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#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 | Mark Marissen | The Also-Ran Candidate for Mayor

#VanElxn 2022, #VanPoli Civic Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2022, , , ,

VanRamblings will start off today’s column where we’ll write about Progress Vancouver Mayoral candidate Mark Allan Marissen, this way …

We like, respect and admire Mark Marissen, a graduate of Carleton University, with a Bachelor’s degree in political science, a senior advisor to the McMillan Vantage Policy Group, creator of the YES Vancouver civic party which ran Hector Bremner as their Mayoral candidate in 2018, father to a young man, now a university student, named Hamish Marissen-Clark — yes, it’s true that once upon a time, Mark and former Premier Christy Clark were (happily, lovingly and productively, one would have to say) married to one another, and remain friends to this day (no mean feat that in this time of distressed former couples … good for them, we say!).

VanRamblings knows Mark Marissen to be a man with a gregarious and welcoming nature, we also know him to be a consensus builder (a prerequisite for being our next Mayor, we’d say) of the first order, who works well and productively with others for the public good, that Mark is politically astute, and a social progressive whom we much admire, that Mark is intimately familiar with governance, and knows all about the hard work which goes into governing successfully, effectively, and in the interests of the people he serves (read: you, me and all of us).

VanRamblings also believes that were Mark Marissen to become Mayor of our beloved city by the ocean come October 15th, that he would well represent the interests of our city, municipally, as well as provincially and federally.

Why, then, in the headline of today’s column are we so ungenerously referring to Mark as an “also-ran” candidate to become Vancouver’s next Mayor?

In a poll released by Quito Maggi’s Mainstreet Research at the beginning of the month, Mark appeared to be in a tight three way race for Mayor with incumbent Mayor Kennedy Stewart and sitting Vancouver City Councillor, Colleen Hardwick.

To which we say: poppycock, balderdash, bilge, blarney and nonsense.

When the poll was released, the response of the political class in our town was: the poll constituted dirty politics, and was nothing more than a Marissen push poll.

According to Wikipedia, “a push poll is an interactive marketing technique, most commonly employed during political campaigning, in which an individual  attempts to manipulate prospective voters’ views under the guise of conducting an opinion poll. Potential voters are contacted with little effort made to collect and analyze voters’ response data. Instead, the push poll is a form of telemarketing-based propaganda and rumour mongering, masquerading as an opinion poll. Push polls may rely on innuendo, or information gleaned from opposition research on the political opponent of the interests behind the poll.

Push polls are viewed as a form of negative campaigning. In all such polls, the pollster asks leading questions or suggestive questions that “push” the interviewee toward adopting a favourable response toward a particular political candidate.”

Now, we’re not saying to a certainty that the August 2nd Mainstreet poll was necessarily a push poll, but when Vancouver’s political class and punditry all but dismiss the poll, one is left wondering about the integrity of such a poll, one that is so at odds with the internal polling conducted by the other Mayoral candidate parties.

Most municipal election polling that the various civic parties are conducting on a regular basis have Mayor Kennedy Stewart, Councillor Colleen Hardwick and ABC Vancouver’s Ken Sim in a tight three-way to become Vancouver’s next Mayor, all but tied at around 23%, with the Non-Partisan Association at 11%, and Mark at 8%.

As we write above, in 2018 Mark Marissen was involved in the creation of the now defunct YES Vancouver municipal party. With the handsomely high profile Vancouver City Councillor Hector Bremner as Yes Vancouver’s standard bearer, Mr. Bremner managed a mere 9,924 votes and 5.73% of the ballots that were cast.

For the average low information Vancouver voter, VanRamblings believes Mark Marissen possesses much lower name recognition with Vancouver voters than was the case with Hector Bremner last time around, while running an oddly lackadaisical campaign for office thus far — only in this past week announcing 5 candidates for Vancouver City Council (with the rather high profile Morgane Oger strangely missing from the party’s updates page — note should be made that, thus far in the 2022 election cycle, the Progress Vancouver website has no candidates page).

VanRamblings is also more than a little concerned about Mark Marissen’s development industry backers and their potentially unholy influence on Mark as Mayor, Mark’s support of both the egregious greenhouse gas emitting massive tower build that defines Vancouver’s recently passed Broadway Plan, and it’s neighbourhood destroying, city-wide parent plan, the godawful, equally egregious Vancouver Plan, causing VanRamblings grievous concern, as it should all Vancouver voters.

Not registering with voters, an oddly lackadaisical campaign, general in the basement internal polling results, too close ties to Vancouver’s development industry, although Mark Marissen may be a fine fellow, in 2022 Mark Marissen’s candidacy for Mayor can be seen as nothing more than a blip on the political radar in our city.

And. now this: the invisible Mayoral candidate for Vancouver’s oldest municipal party, the NPA, having held office in our city for 45 of the past 85 years.

On Monday, VanRamblings was informed by sources within the NPA that 2018 Vancouver First Mayoral candidate Fred Harding would be announced as the NPA’s new mayoral candidate (to which news, VanRamblings guffawed), replacing the dearly departed John Coupar (still alive and kicking, by the way), who was unceremoniously pushed out of the “what were they thinking?” party earlier this month.

But apparently not. Mr. Harding seems no longer to be the NPA Mayoral candidate.

Alas.

According to former NPA City Councillor George Affleck, and part-time CKNW talk show host; owner of Curve Communications; loving dad and hubbie, and all around good guy; co-founder of The Orca political website, and co-host of The Orca’s Unspun podcast — with VanRamblings’ Kitsilano neighbour  + part-time CKNW talk show host, and all around incredibly accomplished woman and broadcaster — who should be celebrated far and wide —  we’re talking about Jody Vance (whoops, got lost there), Mr. Affleck announcing on Twitter yesterday …

 

Gosh, this political game. I tell ya. Not for the faint of heart.

VanRamblings is giving serious consideration to publishing a column on Saturday, a reflection on our very strange first week back writing on this website publishing columns on Vancouver’s civic parties and Mayoral candidates, and how we seem to have made those within all five (and we do mean all) of Vancouver’s municipal political parties that we’ve set about to write this week unusually angry.

Perspective. VanRamblings likes what former Vision Vancouver Executive Director Stepan Vdovine told us one day, when Vision was in its heyday, and after VanRamblings had published a particularly nasty column taking Vision to task. When we queried Stepan about his response to that particular column …

Stepan replied: “You’re a gnat. We don’t give what you write any consideration.”

Operatives in all 10 of Vancouver’s rambunctious and oh-so-sensitive civic parties would be wise to take the learned Mr. Vdovine’s approach to what is written on VanRamblings into account, not get yourselves into a dither, and so darn rattled.

Just sayin’ …

#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.

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

#VanElxn 2022, #VanPoli Civic Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2022, , , , ,

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.