Tag Archives: vancouver

#VanPoli | Homelessness + Housing | A Series | Part 1

#CdnPoli | Canadian Politics, #VanElxn 2022, #VanPoli Civic Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2022, , , ,

Each and every year for the past two decades, and more, hundreds of new homeless persons arrive on our shores to call Vancouver their new home.

These homeless persons, arriving without any money or resources, come down to Vancouver from the north of our province, from the Okanagan, Vancouver Island or some other provincial locale. More of the newly arrived homeless make their way to Vancouver from the Prairies, Ontario, Québec or the Maritimes, more often than not having been provided with a bus / train or plane ticket furnished by their provincial social services Ministry, having been told, “Go west, where the skies are blue, the weather warm, the people friendly, and the streets are paved with gold.”

A surprisingly large contingent of Vancouver’s new homeless arriving in our city each year, somehow make their way across the U.S. borders to both the north and south, arriving (mostly) from California — but, as well, from a polygot collection of other U.S. states — as well as from Mexico, and Central and South America.

Then, there are Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian or Filipino citizens who jump ship (or who were onboard for the long journey across the Pacific, as stowaways) to arrive in Vancouver, here to stay, they hope, here to make Vancouver their new home.

Upon arrival, these émigrés to our lustrous Pacific shores often make contact with one of the hundred or more outreach workers populating the downtown eastside, those angels of mercy helping the newly arrived find a place to stay, registering them for social assistance, or persons with disability coverage, making sure that they’re covered by B.C. Medical, ensuring their needs are otherwise looked after.

Then, among the newly arrived émigrés, there is the contingent who want to stay under the radar: the heavily drug dependent, and the drug dealers.

Apart from Vancouver’s (mostly) good weather, the other key reason this new homeless population moves to Vancouver relates to the ready availability of drugs. Vancouver is North America’s largest drug distribution centre. Heroin arriving from Afghanistan through Amsterdam will find its way to Vancouver, to be carried across the continent. The raw ingredients to make fentanyl arrives in Vancouver from China (the Canadian government long ago staunched the supply of raw fentanyl into Vancouver … now fentanyl has to be “mixed”, locally, in Vancouver).

Of the new arrivals each year, approximately one-third of the new “out of town” homeless population remain in Vancouver, many sleeping in doorwells, under park benches, in alley ways, in garages, loading bays, under bridges, in and around Jericho or Stanley Parks, or have found themselves shelter, or life in an SRO.

Many others make their way to municipalities across the Metro Vancouver region, mostly to Surrey and Burnaby, but as well to the Tri-Cities (Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam), Ladner, Langley and Richmond, Haney, Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, not to mention the North Shore.

A contingent of members of the Vancouver homeless population make their way into the Fraser Valley (as far out as Chilliwack, Agassiz and Hope) or over to Vancouver Island — mostly Victoria, Nanaimo and Duncan, but across the entire Island, as a whole — with a sizeable number heading to the Okanagan’s inviting climes.

A remaining number of homeless persons return home — with the provincial government, more often than not providing the fare home — having enjoyed (or not) their brief vacation on the west, with a smaller number deported or in jail.

All of the above is by way of saying, when the annual Homeless Count is conducted each March, the number of homeless persons always rises, sometimes by substantial numbers, and not because it’s persons — seniors, or others — who have found themselves evicted from their apartments because rents have become too high, or young people who have aged out of the care system (or lack thereof) provided by the province of British Columbia.

Rather, this is a sorry tale of human misery.

In some sense, then, the problem of resolving Vancouver’s homelessness crisis would seem irresolvable — the more housing that is built, the more modular housing structures constructed, the more hotels purchased by the province, the more SROs that are renovated by the province to make this kind of congregate housing livable, the more shelters that are made available, the more homeless persons who will arrive on our shores, this year, and  all the years beyond.

Today’s VanRamblings’ column is not prescriptive, nor do we attempt to provide historical context — we’ll do that later in the week, plus offer what we feel may be a short term fix to help alleviate the lives of human misery for persons who are living at a bare subsistence level,  as VanRamblings sets about to present an historical context dating back decades, through until today.

#VanElxn2022 | Ken Sim | ABC | The Underqualified Candidate for Mayor

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In 2018, Ken Sim ran for Mayor under the NPA (Non-Partisan Association) banner, securing 48,748 votes, or 28.16% of the vote, barely losing his bid to become Vancouver’s political leader to former Burnaby South NDP MP, Kennedy Stewart, who won his first bid for civic office with 28.71% of the vote, with 49,705 ballots cast in his favour, achieving a winning status with only a bare 975 vote plurality.

As is often said, every vote counts.

Ken Sim is back again to run for the Mayor’s office in 2022, this time as the Mayoralty candidate for ABC (A Better City), a political party created a year ago, just in time for 2022’s Vancouver civic election. VanRamblings will write later about ABC, and the shenanigans that went into cause Mr. Sim to “switch” parties.

VanRamblings will make two statements at the outset of today’s post …

  • The election of Ken Sim as Vancouver’s next Mayor, supported by a majority ABC Council contingent would result in an unrecoverable nightmare scenario for Vancouverites that would destroy our beloved hometown, once and for all;
  • It is probable that Ken Sim believes he means well for our city. What we write today should not be seen as a personal “attack” on Mr. Sim, but rather a recording of why we believe he is unfit to become Vancouver’s next Mayor..

Next month, when we write about ABC, VanRamblings will explain our nightmare scenario comment, made directly above.

Last month, there was a secret meeting held at the Terminal City Club, Vancouver’s première downtown business club, or as Vancouver Magazine describes it …

“Like a pedigreed version of Snoopy’s doghouse: miraculously bigger on the inside than the out, with a fitness centre and a 25-metre mountain-gazing pool, boutique hotel, billiards room, 9 banquet rooms, 3 restaurants, the place where the hoi polloi go to dine and schmooze with their other rich folks contemporaries. The meet and greet club, where decisions that impact on the lives of all Vancouverites take place, hidden behind closed doors.”

… wherein our city’s wealthy elite had asked ABC founder and funder Peter Armstrong (former, longtime President of the NPA, and owner of the Rocky Mountaineer railroad company) to bring Ken Sim along in order that they might “interview / vet” him respecting his adequacy, or lack thereof, to become Vancouver’s next Mayor. At this point in time, these wealthy Vancouverites had “parked” their campaign-supporting monies. Peter Armstrong hoped that the meeting would result in them both opening their hearts and their pocket books.

Alas, it was simply not meant to be.

After the hour long meeting, Ken Sim was dismissed from the room where he’d been vetted, with Peter Armstrong staying behind to hear the reply of the “club”.

Here’s what the Terminal City power brokers had to say to Mr. Armstrong …

“Let’s get straight to the point, Peter. Where’d you find this guy? Yes, yes, we know that he ran for office in 2018, but did he learn nothing from his campaign in 2018? This guy couldn’t manage a popsicle stand, never mind a city with more than a half million people. Rarely has it been our displeasure to interview a candidate for office who is as inept, and clearly unqualified, as Mr. Sim. Suffice to say, there’ll be no money from us. We know that we’re not going to support that anti-development cretin, Colleen Hardwick. I suppose we’ll now have to turn our attention to Kennedy Stewart, who would seem the best bet, or perhaps the NPA’s John Coupar, or that Mark Marissen guy. You may leave now, Peter. You’ve wasted enough of our time.”

Peter Armstrong has more than enough wealth to fund Ken Sim’s bid to become Mayor of our city, and get a good number of ABC candidates elected to office.

Even so.

In May of this year, at a rally held at Vancouver City Hall to oppose implementation of the Broadway Plan, long the political eminence gris of right-of-centre politics in our city, Jolene came up to us and grabbed our right arm to pull us away from the crowd, because she had “things” she wanted to tell VanRamblings. To wit …

“Recently, I had a meeting with Ken Sim who, as you know, is running as ABC’s Mayoral candidate. Given the disarray the NPA currently finds itself in, despite how much I like John Coupar, I’ve set about to meet with each of the five Mayoral candidates, to determine which campaign I’ll support with my time and money.

I came out of that meeting disillusioned.

All Ken could talk about was how he wanted to ‘run the city like a business’. He had no conception of what would be required of him as Mayor, knew the names of none of the city’s senior staff, nor the various departments within City Hall, had nothing to say about the arts, homelessness, affordable housing, crime and public safety, or any other issue of importance to voters. All he kept harping on was, ‘I’m going to run this city like a business’. Not without my support, he won’t.”

In the interest of fairness, perhaps now is the time for VanRamblings to write …

In the 2018 election, we attended the S.U.C.C.E.S.S all candidates meeting in Chinatown, where then NPA (Non Partisan Association) Mayoral candidate Ken Sim was a featured speaker. When Mr. Sim got up to speak, he spoke extemporaneously and told the one hundred and fifty or so that had gathered, about his experience as an Asian man living in the City of Vancouver, the number of times he’d had racist epithets hurled at him, and how that had influenced him and how it has affected the conduct of his life, and as a citizen and husband and father. Ken Sim’s speech was humane, authentic and moving, his words landing with a troubled fidelity.

VanRamblings recorded that speech as a Facebook Live video, and had intended on returning home to convert the video for upload to YouTube, and placement on  VanRamblings — but, alas, the video disappeared into the ether, seconds after we attempted to publish the video on our Facebook page. There are very few days that go by when we fail to remember the tragedy of how much the loss of that video has meant to us. We would have loved to share that video in 2022.

None of what is written on VanRamblings today is meant as a personal attack on Mr. Sim’s character or integrity. Rather, it is to express VanRamblings’ concern that Ken Sim is unfit to become Vancouver’s next Mayor, that he lacks a fundamental understanding of civic governance and how the city operates, and although it might be said the he “could learn on the job,” we’ve had enough of that this term.

In 2022, and in this election cycle, we despair for our city, for the homeless that have taken shelter along East Hastings street, for all the renters and condo owners who have been denied ready access to our parks system because they’ve been turned over by our current Park Board to house those same homeless persons, we despair as to what will be wrought should the egregiously soul-and-city destroying Broadway Plan or the neighbourhood-destroying Vancouver Plan be implemented post the October 15th election.

We despair for those who cannot find affordable housing in our city, we despair for those who have been the victims of an ever burgeoning crime wave that has come to the fore in this post pandemic time — as if those who would mean us harm are trying to make up for lost time — and for all of those beleaguered citizens who have been victim to one of the hundreds of unprovoked attacks on their persons, we despair for all those who have had to leave Vancouver because it simply too damned expensive to maintain any kind of reasonable life in our city.

VanRamblings does not believe that Ken Sim has the answers to the the myriad issues that plague our city, nor even knows what those issues are, or that he has the tools and the skills to make the kinds of changes we need to make our city a more livable city for all. We would have much preferred that sitting ABC City Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung was the competent, hard-working, skilled, innovative, convention-destroying Mayoral champion our city so desperately needs in 2022.

#VanElxn2022 | Colleen Hardwick | Vancouver’s Must-Elect Next Mayor

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If we are to preserve our city for future generations, and not give it away wholesale to the greed of developers who would envelop Vancouver with massive 40, 50, 60 and 70 storey greenhouse gas-emitting, glass and steel, plynth and podium style towers, if we care for our neighbourhoods and all the residents who reside in those neighbourhoods, if we believe in democracy — as Mayor Kennedy Stewart, and all of the other sitting Vancouver City Councillors clearly do not, given their “we know all, we were elected to make decisions, we’re not interested in anything citizens might have to say, on any subject, at any time” ‘woke’, virtue signalling, elitist orientation to governing —  then come early October, there is only one Mayoral candidate, and only one political party, for whom you must cast your ballot: TEAM Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick, and her outstanding and diverse team of community activists, who will return your city to you, the citizens of Vancouver.

Why is VanRamblings, so early in the Vancouver 2022 civic election cycle, endorsing Ms. Hardwick for Mayor of Vancouver post election day, Saturday, October 15th, as well as endorsing each of every one of her strikingly well-qualified and community-oriented candidates for Vancouver City Council?

The answer to that question is easy, because …

  • Colleen Hardwick is far and away the most qualified candidate seeking the Mayor’s office in the 2022 Vancouver municipal election. Having all but completed her work on a PhD / the granting of her doctorate pending, says Ms. Hardwick, the focus of her studies in urban development (applied innovation). To be perfectly precise, cuz she’s detail oriented and truth-telling, Ms. Hardwick wrote to us after publication, stating “My work at UBC has been in Applied Innovation from the ISGP (Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program). Patrick is one of the faculty on my PhD Committee, which includes professors from several different departments. The innovation that I created is PlaceSpeak, the “unique geo-verification technology that connects participants’ digital identity to their physical location, ensuring that data collected is relevant and defensible for evidence-based decision-making.” Don’t know that you want to go there, but Masters is the level of Urban Planning and that is from SCARP. Penny Gurstein is also on my Committee.” Ms. Hardwick continues her work with her mentor, the esteemed professor Patrick Condon (who’ll be endorsing her upon his return from Massachusetts) — the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture . Quite simply there is no other Mayoral candidate in the 2022 Vancouver civic election who has a better grasp on urban planning, governance and community engagement than is very clearly the case with the creditable Colleen Hardwick.
  • Colleen Hardwick and TEAM have the only viable, realistic and achievable affordable housing programme, of all 10 of the parties running candidates in the 2022 Vancouver municipal election. We’ll write about the plan at length another time, but for some time now there’s been discussion within TEAM that a majority TEAM for a Livable Vancouver Council will work with senior levels of government to turn over — on a leasehold basis — up to 10 crown land properties located within the City of Vancouver each year, for the development of affordable housing co-operatives, to be developed through a revived relationship with the Community Land Trust, who would be the de facto project managers. In a TEAM-initiated plan, the city could both expedite the construction of ten 150-unit family housing co-ops each year — think the City Gate Housing Co-operative on Milross Avenue, the Roundhouse Housing Co-operative on Marinaside Crescent, in Yaletown, or the Railyard Housing Co-operative on Quebec Avenue at 1st, just east of the Olympic Village — all built at no expense to Vancouver citizens — while foregoing the 1 million dollars in development permit fees generally paid to the city for a building of such size, dating back to the time when Vision Vancouver signed an agreement back in 2022 with the Community Land Trust (this affordable housing plan is already city policy, that was allowed to lay dormant through lack of action by the current Vancouver City Council). Construction and materials cost: paid for through a combination of mandated developer Community Amenity Contributions and provincial and federal funds (both Prime Minister Trudeau and former B.C. Housing Minister, David Eby, have already signed off on all of the above). Cost to Vancouver citizens: zero. Cost of land: zero. Cost to Vancouver citizens for construction and materials: zero. A negotiation with the federal government would ensure that all subsidy monies for Co-op members would be paid for through the federal co-op housing subsidy fund. All monies paid by Co-op residents — after administrative, amenity payments and maintenance costs, as well as monies placed into a “replacement reserve fund” for major, future renovations — would be returned to the City to build supportive social housing, at no cost to citizens.
  • As part of TEAM’s public safety programme, there’s been discussion within the party about re-implementation of former Mayor Phillip Owen’s revolutionary, but simple Four Pillars Plan: prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and enforcement.
  • Mixed representation system. Ms. Hardwick and her TEAM are giving consideration to implementing a mixed representation system in the next Vancouver municipal election, a Mayor and five Councillors elected at large, with 5 other Councillors elected in five district neighbourhoods across the city.
  • Another key element of TEAM’s public safety programme could include the expansion of the VPD’s Car 87 programme — long a TEAM policy initiative, stolen by ABC’s Ken Sim recently — Car 87 teaming a Vancouver Police officer with a mental health professional, to help provide on-site assessments and intervention for people living with mental illness. Car 87 is the first programme of its kind anywhere in the world, each year saving dozens of the lives of citizens experiencing severe psychiatrist distress.

Two final important points, the first related to sustainable neighbourhoods: Colleen Hardwick and her TEAM candidates for Council believe that the massive tower construction programme envisioned by the Planning Department in Vancouver — the so-called Vancouver Plan, and the Broadway Plan — that would extend from Boundary Road to Blanca, from Burrard Inlet to the Fraser River,  is an absolutely unnecessary intrusion into the neighbourhoods which provide the livability of our city, and constitute the city we call home, the city we love.

Another note. In the current term of office, this Council has approved 110,000 new units of housing, some already under construction, and some set to begin construction soon. All while the Planning Department tells our citizens that 100,000 units of housing must be built by 2050 to house the incoming population. Hell’s bells — Vancouver City Council has already approved more housing than the Planning Department says is necessary. Sort of negates the need for the massive construction of towers on every street, in every neighbourhood, don’t you think?

Gentle density, consultation with those who live in the neighbourhoods across our city, not NIMBY-ism, but democratic engagement with citizens to construct community plans that would ensure the building of schools and public recreation centres, and the inclusion of parks and green spaces with space for small businesses along our neighbourhood arterials, with gently increasing density in every neighbourhood — not massive towers — while ensuring that every neighbourhood would be home, as well, to those in need, in a city meant to house, and will house, everyone.

And let us not forget, either, that while the population of Vancouver grew by 7.2% between 2016 and 2022, when new building construction added 7.8% more units in that same time period (in this neck of the woods, we call that an overbuilt city, an oversupply of housing), much of that population moved into Vancouver in the period between 2016 and early 2020 — in the past two years, starting with the pandemic, Vancouver has experienced a net out-migration of 100,000 of our citizens, who simply cannot afford to live in the most expensive city on the planet.

And, we need these towers, why? And who are they being built for?

Certainly not you and me, in a city of towers as envisioned by our NPA, Green, ABC, OneCity, Progress Vancouver and Forward Together civic political parties —  but hell no, not by a TEAM for a Livable Vancouver majority Council, and a steadfast Mayor Colleen Hardwick, who would fight for you every day of her term in office.

Importantly, as well, a majority TEAM Council would conduct a core review of city staffing levels, and services, in its first year of office. During his brief time as City Manager, Sadhu Johnston hired 1100 new middle-management staff, with executive assistants paid at $75,000 and management staff paid at $165,000, and up, annually. Many believe — and this belief extends to those working inside Vancouver City Hall — that Vancouver has an overstaffed, inefficient bureaucracy that serves as a driver of our city’s unsustainable 5.8% annual property tax increases. TEAM believes it to be likely that the core review will reveal that Vancouver employs a bloated middle management staff, and far from enough union workers — you know, the folks who do the actual work, who don’t push pencils around all day.

Let us not forget, either, that it was Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick who successfully moved to appoint an independent Auditor General in the City of Vancouver, Vancouver’s new auditor Mike Macdonell set to save the city tens of millions of dollars in non-essential expenditures, annually. Good job, Councillor!

To read TEAM policies on issues ranging from democratic engagement with Vancouver citizens, and the establishment of democratic advisory neighbourhood councils to inform Council decision-making; restoration of funding for our beleaguered parks and recreation system; pursuing reconciliation with our Indigenous peoples; health and safety for all Vancouver’s citizens; supporting the creative community, and so very much more, just click here for enlightenment.

Remember: when it comes time to cast your ballot in October, if you care about our city at all — and we know you do — the one, the only Mayoralty candidate, Colleen Hardwick, and the only Vancouver civic party you can, in all good conscience, cast your ballot for is TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, for a spectacular Sean Nardi, Grace Quan, Stephen P Roberts, Param Nijjar, Cleta Brown and Bill Tieleman — who constitute the hardest working, best informed team of candidates for Vancouver City Council you’ll find on Vancouver’s voting ballot come October.

#VanElxn 2022 | Five Candidates Vie to Become Vancouver Mayor | Part 1

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In 2022, there are a record five serious-minded candidates intent on occupying the Mayor’s office following the October 15th Vancouver municipal election.

One of these stalwart persons of character and intent who would lead is …

Edward Charles Kennedy Stewart (born November 8, 1966), who has sat as Vancouver’s Mayor since being elected to office in a close fought race in 2018.

Recently, Mayoral candidate rival and current sitting Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick, was asked to say something nice about Mr. Stewart, for an article to be published later this month. Ms. Hardwick’s response, “He once played bass in a band.”  Which, if you come right down to it, pretty much encapsulates Mayor Stewart’s contribution to the life and politics of his adopted (he was born in Halifax) home town of Vancouver, over the course of the past, almost, four years.

In recent days, VanRamblings has referred to Mr. Stewart as hapless. But a more accurate description of his time as Mayor would be the following word …

Indeed, for much of the past four years, Mr. Stewart has proved an in absentia Mayor, rarely if ever around, absent from the public eye for much of the pandemic — except when he was whining to the press about how “Vancouver needs more money, the federal and provincial governments have to help us” … with, all the while, OneCity Councillor Christine Boyle and Green Councillor, Adriane Carr having gone rogue, demanding a 15% property tax increase, because “the pandemic presents us with a golden opportunity to address our climate emergency” … with nary a contrary word of disagreement heard from Mr. Stewart.

Where other Canadian mayors —  think Don Iveson in Edmonton, Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, John Tory in Toronto — pulled their respective Councils together to forward the cause of the citizens they’d been elected to represent, Mayors who not only acted like but were true, red-blooded statesmen in a time of crisis, Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart — lacking any evident leadership skills or abilties — allowed a fractious Vancouver City Council to go hither, thither and yon pursuing their own political agendas, far too often at the expense of the public interest.

Stewart: unavailable to the press — a lesson he seems to have learned from former Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper —  given over to near hourly meetings with various well-heeled developers (who would fund his re-election campaign), these greed merchants brought to the Mayor’s suite by former Vision Councillor Raymond Louie, who since the last Vancouver civic election has acted as an extremely well-paid lobbyist for Vancouver’s development industry.

The icing on the cake for Mr. Stewart’s tenuous (and we hope soon to end) era in the Mayor’s chair is the bastardized Burnaby by-law proposal wherein he’s promised the construction of affordable housing amidst the burgeoning greenhouse gas-emitting concrete-and-steel massive tower developments that will envelop the “Broadway Corridor” from Clark to Vine, from the Inlet to 16th Avenue …

In May 2019, Burnaby City Council adopted a ‘best in Canada’ tenant assistance policy that provides support for tenants displaced from rental buildings with 5-plus apartments, mandating developers cover tenants’ moving costs (up to $1,400), and pay the difference between a tenant’s current rent and the rent in the new building tenants move to while construction is underway, providing the …

Right of first refusal to displaced tenants to move into the replacement building once construction is complete, at the same rent as they paid before being displaced (subject only to the provincially mandated maximum annual increases), as well as mandating that developers will again have to cover moving costs when tenants move back into the new building.

Mr. Stewart’s affordable housing plan does not encompass the notion that developers would pay the difference between a tenant’s current rent and the rent in the new building tenants move to — where would tenants move to in their neighbourhood or in Vancouver, who’d been paying $1100 a month for their rent, where would they find such accommodation at a similar monthly rate … Spuzzum?

The other “flaw” in Mr. Stewart’s so-called “plan” is that tenants who would be displaced from their livable four or five storey buildings, where one-bedroom suites encompassed 700+ square feet, would upon completion of the new building return five years later to the  40-story purpose-built rental building where one-bedroom suites would encompass only a postage-stamp sized 395 square foot apartment.

Kennedy Stewart: the worst Vancouver Mayor since Jack Volrich’s greasily reductive, inauspicious, and best forgotten, late 1970s two-year term in office.

Last week, Mayor Kennedy Stewart held a press conference, to address the issue of the tent city along East Hastings, between Carrall Street and Main. There was in his demeanour a sense of frustration and melancholy, verging on defeat. For the first time in his 33-month tenure as Mayor, there was about him a humanity that, prior to that press conference, had not been previously witnessed by this reporter.

Here’s what Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart had to say …

“For more than 3 years, my administration has worked in concert with all of our elected Councillors, city staff, the provincial and federal governments, as well as a myriad of social agencies to find a resolution to our ongoing homelessness problem.

As Mayor, I’ve been down to Hastings Street and spoken with some of those who are  resident in the tents that we see strewn along East Hastings. I’ve spoken with homeless advocates Fiona York and Sarah Blyth, asked them what my administration can do to alleviate the human misery we are witness to each and every day.

The answer is always the same: housing that will provide dignity. A home with a bedroom, a fully stocked kitchen, a living room with a sofa, a dining room, comfortable furniture, the amenities of life.

Having spoken with various senior administrators at B.C. Housing, I’ve been told that housing is on its way, but not until this autumn.

What to do now, though, in the midst of this housing crisis?

I am at my wit’s end as to how we, collectively as a society, how my administration, and the provincial and federal governments will resolve, once and for all, Vancouver’s homelessness crisis. I want to assure you that I, personally, my administration, our Vancouver City Councillors, city staff, and senior levels of government are working together to find resolution to the issue of the human misery to which we are witness each and every day.”

For the first time since he took office early in November 2018, Mayor Kennedy admitted that there was a homelessness crisis that he had previously not acknowledged, in as full and forthright and humane a manner as he did at his press conference last week. There was no whining, no “it’s not my fault, the federal government is not giving me the money I need”, no meaningless “woke” nostrums about how those who express a concern about tent cities are doing nothing more than engaging on an unwholesome and mean-spirited attack on the poor.

What there was, though: a display of humanity, how we’re all in this together, how resolving the issue of homelessness is a struggle we should all be engaged in.

A few more displays of humanity before the October 15th election, a fidelity in his speech, in his words and intent and, hell, Kennedy Stewart may well be re-elected to a second term of office, with realigned priorities and a new sense of purpose.