As I’ve said here before, I try to keep this site as open as possible to all commenters whether I agree with them or not, think they’re making rational arguments or not, and whether they can spell or not. In general, I think that’s worked out well and it cheers me up when I wake [...]

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In case some of you missed this in the comments, here is Wendy Pedersen’s take on her neighbourhood, which she advocates for through the Carnegie Community Action Project. FROM WENDY PEDERSEN Hello. If you want to know what low-income DTES residents think about their neighbourhood, you can read this report: http://ccapvancouver.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/ccapvisionwebsm.pdf Its called Nothing About [...]

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I know some of you, my blog readers, are perhaps not completely in the Olympics “party” mode at the moment, but here’s a reminder — culled from Kwantlen university’s “special events” calendar — of how others are viewing this. I leave it up to you to post your ironic suggestions for additions to this tour. [...]

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Robert Matas’s story in the Globe this morning gets on the record the Vision Vancouver council’s discomfort with the idea of having a czar for the Downtown Eastside, a constantly recurring idea that had been floated again recently. The Vision mayor and council didn’t criticize the idea at first, but behind the scenes, they were [...]

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Another council day, another smackdown of city staff. On the whole, all the councillors tried to play nice and praise city staff yesterday for all their hard work on negotiating the buy-out of the Fortress loan that was announced yesterday. (For more details than I provided, read Rod Mickleburgh’s story in the Globe today here.) [...]

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It’s hard to get a read on Vancouver’s homeless situation through either direct observation or statistics. Few of us monitor the streets at night to do a count and what we see in the daytime can often be deceiving. Lots of people who have homes are still out on the streets during the day. Even [...]

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Here’s the latest from city hall, from those of you not already in the loop from the twitterings, blogs, news flashes and what all emanating from the media horde there. More later on some of the interesting Q and A at the council meeting, but I’m at work on other projects right now. STATEMENT FROM [...]

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I’m at fabulavancouver. I’m going to try not to be irritating with banal posts.

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I have a story in today’s Globe about a resolution from the Health Officers Council of BC that calls for supervised-injection sites in all B.C. communities that need them. The most interesting part of doing that story, for me, was talking to Dr. David Bowering in Prince George and hearing about the escalating drug problem [...]

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Allen Garr at the Courier is always the first person to spot the soft underbelly of new mayors, in my experience. He was the first to write a column back in the early days of COPE’s term noting that Larry Campbell appeared to have undergone a transformation, shortly after being elected, from crusading coroner to [...]

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