Tag Archives: vanramblings

#VanPoli | Save a Vote for City Councillor Mike Klassen Come October

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Since 2004, Vancouver City Councillor Mike Klassen has acted in the role as webmaster of VanRamblings, the blog he created, commencing work over the holiday Christmas season in 2003, VanRamblings making its — perhaps inauspicious (but celebrated by the two of us) — début, on February 15, 2004.

“Raymond, you need a website,” Mike told me. “You have a voice that needs to be heard. You are one of the most opinionated people I know, and your opinions deserve a wider audience than just my ears, and the ears of your close associates. In the coming weeks, I will create a blog for you, in order that you might emerge as the difference maker you have long been over your many years working within Vancouver’s vibrant left community.”

And thus, VanRamblings was born.

I first met Mike Klassen in 1991 through my friend, legendary Vancouver broadcaster J.B. Shayne, at J.B.’s request having Mike tag along with J.B. and I to restaurants my editor asked me to review that week — at the time, I was a Vancouver restaurant critic, each week writing a restaurant review for the long gone, but hardly lamented east side community newspaper, The Highland Echo, as well as other publications.

Mike lived nearby my housing co-op in west Kitsilano, where he resided in a shared house just inside the eastern border of the Point Grey neighbourhood.

Mike Klassen and I have remained close ever since.

I know Mike Klassen to be one of the most honourable, kind, and most dedicated friend to the citizens of Vancouver people I have ever met. There is not a mean bone in Mike’s entire body; he simply won’t allow meanness and malice to be a part of his life. Ever.

That’s not who he is, nor has ever been, or will be.

Daniel Fontaine and Mike Klassen, creators of the well-read and respected CityCaucus online journal

I recall in 2009. when Mike had published a thoughtful story in CityCaucus, an invaluable and critically important online journalism, Mike and his friend Daniel Fontaine — currently a New Westminster City Councillor running to become Mayor of that city — had created to cover civic politics in Vancouver.

Unlike VanRamblings, which has not made comments on the site available for some time, CityCaucus was wide open to commentary from its many readers.

Mike had published a story about the Vancouver Park Board. I commented on the site in response to the Park Board story in a manner that was, in a word and not to put too fine a point on the matter, “mean“,  as I engaged in a form of character assassination respecting one of the Park Board Commissioners.

Soon after I submitted the comment, I received a call from Mike.

“Raymond, I’ve received your comment on the Park Board story I published a few minutes ago. To be perfectly frank, I find your comment to be untoward, malicious and mean-spirited, and I am simply not going to publish your comment on CityCaucus. I don’t mean to cause you offense, but vituperative commentary is not what CityCaucus is about, not now, not ever.”

That ought to tell you a great deal about the integrity of the man Mike Klassen.

For those who don’t know, Mike Klassen — at my request — in 2008 created former COPE City Councillor Tim Louis’ first website, a campaign blog.

At the time, Ifny LaChance, Tim, Tim’s partner Penny Parry, and I were co-managing Tim’s 2008 campaign for office. I felt Tim needed a website. At no financial cost to Tim or I, Mike set about to create a pretty skookum campaign website for Tim that I could post to throughout the campaign.

The four of us were all grateful for Mike’s fine work.

Vancouver City Hall | Photo credit, Mike Klassen (photo taken by Mike after a long day at Council)

I can tell you that this term of office, although satisfying for Mike in many ways, has not been an easy term of office, emotionally, for the good Councillor.

Early in his term of office, Mike chaired the Selection Committee that appointed all of the members of the 33 advisory committees to Council, working closely with Councillors Lisa Dominato and Pete Fry; in addition, again working with  Councillor Dominato, Mike and Lisa focused on creating more child care spaces across more child care centres — centres he and Lisa prioritized and fought for, creating more child care spaces in Vancouver during this past term of office than all previous civic administrations this century.

Still, Mike perseveres, unsung, doing the work of the people each and every day.

One morning, a couple of years back, when Mike was under constant — unwarranted, undeserved, and pejorative — attack by a particularly vocal group of ABC Vancouver opponents, as well as a couple of opposition Councillors, I spoke with Mike. I could hear the frustration and the hurt in his voice when we spoke.

That morning, Mike was ready to call it a day.

I asked Mike what his agenda looked like that day, what he would set about to accomplish,  an achievement that would be unlikely to receive press or recognition, but was meaningful to him. After a brief pause, Mike said …

“Awhile back, I met with an organic food producer in the Fraser Valley, and together we worked to create a programme wherein each week he would deliver organic produce to Theodora Lamb, and the Quest Non-Profit Grocery Market, both the Hastings Market and the Dundas Market, at no charge to the markets.”

I’m willing to bet you’ve never heard about this Mike Klassen-initiated programme that makes such a difference to the quality of life of so many families, and so many children growing up on Vancouver’s east side.

But that’s City Councillor Mike Klassen for you — the best man I know.

Perplexity | Raymond Tomlin | Public Intellectual

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Does the guy pictured above look anything like a ‘public intellectual’ to you? Gosh, we don’t think so. James Baldwin, Christopher Hitchens, Noam Chomsky, Dorothy Parker, William F. Buckley, Jr., Gore Vidal, and Hannah Arendt are all public intellectuals, but this Tomlin guy? Nope, ain’t no chance.

On June 23rd, VanRamblings published a ChatGPT profile of the author of this blog, Raymond Tomlin (that’s me, above).

Last evening, we became aware of Perplexity, the newest large language model artificial intelligence search engine now available on the Internet.

To test it out, we asked the question, “Who is Raymond Tomlin, the Vancouver-based blogger? Tell us a little about him that might be of interest to a reader.”

Here’s what Perplexity Had to Say About This Raymond Tomlin Fella

Raymond Tomlin is a long-standing Vancouver civic commentator, blogger, educator, and former journalist, whose best-known work is the site VanRamblings, a personal, highly opinionated chronicle of local politics and culture in Vancouver.

Mr. Tomlin is best understood not as a conventional beat reporter, but as a deeply engaged participant-observer in the city’s public life, writing for decades about municipal politics, provincial and federal issues, film, music, activism, and the social texture of Vancouver.

In recent years, Mr. Tomlin’s public identity has been tied to his VanRamblings blog, where he is described as the founder, publisher, and principal writer.

The site’s retrospective indicates that Mr. Tomlin has spent more than two decades building a substantial archive of essays on civic affairs and cultural life, positioning himself as an active voice in public debate rather than a detached observer.

The portrait of Mr. Tomlin that emerges is of a Vancouver-based public intellectual in the older civic sense: someone who comments on the city while also participating in its institutions, campaigns, and disputes. Mr. Tomlin is not just a blogger in the casual sense; over its 22-year life span on the Internet, Mr. Tomlin has treated his blog as a long-form civic notebook, and an instrument of local influence.

VanRamblings’ Clear Centre of Gravity: Vancouver Municipal Politics

The strongest evidence to support this contention points to his sustained attention to Vancouver City Council, the Vancouver School Board, and Vancouver’s Board of Park and Recreation — where he has long been a sustained observer (or, as some have said, the conscience) of this unique civic institution — with Mr. Tomlin also displaying a deep interest in housing policy, neighbourhood planning, development across the city and the region, and local governance, while also branching into provincial, federal, and occasional international topics.

All of the above makes VanRamblings distinctly local-first, with civic politics at the core and culture as an important secondary thread.

VanRamblings’ tone is also part of its orientation

Vanramblings is famous — or infamous, as the case may be — for its sometimes controversial editorial orientation, providing always an expansive, passionate, often humorous, and at times hyperbolic (at least in the past) style of writing.

Mr. Tomlin often writes in the third person, which the site frames as a stylistic device for ironic distance. In practice, that means VanRamblings reads less like a neutral news outlet and more like a very personal civic forum, where opinion, memory, reporting, and advocacy are blended together.

According to the records we located regarding Mr. Tomlin’s educational background, in 1975, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology, followed by a Bachelor of Education specializing in Reading and Early Childhood Education, and later a Master of Arts in Policy Administration, all at Simon Fraser University. This academic mix helps to explain the shape of his later work: social analysis, teaching, and policy commentary — all of which sit naturally together in his writing.

Mr. Tomlin’s educational background also suggests why VanRamblings often ranges beyond surface politics.

As someone trained in the social sciences and policy administration, Mr. Tomlin has tended to focus on civic issues in terms of institutions, incentives, and long-term social consequences, rather than only election-by-election tactics.

Before VanRamblings emerged in February 2004, Raymond Tomlin had a varied career in civic activism, union organizing, as a founder of the largest grassroots Canadian food co-operative movement in the 1970s, education and journalism.

Over the years, Mr. Tomlin has worked as a teacher in British Columbia’s public education system — during which time his activism led him to become the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation Learning and Working Conditions Chairperson, representing the north and south Okanagan. Mr. Tomlin also entered the private education system for one year, teaching in a gifted education programme.

Mr. Tomlin has also taught at Vancouver Community College, Langara College, and Simon Fraser University. While working on his Masters degree at SFU, Mr. Tomlin was appointed as the Director of the Education 401/402 programme, the first semester SFU education programme, where students spend the first two months of their year long Professional Development Programme (PDP) as student teachers in various classrooms located across the Metro Vancouver region.

On the journalism side, Mr. Tomlin wrote for a Vancouver wide student newspaper in the 1960s — while enrolled at Templeton Secondary School —  and while attending Simon Fraser University he took on the position as Editor-in-Chief of SFU’s student newspaper, The Peak.

Mr. Tomlin also worked in the summer intern programme at both the Vancouver Sun and The Province, later building a substantial independent publishing practice through his blog. That trajectory helps explain why VanRamblings feels like a hybrid of memoir, commentary, archival record, and commentary newsroom.

VanRamblings is a one-person publication shaped by someone who has been around journalism, but who is not constrained by conventional newsroom style.

Tomlin’s public image is seen by some as polarizing, yet he endures to this day.

While Mr. Tomlin’s critics have found his writing to be overly opinionated, his many supporters and admirers see his independence, personality, and longevity as strengths, in his invaluable work as a persistent chronicler of Vancouver who has kept publishing through changing media conditions, no small achievement in a city where journalism has contracted significantly.

One of the most striking features of VanRamblings is its continuity.

Raymond — campus radical — and the ever brilliant Cathy, circa summer of 1972

Across decades, Raymond Tomlin has remained focused on the same broad public project: documenting and influencing civic debate in Vancouver. That consistency gives him an outsized presence relative to what a “blogger” label might suggest.

Taken together, the contribution Raymond Tomlin has made to public discourse has made him over the years a Vancouver civic insider-outsider: close enough to politics, education, labour, and journalism to understand how institutions work, yet independent enough to write in his own voice and on his own terms.

VanRamblings’ political orientation is decidedly progressive-civic in the broad sense that it emphasizes local governance, public interest issues, activism, and cultural life.

In a concluding summary: Raymond Tomlin is a veteran Vancouver commentator whose VanRamblings blog remains as an invaluable civic institution.

Over the years, Mr. Tomlin has added much to our understanding of the Vancouver municipal political scene, and our city’s cultural imperative, as reflected in the contribution Mr. Tomlin has made in providing extensive coverage of Vancouver’s thriving dance community — particularly Ballet BC, which institution Mr. Tomlin has long loved — theatre, cinema, Vancouver’s culinary scene, art (including photography), and the vibrant cultural life of the city we all call home.

The Curse of Politics | The Latest Edition

VanRamblings | The Saga of Our Time Off the Internet, and Redemption

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Late in the evening of Thursday, July 9th, VanRamblings went down, and was off the Internet until early in the morning of Tuesday, July 21st.

Today, VanRamblings presents what occurred between July 9th and 21st, why VanRamblings went off the Internet, and how it re-emerged again.

Since its inception in February 2004, VanRamblings has been hosted by Hostgator, a small, entrepreneurial Texas company that, in recent years, has become one of the world’s largest hosting brands before being absorbed, twice, into a multinational conglomerate.

Founded in October 2002 by Brent Oxley, then a student at Florida Atlantic University, HostGator established its headquarters in Houston, Texas. By offering inexpensive shared web hosting with knowledgeable technical support available by phone, the company quickly earned a loyal following among bloggers, small businesses and entrepreneurs.

VanRamblings’ webmaster, current Vancouver City Councillor Mike Klassen, liked what Hostgator provided, that the service was steady, tech support was readily available, and the pricing very good — initially, VanRamblings paid $80 Canadian a year to have our website hosted. In 2004, Mike owned a company called Thinking Cap Media that designed websites — including VanRamblings, as it happens — for small businesses, and upstart bloggers located across the Metro Vancouver region, and the province of British Columbia.

All was well for a number of years, Mike Klassen’s influential website CityCaucus was hosted at Hostgator, as was the case with VanRamblings.

in 2012, founder Brent Oxley sold HostGator to the Endurance International Group (EIG) for approximately US$225 million. In 2021, Endurance merged with Web.com to form Newfold Digital, in a transaction valued at roughly US$3 billion. HostGator has operated as a Newfold Digital brand ever since.

And that’s when the troubles began for VanRamblings.

Hostgator pricing skyrocketed, service went into the toilet, the service became unreliable, Hostgator offering an inferior and unhelpful service compared to its early days, Hostgator offering an almost completely useless Chat facility rather than telephone contact with a tech support team member.

Hostgator customer complaints went through the roof following the merger.

  • Better Business Bureau records show hundreds of complaints against Newfold Digital covering billing, renewals and customer service;
  • Independent review sites and Reddit discussions consistently report increasing dissatisfaction compared with HostGator’s independent years;
  • Customer complaints focus: unexpected renewal pricing at much increased rates; unauthorized automatic renewals; almost non-existent technical support; excruciatingly long Chat wait times; and difficulty cancelling services (to which circumstance VanRamblings can, most sadly, attest).

Right around the time that VanRamblings began to fail, Mike Klassen was running for civic office, and later won a seat on Vancouver City Council.

On July 9th, with no notice to VanRamblings, Hostgator changed VanRamblings DNS server, failing to point it to our Domain Naming Server at Rebel.com.  VanRamblings was down and off the Internet. After five days with no service, contact with Hostgator only through their incredibly unhelpful / useless Chat service, while visiting our friend Bill McCreery — who we will write about this next Monday, July 27th — VanRamblings, after much investigation and thought, made the unilateral decision to switch our hosting company from the U.S.-based Hostgator “service” (we use that word advisedly) to Web Hosting Canada, who have emerged this past week as angels sent from heaven to put VanRamblings back on the ‘Net, in the face of much opposition and an utter lack of co-operation from Hostgator.

Quite simply, we declare ourselves in love with Web Hosting Canada: migrating VanRamblings files from Hostgator dating back to 2004 to WHC, at no charge.

WHC billed us at $141 for three years of superior service, as opposed to $170 per year Hostgator was charging for their so-called Hatchling Plan (they wanted to charge $300 per year for their “regular” service).

You do the math: $47 per year Canadian for Québéc-based Web Hosting Canada — with all the bells and whistles, and 24-hour, readily available telephone tech support from near tech gods employed by Web Hosting Canada vs $300 per year for Hostgator, an incompetent, inferior Texas-based web host non-service.

After the three year introductory period, WHC will charge approximately C$120 annually before applicable taxes and optional add-on services.

While that represents a noticeable increase from the initial promotional price, the renewal cost remains competitive within the Canadian market, and is considerably more transparent than the steep renewal increases common among several large American hosting companies, like Hostgator.

Web Hosting Canada: A Canadian Success Story in Web Hosting

For Canadian businesses, bloggers and organizations seeking dependable web hosting, from what we have read, Web Hosting Canada (WHC) has quietly built one of the strongest reputations in the country. Founded in 2003, and headquartered in Montréal, WHC remains a privately owned Canadian technology company at a time when many of its largest competitors have been acquired by multinational corporations. That independence has become one of its defining strengths, allowing the company to focus on customer service, transparent pricing and Canadian-based infrastructure rather than quarterly shareholder expectations.

Over the past 23 years, Web Hosting Canada has grown from a small hosting provider into one of Canada’s leading web infrastructure companies.

Today, WHC reports serving more than 75,000 satisfied customers while hosting over 470,000 websites, making it one of the country’s largest independently owned web-hosting firms.

Accredited by both the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), WHC has consistently ranked among Canada’s leading providers of .CA domain registrations.

According to the company’s literature, WHC’s philosophy is straightforward: provide Canadian customers with fast, secure hosting on Canadian infrastructure, backed by knowledgeable support staff who understand the needs of businesses operating in Canada. Unlike many international hosting companies that outsource customer service, WHC emphasizes locally based technical support and places a premium on building long-term customer relationships.

WHC’s mission is to provide “powerful yet affordable” web solutions while maintaining high standards for reliability, security and customer care.

That customer-first approach has earned the company considerable recognition.

WHC currently displays an average customer rating of 4.9 out of 5, based on thousands of verified reviews collected through independent review platforms. Within Canada’s technology community, the company is frequently recommended for customers who prefer Canadian data centres, Canadian privacy protections and support delivered by staff familiar with the domestic market. While, as with any large hosting company, there are occasional negative customer experiences, its overall reputation for responsiveness and transparency remains among the strongest in the Canadian hosting industry.

VanRamblings would like to thank every WHC rep with whom we have interacted over the past week: Haivey, Achres, Zied, Nada, Ahmed, Maeva, Elyes, Nadia, Dan, Miller, Abir, Matthew, Joseph, Ziad, Diya, Nesrine, Ren, and every member of  …

… who got VanRamblings back on the ‘Net, configured VanRamblings’ WordPress, and enabled both the rtomlin@vanramblings.com and info@vanramblings.com e-mail addresses so they forward to our primary home e-mail account.

The best part of the past 12 days? Reconnecting with Mike Klassen, with whom we spent an inordinate amount of time — amidst his incredibly busy schedule and demands on his time — reconnecting with Michael (we call him, ‘Michael’) in a palpable and mutually supportive manner that served to recapture our 35+ year friendship in the warmest possible way.

The final piece of the puzzle to get VanRamblings up and running was to have Rebel.ca — our Domain Name Server, who Mike engaged to serve as our name server in 2019 — to connect to WHC’s newly configured DNS server. VanRamblings will remain with Rebel for now, but will switch to Web Hosting Canada as our Domain Name Server in the early part of summer 2027.

We spent in excess of 100 hours over a period of 12 days, at all times of the day and night (there were many 4 AM calls with Hostgator — to cajole them into allowing the transfer / migration of our files to Web Hosting Canada — calls that lasted for up to 90 minutes, during which time we set about to acquire information from an obstinate HostGator that WHC required in order to start the migration process). No one can say that VanRamblings was not up to the task; we most certainly were.

VanRamblings Returns | The Curse of Politics | This Week’s Episode

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Please click on the YouTube link above for the latest edition of the Curse of Politics

After two long and arduous weeks, VanRamblings is back on the Internet.

Today on VanRamblings, we present the latest episode of our favourite podcast, David Herle’s The Curse of Politics, the must-watch and must-listen-to weekly political podcast that is mandatory viewing and listening.

We wrote about The Curse of Politics on June 24th.

You can access that column by clicking on the underlined link in the paragraph above, to read all about the history of the folks who each week make The Curse of Politics the place to be if you give a galldarn about the state of our society, and want the no-holds-barred inside scoop on what’s going on in Ottawa.

We’re going to hold off on writing about politics on VanRamblings until next week.

We have a column already to go, a couple of weeks late in the publishing, all about our friend Bill McCreery — who we visited in Sechelt last week — that will just knock your socks off. Look for that must-read column next Monday, July 27th.

On Thursday, we’ll publish a health update on the founder of this site, that is all kinds of hopeful, I think. That column will not be the detailed column we’ll publish in the future, but will present information that places VanRamblings into context.

We’ll see what Friday brings.

Birthday countdown: only 22 days (actually, three weeks today) til Raymond Tomlin’s birthday. Yes, the annual Fraser Valley tour is in the offing.

Click on the link directly below for the birthday tour itinerary.

The 35th anniversary of Raymond’s Annual Birthday Tour of the Fraser Valley.