All of you will be thrilled to know that an out-of-the-way Italian restaurant in a manufacturing town near Bologna was the scene today of a sentimental rendition of O Canada by 20 Canadians who are here studying co-operatives and economics. (And one of us is studying the studiers.)

After a hearty meal of mortadella, cheese, tortellini in cream and fried sage, tagliatelle with mushrooms, and coffee granitas, the former American in the crowd (and the only one who knew the French words) led us in singing the national anthem. We even stood up.

As the song ended, someone added the traditional ending: Drop the puck.

It was a lovely Canada Day here.

This just in from the PR company working with Millennium Developments.

Millennium Water Construction Quality

Vancouver, BC - The Millennium Water consultant group and the general contractors are in the process of evaluating the current commentary regarding the quality of construction on the Olympic and Paralympic Village Project which has to-date been, in the consultant team’s opinion, above industry standards.

The Olympic Village is nearing completion and as such there are multiple and varied activities across the project. The work of the sub-trades is coordinated by the General Contractors and is subject to extensive review by the professional design team. The work in progress is governed by the architectural and engineering drawings and specifications which define the quality, durability and energy performance of the materials and systems installed. This work is further governed by both municipal and industry standards.

All work undertaken on the Olympic and Paralympic Village site is subject to a rigorous and stringent process of field reviews.  The professional engineering and architectural consultants are charged, under the Vancouver Building bylaw, with providing such reviews in support of the Letters of Assurance that each design professional is required to issue at the completion of the work - prior to being granted Occupancy by the City of Vancouver Inspectors.  These reviews are undertaken for each building and are carried out by the professionals and other parties, including:

*         The Trade Field Supervisors
*         The General Contractor Superintendents
*         The Code Compliance Certified Professional
*         The Building Envelope Consultant
*         The Mechanical and Electrical Engineers, and
*         The Architects.

The professional consultants are providing essentially full time attendance on site to facilitate the quality and schedule requirements associated with the project.

Work in progress does not proceed forward until all parties noted have completed their field reviews and the work has met the technical requirements of the specifications.

The consultant team issues photo-records of all field reviews with the appropriate written observations. In the example cited in the recent news story, the items identified have been acknowledged in previously issued field reviews submitted to the General Contractor by the Mechanical Engineer.  The process to remedy such issues is an acknowledged aspect of building construction where the professional consultant team acts on behalf of the public to assess compliance with both the City of Vancouver and Provincial Building Standards.

The consultant team will undertake an additional review of the work in progress to assess the issues identified and to confirm that the project specifications are being met by all contractors and trades on the site.

The murder of Wendy Ladner-Beaudry last April touched so many people in this city. I was one of them. Even though I’ve written about her brother, Peter, for years in his role in civic politics, I never met Wendy.

But I felt compelled to try to tell her story in a little more depth, which I did for my regular feature in Vancouver magazine.

Vancouver’s mayor and Housing Minister Rich Coleman did some tough negotiating over the weekend to come up with something they could agree on with respect to the emergency homeless shelters and a future housing plan. You can read my story about it here.

The Olympic village just can’t catch a break. The project that everyone thought would be a showpiece for the has turned into the construction project that everyone loves to report bad news on.

The latest is this story in the Province, with complaints about the building practices going on. It’s not unheard of on major projects for the drywallers to get ahead of the pipe-wrappers. In another project, no one would care. But now the village’s developers are going to have to take special measures to prove that there are only a few cases of this on site, not whole walls ful.

I posted earlier that my travels through France had reminded me what an agricultural country it is still. One of my regular blog commenters responded that I was perhaps romanticizing French farm life, given how much it is being eroded by global agro-business and the younger generation’s disinterest in the hard labour entailed.

It’s true that a phenomenol number of the farms I see seem to be trying to maintain themselves by diversifying. They sell their fruit or their wine or their lavender from the farm. They put on little soirees to attract more people to their wine-tastings. Or they rent out rooms and they run little restaurants on the side.

We — oh, okay, it was just me — decided to stay at an organic farm we’d seen highly promoted in Lonely Planet to get a taste of some of this back-to-the-land stuff. The Ferme de la Borie, near Florac in the Haut Languedoc, was a lovely thing in my imagination before I got there.

I saw us sitting out at picnic tables covered with checked tablecloths near a field of wheat while we were served a delicious chicken stew and umpteen bottles of wine. There would be sunshine and butterflies and also some oleander bushes nearby. The farmer, Jean-Christophe, would be a jolly rotund fellow in overalls who would tell us about the pleasures of organic farming and the history of the land.

Well.

We turned off the main highway and made our way up and up and up and up the mountain, three kilometres almost straight up actually on what could best be described as a paved goat track. When we were almost at the ridge, we arrived at the farm, which looked exactly like what it was — a fifteenth century stone farmhouse built into the rock on the side of the hill that had fallen almost to pieces and then been rebuilt, bit by bit, without the benefit of adherence to any kind of building codes.  There were a lot of spare machine parts and building materials around. An incredibly skinny and manic young man with beyond-shoulder-length dark hair was running around watering the plants. Jean-Christophe. We never saw him again.

Instead, Mireille was our hostess for the evening. Imagine the kind of woman who could survive a siege or pick the rocks out of 20 acres of mountainside fields. That was Mireille. She led us into the farmhouse, which was pretty much like doing a Star Trek-like time travel straight back to the 16th century.

We clambered up the giant stone steps of the interior courtyard, went into an “entry hall” that was like an unlit cave, up some more stone steps, and into a “dining room” that was missing only a few hunting dogs and torches on the side of the wall. It had an enormous fireplace you could roast a hog in and was so dark that it was a shock to go out onto the terrace and see the sun was shining.

We all ate around an enormous table — salad with bits of cheese made at the farm, a green bean stew with some kind of meat that I assume was also made at the farm, eggs (from the farm) in bechamel sauce, many more cheeses after the main course, and a plain cake that we smeared with chestnut butter at the end. The flies, which not even two giant fly-friers working full time could keep up with, had a feast.

There was an American family there from Knoxville, Tennessee, a young couple from the Alps with their baby on a three-day hiking vacation, a woman from Paris on her way to Montpellier, and another 30-something couple who looked like urban bohemian types from I don’t know where. So one end of the table talked about how awful George Bush was and the other end talked about Sarkozy’s new ministers and sometimes the two conversations mixed.

Mireille reminded us of the wars between the Protestants and the Catholics, which was particularly fierce in that area. All the Protestant men ended up being sent off to row in the galleys, according to her, and the women were sent to the prison in Montpellier.

The next morning, the man from the 30-something couple pulled out an accordion and played traditional folk music on the terrace after breakfast (bread, jam, chestnut butter, cake and many more flies), his notes trilling off to the far ridge (where I could see another ancient farmhouse). The hardy ones amongst us went off to help make cheese, which entailed scooping up curds from the big vat and pressing them into round molds, while picking out, in the process, one snail and, yes, one fly.

It certainly gave me a new appreciation for the tommes (big round cheeses that are made with pasteurized milk) and the pelardons (smaller ones made from unpasteurized milk, which develop an ash-coloured mold as they age) that we’d eaten the night before.

And then we were off.

If anyone wants to get completely away from the sanitized globalized world, I highly recommend it. We’ve certainly never had an experience like that before. And may never again.

This comment got appended recently to the long string from last month on view corridors. I doubt many people will have continued looking at that post and it’s an interesting comment, so I’m re-posting it here as a separate entry. (And for those wondering if there will be an end to the view-corridor debate, the city’s website has a fancy timeline graphic that appears to indicate, if I am interpreting the boxes and arrows correctly, that there will be a final decision in the last quarter of 2009):

From “renaissancehombre”

As an admirer of your fair city I have the perspective of an outsider, which perhaps gives my position a different sort of objectivity. I have visited and studied your city in detail basically because it is a great city and I would like to live in a city as beautiful as yours. I really hope you realize how good you have it and how unusual this is.

I have nothing personal to gain, but it would break my heart to see your city get worse instead of better due to something so petty as shortsightedness.

Please be aware that if you people begin down the road of undoing the View Corridors, that you run the very real risk of setting in motion a trend towards compromising on other aspects of the things that have also made Vancouver truly special. Once such a trend begins, it is very hard to reverse.

My impression is that the View Corridor ordinance, which incidentally has inspired other cities to attempt similar measures for the public good, arose because every new development project resulted in a battle, and judging by some of your comments it seems clear that in some of these battles the developers won and the public indeed lost. Perhaps I am mistaken, but to revise the view corridors in response to developer pressure now is an invitation for a return to a very contentious situation in which developers and the public are continually pitted against one another.

Is this actually what you want? I am sure the developers would not mind, since they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. But what do you want?

I am honestly surprised that you people cannot find a more creative solution. I am shocked actually. I know your city well and have studied your view corridors in detail. At this juncture you developers have nothing legitimate to complain about because the view corridor ordinance has been in place now for a considerable length of time. Begin to tinker with it and this will no longer be true. Suddenly every developer will have grounds for violating a view corridor for any new project because it will be seen as unfair that some rules were relaxed while others were not.

Instead I think you people should recognize that sooner or later buildable lots in downtown will become scarce. This could happen now, in which case developers can be encouraged to improve your city by improving other parts of it, or you can first let them ruin the downtown and then move on. For example, San Francisco suffered a weakening of its identity when short cited city officials changed rules that permitted the downtown to become overdeveloped. Yes there are still nice parts to the city but the downtown there is now cold and hostile and not nearly as nice as it once was. Once a bad idea is implemented in such a form you are stuck with it.

Take your time, please, and try to figure out what the real problem is, and by all means find a more creative solution than dismantling the things that took you this far just so some developers can pocket some extra cash.

In case you’re missing it back in North America, BBC is ALL OVER the story about Michael Jackson’s reported death, with current non-stop coverage and many uses of “we haven’t confirmed this but it’s been on the TMZ website.”

The residents around the two homeless shelters under the Granville Bridge started complaining a month ago about the activities in the shelters and their uncertain future. At first, they didn’t get a lot of attention, but the story exploded in the last couple of weeks and has turned into one of city hall’s major unchecked forest fires.

Now the mayor is going on the offensive, pointing the finger at the province and saying they need to come up with the money for interim housing.

Here’s the statement he made at 1:30.

Thank you all for being here today.

When I campaigned to be Mayor of Vancouver, I made it very clear that homelessness would be my top priority. It still is.

We have over 1500 people sleeping on our streets every night, and the world spotlight will be on our city in eight months.

If people think it is an embarrassment now, just wait until February 2010, when the world’s media will be staying in hotels just blocks from the downtown eastside.

We have a plan for dealing with homelessness. In March, we put forward a proposal to the Province that would see a combination of shelters and interim housing to help us get through next winter and until new permanent housing starts to come on stream over the next 3-5 years.

The province has put huge investments into housing, whether it is through purchasing and renovating SRO hotels, or funding the first six of the social housing sites around Vancouver.

But the majority of new construction will not be completed for 3-5 years. Therefore, if nothing immediate is done, we are still going to have over one thousand people on our streets for the foreseeable future.

One of the things we did immediately upon taking office in December was partner with the Province and the private sector to open shelters around Vancouver to help people get off the streets.

Contrary to what many people say, the shelters were not opened just because it was cold out. They were opened because there is an unconscionable number of people sleeping on our streets. And there still are.

I don’t believe that just because it’s warmer out during the day that people should still sleep in doorways and benches at night.

We now have five HEAT shelters around the city that house about 450 people a night. They provide meals, connect people to housing, job training, psychiatric services – all things these people would not have access to if they were still on the street.

In the first three months alone, over 12% of shelter users were moved into housing.

We had people coming inside to the HEAT shelters who have refused all other options. Overall, the HEAT shelters have been a success.

- VPD stats show drop in public disorder and mental health calls around the city.

- The Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association has seen reports of aggressive panhandling plummet. The shelters are making an impact where other policies have not worked.

We’ve also seen some serious problems trying to shelter the hardest to house. The situation at the Granville shelter is not tolerable. This shelter is focussed on our street youth; it provides less than 10% of the beds across the HEAT shelters but is causing a disproportionate amount of the problems.

I’ve seen this myself when I spent a few hours down there last Saturday night. I’ve heard from the residents, both from the condos and in the shelters. It’s a situation that no one should have to live with.

The overwhelming majority of comments I have heard from residents in that neighbourhood is that they want to see help given to the people in the shelters who need it.

They know that as a city we need to coexist, but they are fed up with the drugs and disorder that have emerged around the shelter.

Simply put, the state of tension and fear that exists in that neighbourhood cannot continue. It is pitting the needs of the homeless against those of the residents – and it needn’t be the case. The two are not mutually exclusive. And they can’t be, as we try to make progress as a city that has close to 1500 people on the street needing housing.

I am going to outline today a number of steps that the city has recently implemented in conjunction with the VPD and the shelter operators to deal with the challenges at the Granville shelter.

First of all, we’re raising the barriers. Low barriers were necessary during the cold winter, but given the current circumstances, that needs to be changed.

The VPD has provided a list to the shelter of people who they have identified as causing serious problems. They’re the bad apples.

These are people who deal drugs, who prey on the most vulnerable, they have histories of assault and theft…..they are now banned from the shelter.

They’ve been getting a free ride from the shelter services and it ends now.

Shelter residents who are seen using drugs, dealing or purchasing drugs in the vicinity of the shelter in the neighbourhood will not be allowed in.

People staying at the shelter will not be allowed to wander in and out at night. They can step outside for a cigarette, but that’s it. They’ll be monitored by staff.

These rules will be consistent with those of other shelters in the city.

What we have is an 80/20 problem at this shelter. The vast majority of the residents are getting a roof over their heads, a warm meal, and access to services that they desperately need, and are not causing problems.

These are the people who I have heard from neighbourhood residents in nearby condos that they don’t have a problem with.

The problem is with the 20% who are doing serious damage – creating chaos, making people feel unsafe, and ruining it for everyone else – the shelter residents and the neighbourhood.

I’ve heard a lot of the discussion going on in recent weeks, on the call-in radio shows, in the newspapers, on tv. Too often, it seems that a complex problem that has plagued our city for years has been boiled down to an “us vs. them” debate.

It’s just not true. I’ve talked to both sides and I can tell you it’s not true. As a city, we need to move beyond this culture of black and white characterizations of our most challenging community issues. We are in this together.

Just as we need to remember that the people living in the homes nearby the shelters have a right to live in an neighbourhood that is safe and clean, so to do we need to remember that the people in these shelters have fallen through the cracks of our society, and that we can’t simply ignore them.

I have spoken with the Premier and Minister Coleman several times in recent days, they know our concerns, and I know they’ve got some big challenges.

Minister Coleman has been the driving force behind so much of the good work that the province has done on homelessness, including the SRO hotel purchases and funding for the six social housing sites. And I am optimistic that the funding will come through, because he knows the benefits of keeping the shelters open.

People keep asking, what’s Plan B if the shelters don’t stay open. The shelters are Plan B. Plan A has always been housing – that’s the only solution to homelessness. If there is no funding from the province to keep the shelters open, they close as of July 1^st, and people are back on the street. It’s as simple as that.

I want to focus on Plan A, which is creating more housing. In March, I presented the provincial government with a proposal for interim housing. This is the transition that allows us to get people out of shelters and into housing. Through a combination of modular housing, privately leased hotels, and government-purchased buildings, we could provide 550 units of housing before next winter.

There are presentations that show you some of the offers we’ve had for modular housing right over there.

The city is prepared to put up capital costs equivalent to about $2.6 million a year to provide buildings and land, and we’ll be working with our private sector partners to have them match our contribution. We’ve asked the Province for $5 million a year to cover operating costs.

That’s the solution we’re putting forward. Move people out of the shelters and into housing quickly. It is within our grasp. As the permanent housing that the province has invested in becomes completed over the next three to five years, people can move from the interim housing and into permanent housing.

From the streets to shelters, from shelters to interim housing, and from interim to permanent housing. That’s the plan we have, and we have put it to the Province. I’ve spoken to the Premier about it, I’ve spoken to Minister Coleman….and I’m hopeful they’ll support it.

We’re in tough economic times, and I know it’s not an easy decision. But I believe that the benefits of investing in this interim solution, which would allow us to get people off the street, out of shelters, and into housing, are well worth it….particularly with the Olympics just around the corner.

I’m sure that the residents of North false creek, the shelter residents, and the people of Vancouver who see homelessness on our streets every day would agree that getting people into interim housing is worth the money.

In the meantime, I await the decision from the provincial government on the funding of the shelters, and I hope that we’re able to continue them.

This story from the Toronto Star, praising Vancouver’s car-free days and Toronto’s lack of same, popped up on my screen today. It’s ironic given the debate that keeps raging in this city about changing the current proportions of the car-bike-walker sharing system.

It reminds me forcibly of the way it’s so easy to praise from afar, even while the locals are grumbling. I wrote glowingly (well, somewhat) about Montpellier the other day, and the mayor who has brought trams, a car-free central city, a grand new neo-classical development, and bike-sharing to the city. I’m sure, though, that there are many in Montpellier who seem him as a mad leftie (he is with the Socialist party) who is ruining the city with his social engineering grands projects.

Similarly, while former mayor Sam Sullivan became the object of severe criticism on his home turf, reporters from elsewhere typically wrote glowing stories about him and about one of his biggest initiatives, EcoDensity. (In fact, they’re still writing those latter ones.)

So think about all that while you’re fuming in your car stalled in a bottleneck, with nothing to look at but the mayor’s new community garden and/or one of his newly created homeless shelters — while you’re composing nasty letters to the mayor and council about their follies, someone somewhere is writing about what a progressive and forward-thinking city Vancouver is.