governments, and with police and the public in terms of the changes that are coming forward. The Solicitor General’s office is working on it right now.”
GlobalBC reporter Catherine Urquhart ends her report, stating …
“Legislation changing the Police Act to remove Mayors from police boards is expected to come as early as the spring session.”
British Columbia Solicitor General Mike Farnworth keeping his powder dry. Buh-bye, Mayor Ken Sim.
Solicitor General Farnworth’s silence thus far = revenge is a dish best served cold.
