Waiting to hear an explanation for this news release which has Vision and COPE agreeing that they will split the council slate 7-3. Of course, no guarantees who will be elected but, still, it means Vision is not going to go past the seven spots it has now. In 2008, you’ll recall, they had eight [...]

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Unhappy condo owners at the Olympic village filed their lawsuit last month. Now the city’s fighting back. Maybe they should just do best out of seven games.

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Jesse Johl, we hardly knew you. For those who don’t recall, Johl was acclaimed as one of two NPA candidates acclaimed to run in the November election last fall, as a way of giving some support to lone councillor Suzanne Anton. Bill McCreery, the other acclaimed candidate, has been busy peppering blogs, emails and live [...]

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I’ve been longing to get my own copy of Harland Bartholomew’s 1928 plan for Vancouver ever since I saw it in Andy Yan’s hands. But Yan and his boss, Bing Thom, have done all of us a favour by digitizing this book for the Vancouver Archives as a birthday present for the city. The link [...]

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From the group that tried valiantly to save the Mount Pleasant pool: The first Annual General Meeting of the Vancouver Society for Promotion of Outdoor Pools is scheduled for Saturday, May 7th , from 2PM – 4PM. Meeting location: Mount Pleasant Community Centre, #1 Kingsway, Multipurpose Room 3 on the second Floor. Everyone is welcome, [...]

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My story in the Globe here and the full motion here. More to come. A. THAT the application by BC Pavilion Corporation (PavCo) to rezone the following: a portion of 777 Pacific Boulevard (PID: 008-332-614, Lot 153 False Creek Plan 20421 (“BC Place Site”); a portion of Terry Fox Way to be closed and conveyed [...]

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Douglas Coupland called Vancouver The City of Glass because of its forest of greenish-glass towers. I always imagined the glass towers were only about trying to maximize views and build modernist. As I discovered in doing this story, it’s really all about the money. Glass is cheap. But not for much longer. One, people don’t [...]

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Council meeting with casino vote starts in two hours. This was my story today about why there’s not much incentive for council to approve a casino expansion that would triple the size of the current Edgewater. What I’m not sure of is how they will vote on the relocation from the current Plaza of Nations [...]

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I remember one editor I had many potlatches ago, who said he just couldn’t believe there was no fraud or hijinks going on in Vancouver, with all the cranes around. Surely someone was paying someone off, he suggested. I said that I thought the whole system ran on a more instutionalized payoffs: developers who wanted [...]

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It’s been a rough time in journalism the last decade (or three?). It’s also been one of the most exhilarating times, as you feel journalism re-inventing itself under your feet. Like many in this profession, I still wake up many mornings after 25 years, thinking, “Wow, people pay me to do this? How great is [...]

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