A current story that is generating lots of huffing and puffing from commentators (here, here and here) is the fact that park-board commissioner Constance Barnes apparently received a $3,000 loan from the board to help with the cost of the $18,000 rehab program she enrolled in after crashing her car into a house and being [...]

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As a few blogs around town are reporting  (Alex Waterhouse-Hayward and city caucus) and I’ve been hearing from others, Abraham Rogatnick died Friday. Bruce Grierson did a piece for Vancouver magazine last year that described the deep impact this professor, historian and urbanist has had on the city, which you can read here. Better than [...]

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There’s been a lively discussion going on for a while related to the series of stories in The Tyee about Portland’s alleged superiority to Vancouver, which I’m sure many of you have looked at. Here’s a Seattleite weighing in on the comparison, pointing out at least one interesting fact. Yes, Portland has less homelessness. It [...]

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My latest column in Vancouver magazine is about our eponymous credit union, which sometimes feels like a form of local government. VanCity is going through big changes — it dumped its insurance service and announced it was shutting down Citizens Bank’s loan operations since I wrote this piece. I spent some time with CEO Tamara [...]

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Vancouver activists and planners tied themselves in knots over Southeast False Creek for years before the Olympic village was planned there, fighting to make it an area that set new standards for the ideal community: green, socially mixed, non-car-dependent, and everything else your little urban heart could wish for. Strangely, hardly anyone is paying any [...]

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One thing you have to say about B.C. and Vancouver these days is that there’s been a definite blooming of new efforts being made to help people who are homeless and have multiple other problems. From the sobering centre in Surrey to emergency no-barrier shelters here in Vancouver to the provincial government’s various new projects [...]

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Several people alerted me recently to a column that Michel Beaudry wrote in the Whistler Pique where, in part of it, he said the RCMP liaison he’s been talking to said recently that police have exhausted all their leads when it comes to investigating the murder of his wife, Wendy Ladner-Beaudry, and don’t know what [...]

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I got this interesting but utterly mystifying news release last week about an architecture roadshow that is going to be put on across Canada, starting with Vancouver. I say mystifying because I can’t quite imagine what it is from the description. I think I must have failed Highly Conceptual Thinking in a previous life. Anyway, [...]

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Vancouver’s Non-Partisan Association sent out a notice late last week saying it plans to lower its membership fee from $20 to $10 a year, in an apparent move to compete with Vision Vancouver’s successful membership drive that brought in 17,000 new members last year at as low as $5 apiece. This seems to be part [...]

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I’m reposting this comment that came in on an earlier blog post. Hello everyone, My name is Gillian and I am the Communications Liaison for the Vancouver Biennale. Just thought I would give you some information about us. We are a non-profit organization with three staff members and no tax payers money is used for [...]

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