Tag Archives: #vanelxn

#VanPoli | COPE Candidate for Mayor, Stephanie Allen, Withdraws from Race to Become City’s Next Mayor

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Full text of COPE’s candidate for Mayor Stephanie Allen’s speech to a press conference delivered Sept. 2nd in Helen Gutteridge Plaza at Vancouver City Hall.

Good morning,

I offer my acknowledgement of the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, to their peoples who have stewarded these lands for 1000s of years. I offer my commitment to working in good relations towards our collective liberation from colonial systems.

Today, I am here together with my colleagues and loved ones to announce that, for the good of all people living in Vancouver, we have decided as a team to withdraw my candidacy for Mayor of Vancouver.

In May, our membership nominated me as part of a slate to win the City — to evict Ken Sim and ABC and achieve a COPE-led democratic socialist municipal government.

For now, we have not been able to achieve all of our goals.

But this movement isn’t about me or about COPE.

It’s about the people of Vancouver.

And the people need us to defeat this right-wing government and reduce the harm being done by the sociopathic system we’re up against.

So while I am announcing the end of my campaign for Mayor, I am also here today to recommit to our common fight for Vancouver.

Ken Sim and ABC must be evicted on October 17th.

That’s why I am strongly encouraging the other mMayoral candidates in the race to also do the right thing, show integrity, and narrow the Mayoral field to the person best positioned to evict Ken Sim.

Earlier this year, COPE and progressive parties struck an agreement to limit candidates and create a path towards a single Mayor. We have come to the moment where we at COPE have made our decision.

It has been the privilege of a lifetime to stand as the Mayoral candidate for COPE, a party with the deepest history of fighting the power of the super rich and showing up for the poor and working class people in our city.

COPE is a party dedicated to telling the truth. We are a diverse cohort of shared purpose. We have the lived experience, academic accomplishments, systemic analysis, and practical knowledge to examine the problems facing our city at the root cause level and to craft policies that will create lasting solutions.

But just as importantly, we at COPE have the love to care about the struggles that families, seniors, youth, working people and ALL those who have been pushed to the margins are going through, and we can see how much worse it’s getting for everyone.

We will not put our egos ahead of doing the right thing for Vancouver.

We know that it is mission critical to have one Mayor on the progressive side and that it has to be the person best positioned at this critical hour, to win the election.

We need a majority progressive Council, School Board, and Park Board to undo the damage done by this bad Mayor and the bad Mayors that came before him.

By stepping aside, we are showing to the people of Vancouver that we have heard you, that we will put you first, and that our commitment is to the long haul. Our movement will keep going, we will never give up the fight for a free and just society grounded in principles of care and community over greed and inequality.

Vancouver, we are here to do the right thing for you and we will keep doing the right thing. Getting a progressive majority on Council will have a direct positive material impact on the lives of people in our city.

And while we do that vital harm reduction through our existing electoral systems, we will stay relentless in dreaming up replacement systems. Ones that are restorative of people and planet, not extractive and exploitative. Ones that value life over profit, care over consumption, and healing over abuse and punishment.

The super-rich are planning our extinction. It’s obvious now. They don’t care about us, about the future generations to come, the climate, wildlife and natural habitat. All they see are ways to squeeze humanity and nature for the sake of piling more billions into their vaults.

You take care of your neighbours. It’s been an honour to speak to so many people over these last months who understand the threat facing our city, and our world. You have shared with me your stories, your frustrations, and your dreams of better.

Local shopkeepers, non-profit leaders, co-op housing members, people working in the gig economy, those who have and are being displaced from homes they love, advocates and organizers.

YOU are the ones with the solutions.

You have done the work to get food to the households that need it, help people recover from addictions and get the therapeutic support they need.

You are the ones who put in all the work to develop affordable homes, protect women and children fleeing violence, and care for seniors on low incomes. You make sure kids are protected from the cruelty in our society.

You also make this city cool with your dedication to the arts and culture scene in this city, with comedy festivals, activating parks and event venues with live music, theatre, and visual arts productions.

It is we, the people, who have the power. We always have, and we always will. Promise me, you’ll never lose sight of that.

So, as I leave the Mayoral race I want to say:

To Vancouver, you are worth fighting for … and this building, City Hall, is your house. Do not vote for anyone who would disrespect you or take you for granted in your house. Send ABC a message that their politics of division and selling out to the super rich are done.

To my fellow candidates, and the COPE staff, volunteers, and membership, thank you for the trust you put in me to carry our message to the city.

For your dedication to a better world, and for showing up everyday challenging yourselves and all of us to dream of a better future for our city. Despite all the things, I have never served alongside a better group of people anywhere. We’re in this now, I’m not going anywhere, we still got this ‘cuz we got each other.

To my friends and supporters, my family, my husband …  thank you for being there with your calls, texts, donations, hugs, so many hugs …and showing up when I didn’t expect you but absolutely needed you. Doing this work was only possible because of your love and care.

To our ancestors, all those who came before us and fought for us to have the freedoms we have now, freedoms you never saw, thank you for what you sacrificed and for dreaming of a better world for us.

To the future generations, we won’t let you down. We will stop climate change, eliminate poverty and homelessness, and make love and compassion the foundation of the structures that govern our lives.

In solidarity, and dedication to an affordable and just city and for a better world, I offer my sincere appreciation and love.

#VanPoli | The Villages Plan | An Open Letter to Vancouver City Council

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Open letter to Vancouver City Council on the “Villages Plan”
Patrick Condon, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia
UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan

Dear Mayor and Council,

I write to challenge key elements of Vancouver’s Villages Plan Programme.

Together with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City is now granting private owners of more than 80,000 parcels the right to build roughly 700,000 new housing units.

This represents enough capacity to house an extra 1.4 million people — more than double Vancouver’s current population of 670,000.

At today’s 1% annual population growth rate, this single decision delivers over 100 years of future housing supply. Yet even the projects already in the approval pipeline (roughly 78,000 units) would satisfy 30 years of trend growth.

Contrary to this city’s long standing policies for new density approvals, this massive landowner entitlement is being provided free of charge, with no expectation of payment for these new land rights.

These land rights are worth many billions of dollars.

The City is giving them away for free in the hope that this will somehow make housing more affordable.

This is an odd notion for our planners to hold. If adding hundreds of thousands of new units to existing neighbourhoods truly lowered prices, Vancouver would have North America’s cheapest housing.

It has North America’s most expensive housing. (charts below)

It defies logic to expect an “unleashing of the housing market” — the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan — to produce affordable housing when we have spent decades trying to do just that. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock since the 1960s, all within a city where virtually every private parcel was in urban use. This is a higher percentage increase of infill development than that of any other North American centre city. If adding housing to existing city districts was the sure fire path to affordability we would have seen positive results by now.

Based on this evidence, it is clear: if affordability is the main justification for this plan, it obviously fails the test.

Massively over-zoning a city above reasonable expectations for population growth serves little purpose. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that only “restrictive zoning” stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t.

The claim is false.

On the contrary, if any city proves that it is possible to use zoning as a positive public policy tool, it is the City of Vancouver. We tripled housing units city-wide. No other centre city did that — an unheard-of achievement.

While this sadly did not make the city more affordable, as we had hoped, it did make the city better. Much better.

How was this 200 percent growth accomplished? By working with residents, not against them. Community planning with local communities was the means to this achievement. Planning with communities was not an impediment, as some now claim. It was the democratic path to a better city.

But sadly it is now obvious that our decades-long effort to encourage the housing market, in the hope that housing would stay affordable, has failed us. Given this evidence, it seems foolish to upzone so aggressively, hoping against hope that, in 30 or 40 years, housing will be more affordable.

Achieving durable affordability much sooner than this requires a major change in direction. We don’t lack housing; we lack affordable housing. Given this fact, we should follow a path that other similar cities have charted — one where the bulk of new housing built is affordable to average wage earners. This can be done by reviving the Vancouver tradition of building non-market housing at scale, largely financed through “land lift” taxes as applied in Yaletown.

Our own internationally famous False Creek South serves as a storied precedent. Service workers to business owners have found homes in that lovely, self-sustaining community.

The pattern is obvious. Reuse it.

Unfortunately, the Villages Plan moves us in exactly the wrong direction. It virtually rules out any form of land value capture tax, based on the mistaken fear that it would raise home prices. It won’t — and it can’t.

A properly designed land-lift tax simply reduces the inflated “land price residual” that now funnels unearned speculative windfalls into private pockets. A properly designed “land lift” tax channels those gains into public benefit — without increasing the price buyers ultimately pay.

I urge you to revise these plans by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in a highly collaborative, bottom-up, neighbourhood-focused planning process. One that might arrive at much stronger inclusionary zoning requirements.

The people of Vancouver would rally behind such plans — plans that ensure that their sons and daughters, and the workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home.

Do not pass this plan.

Let us turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here.

Yours truly,

Professor Emeritus Patrick M. Condon
University of British Columbia

More voices weigh in on ABC Vancouver’s Villages Plan development proposal

Steve Jedreicich — principal of Vancouver’s SJ Development Ltd., brings over 30 years of local urban planning and real estate consulting experience to the housing discussion —  weighs in on ABC Vancouver’s contentious Villages Plan proposal.

WBN News Vancouver publisher Karalee Greer’s published article on the impact of the Villages Plan development proposal currently before Vancouver City Council, in particular its impact on Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. At present, well more than 1000 speakers are set to address the controversial Villages Plan proposal, in meetings that thus far have lasted well into the night at Council.

Randy Helten and Steve Bohus, the good, hard working, dedicated folks behind the informative CityHallWatch website offer a backgrounder on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal, suggesting the plan “was born in the USA.” CityHallWatch offers six more Villages Plan articles the site published in the months of June and July. Click on the multi-coloured links below to access the articles.

Yes, there are even more Villages Plan articles available to you.

As is his wont — and thank goodness for that — The Daily Hive’s well-respected, incredibly hard working urban affairs reporter Kenneth Chan, early in July, published a thorough and well-researched article on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal.

Well worth a read.

Vancouver Liberals, Building a Civic Party Destined to Govern

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Yesterday, VanRamblings received the following e-mail from our friend and neighbour Catherine Evans — founding member and soon-to-be Vice-President of the Vancouver Liberals, multi-year Chairperson of the Vancouver Public Library Board of Directors, dedicated Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, David Eby’s appointed liaison with Vancouver City Hall on Mayor Ken Sim’s proposal to dissolve an elected Vancouver Park Board (a hateful job she told VanRamblings, also telling us she’d lost a number of friends arising from her appointment by David, to whom she is loyal), and multi-year senior constituency assistant in federal Liberal Minister of the Crown Joyce Murray’s office (where she did much good for many many people) and now, as we say above, a founding member, and soon-to-be Vice-President of, Kareem Allam’s upstart Vancouver Liberals municipal party, as the party — VanRamblings predicts — rolls to victory at the polls next year.

Here’s what Catherine wrote to us — and many many others — yesterday …

This week we learned that Vancouver City Hall will pay out $800,000 in severance to the separated former City Manager, Paul Mochrie.

This is simply OUTRAGEOUS. An $800,000 payment on Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver’s watch is unacceptable.

We have to put an end to these golden parachutes at Vancouver City Hall.

Did Ken Sim and ABC make the decision to fire the city manager? We don’t know.

Did they approve this $800,000 payment to bring in a new city manager who will follow their directions? Again – unclear.

But one thing is for sure: this is $800,000 that is being taken away from front-line programmes like cleaning up our streets, cracking down on money laundering, and enhancing community centre programmes.

It’s not surprising Ken Sim didn’t bat an eye at an $800,000 severance payment. After all, he tried to fire the city Integrity Commissioner while he was under investigation.

This culture of entitlement at Vancouver City Hall must end.

When you elect a Vancouver Liberal council in 2026, you can be sure it will.

We need to fix City Hall — and that starts with defeating Ken Sim and his ABC Council, when voters go to the polls next year for Vancouver’s 42nd civic election.

Join the Vancouver Liberals team today.

Thank you,

Catherine Evans
Founding Member, Vancouver Liberals

#VanElxn2022 | 2022 Civic Election Wrap-Up, Part 1

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Vancouver voters ovewhelmingly elected a new, centrist, common sense municipal government, at Vancouver City Hall, Park Board and School on Saturday night, electing ABC Vancouver’s Mayor-elect Ken Sim with highest vote total in the city’s history, with 85,732 Vancouver citizens having cast a vote for Mayor-elect Sim.

All seven ABC Vancouver Council candidates — including Sarah Kirby-Yung, who topped the polls, along with her Council colleagues Lisa Dominato and Rebecca Bligh, elected to a 2nd term on Vancouver City Council — now includes, ABC Vancouver Councillor-elects Brian Montague, Mike Klassen, Peter Meiszner and Lenny Zhou, all of whom will be sworn into office on Monday, November 7th.

Joining the ABC Vancouver majority on Council, three returning City Councillors, who barely squeaked into office: the Green Party’s Adriane Carr, elected with a paltry 41,831 votes, a full 20,562 votes behind Councillor-elect Zhou. For the first time in Vancouver municipal electoral history a Councillor was elected to civic government with less than 40,000 votes: that would be OneCity Vancouver’s Christine Boyle, garnering only 38,465 votes — 6,990 fewer votes than were cast for her in 2018.  Councillor Pete Fry — along with Sarah Kirby-Yung, the best communicator on Council, was elected to a 2nd term on Council, dropping from a second place finish in 2018, having garnered  61,806 votes first time out, dropping almost out of sight in 2022 with a miserly 37,270 votes — for a jaw-dropping loss of 24,536 votes.

VanRamblings will take pains to remind our readers that in our State of the Race column published on Wednesday, October 12th, we predicted — or at least held out the possibility of — a sweep of Council by candidates running for office at City Hall with ABC Vancouver, missing out only on naming Councillor-elect Lenny Zhou.

  • ABC Vancouver sweeps the election, running on their common sense platform, with  prominent Vancouverites Chip Wilson and the Rocky Mountaineer’s Peter Armstrong supporting the party’s bid to assume city government —  with a panoply of financial backers contributing enough money, so that ABC could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on television, radio, social media and ethnic press advertising to ensure a Ken Sim victory on Saturday night —  are running ABC Vancouver Council candidates, incumbents Sarah Kirby-Yung — who we predict will top the polls — Rebecca Bligh and Lisa Dominato, who’ll be joined by “newcomers” Mike Klassen — a rock solid lock to be elected to Council — and fellow ABC Vancouver Council candidates, Peter Meiszner, Brian Montague and Lenny Zhou. The icing on the cake for ABC: when Peter Armstrong left the Non-Partisan Association, he had the NPA voter and membership lists in his possession. In addition, we understand that — as is the case with Mayor Kennedy Stewart and his Forward Together team, who the BC NDP are pulling out all the stops to re-elect Mr. Stewart — Kevin Falcon’s B.C. Liberal party is only too happy to turn over the party’s provincial membership and voters list to the ABC Vancouver campaign — which lists don’t count for much on Vancouver’s east side, but make a world of difference on getting out the vote on Vancouver’s west side.

VanRamblings will address the lack of generosity in 2nd term Vancouver City Councillor Christine Boyle’s tweet, published the day after the election. Believe us when we write that it wasn’t all that long ago that VanRamblings was quite as partisan as the good Ms. Christine Boyle: left, good; right, evil. Not a great construct we’ve come to believe, counter-productive, and dehumanizing, if truth be told.

Better not to demonize those who hold centrist views — in civic government that means: keeping tax increases low, prioritizing core spending initiatives, laser focusing on creating a safe, clean city, while ensuring the provision of services for citizens that includes timely snow removal, regular garbage pickup, maintenance of the transportation system that includes the filling of potholes, maintaining Vancouver’s water distribution and sewage systems, and processing applications at City Hall in a timely manner, all to serve the interests of Vancouver citizens.

Truth to tell, there’s not a right-winger among the elected ABC Vancouver Councillor-elects. Sarah Kirby-Yung is, by far, the most progressive Councillor at Vancouver City Hall, closely followed by Lisa Dominato, the author of British Columbia’s SOGI 123 programme — that helps educators make schools inclusive and safe for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities (SOGI) — and Rebecca Bligh, long a leading light and fighter within the LGBTQ2+ community.

As we wrote last week, Councillor-elect Mike Klassen is …

“Fair-minded, possessed of an umatched personal and professional integrity, and as a former première civic affairs columnist with the Vancouver Courier newspaper — his writing possessed of an integrity, a heart and a humanity that spoke both to his professionalism as a journalist, and to how Mike has always brought himself to the world.

In his work as a vice-president with the B.C. Home Care Providers Association, Mike Klassen gained a rapport with members of the New Democratic Party caucus that is second-to-none, each member of that caucus having come to respect Mike as someone who gets things done, someone with whom it is easy to work towards change for the better, someone who does his homework, and someone who is non-partisan in the interests of better serving the needs of British Columbians.”

Now, we’ll give you that VanRamblings, at this point in time, doesn’t know a great deal about Peter Meiszner — as it happens, though, Peter played an invaluable role in VanRamblings’ coverage of #VanElxn2022, offering needed advice and succour to us, as a writer and journalist, interacting with us always with heart, humanity and respect — Brian Montague and Lenny Zhou. Give us time, though.

And, no, ABC Vancouver Councillor-elects will not be bulldozing the tent encampments along East Hastings, but have committed to working with the provincial and federal governments that would see those currently housed in tents along East Hastings housed in comfy one-bedroom apartments, and the tents removed.

On election night, Mayor-elect Ken Sim told the Daily Hive’s Kenneth Chan that ABC Vancouver fully intends to implement their 94-point platform plan over their first 100 days in office, tackling crime and public safety issues, as the new majority Council commits to hiring 100 police officers and 100 mental health nurses, expanding the existing Car 87/88 programme of pairing a police officer and mental health nurse in an unmarked vehicle for non-emergency mental health calls.

ABC Vancouver will also target help for Chinatown’s ailing business sector, while supporting the neighbourhood’s cultural organizations, and its residents.

Despite facing increasingly frequent instances of violent attacks, property damage, theft, public disorder issues, and other incidents that are anti-Asian in nature, the Chinatown community’s pleas for effective help went unheeded by the Kennedy Stewart administration, which largely ignored the problem.

Says ABC Vancouver Mayor-elect Ken Sim in his interview with The Daily Hive …

“We will take a very pragmatic approach to all the challenges and opportunities that are presented to us, and adopt a science-based approach, while meeting and consulting with healthcare providers and professionals, teachers, parents —  just about anyone can contribute to a solution to the problems Vancouverites have faced in recent years. Quite simply, we’ll  make better decisions, decisions that serve the interests of the community.”

Having read the above, do you have the impression ABC Vancouver is right wing?

VanRamblings believes that referring to the ABC Vancouver Councillor-elect team as “right wing” is not only dismissive and dehumanizing, it’s just plain, dead wrong.

Cyclists ride on a separated bike lane in Stanley Park

What VanRamblings could not possibly have predicted was that ABC Vancouver would sweep both Vancouver School Board, and Vancouver Park Board.

Vancouver’s incoming ABC Vancouver Park Board Commissioner-elect majority are laying out priorities for their next four years in office.

“At the end of the fall we’re going to remove the temporary bike lane and restore full car access to the park. But then we’re going to spend the winter to come up with an engineered solution to maintain access to both bikes and cars,” Commissioner-Elect Laura Christensen told Global News.”

Park Board Commissioner-Elect Scott Jensen  told CKNW’s Jill Bennett that the lane removal will coincide with the arrival of winter weather, expected to result in fewer cyclists. The plan would involve re-opening vehicle access to Beach Avenue. and a return to a “pre-pandemic Stanley Park configuration” over the winter.

Going forward, Jensen said the Board will look at “areas where we can provide a protected permanent bike lane so that cyclists who choose to use the interior bike route will be able to have areas where they will have that protection.”

“We talked a lot to cyclists, and the ongoing message  we heard was that cycling up the hill from the bottom portion of the the roadway up to Prospect Point was an area of concern where they felt that was necessary to have a divided protected lane,” he said.

Jensen told CKNW that whatever solution the Board delivers will prioritize access to parking lots and the needs of businesses in the park.

The new Park Board will also move to make the city’s pilot project allowing alcohol in some parks permanent, and launch a new pilot looking at the city’s beaches.

As to the most contentious issue facing the Park Board Commissioner-elects, Christensen said the new majority would take a measured approach.

“The B.C. Supreme Court has been very clear that people have the right to camp in parks when there is no housing available, and we have no plans to evict them at this time,” she said. “However, in the meantime we’d like to increase maintenance and safety in the park, increasing cleanup, garbage pickup, things like that. “And we’ll be working with our ABC majority on council to provide housing options in the future, so that’s housing options with wraparound services and support.”

Vancouver’s new park commissioners will be officially sworn in on Nov. 7.

In a discussion with ABC Vancouver Board of Education trustee-elect, and a former Chairperson at Vancouver School Board, Christopher Richardson, last evening, VanRamblings was told that ABC Vancouver’s school trustee-elects have not, as yet, met to discuss implementation of the Board’s “new priorities”, but as Mayor-elect Ken Sim told the media yesterday, one School Board priority under an ABC Vancouver administration will include the return of the police liaison programme.

The successful police liaison programme — which ran for some ran for 50 years in Vancouver secondary schools — was cut last year by the current and outgoing Board. Mayor-elect Sim was passionate in his defense of the Vancouver School district’s police liaison programme which, as he told the press, kept students like him out of the clutches of the gangs who all but ran secondary schools across the Vancouver school district when he was growing up.

Another ABC Vancouver priority for implementation by the new Board, Mr. Richardson believes: re-instatement of the Honours programmes in Vancouver schools, cut by the current and outgoing Board last year in an attempt to provide lowest-common-denominator “equity” for students enrolled in Vancouver secondary schools. In cutting the Honours programmes in Vancouver secondary schools, the Board may have been well-intentioned in the taking of the decision to cut the Honours programme but were, VanRamblings believes, wrongheaded to deny secondary school students enrolled in the Vancouver school district access to such educational opportunities as the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme, that seeks to “provide an internationally acceptable university admissions qualification suitable for the growing mobile population of young people whose parents were part of the world of diplomacy, international and multinational organizations” by offering standardized courses and assessments for students aged 16 to 19. The IB programme is but one of the invaluable Honours programmes (such as the Honours Math programme at Templeton Secondary School) that were cut by the current and outgoing Vancouver Board of Education last year.