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Entries from January 2016

Vancouver starts spending additional tax money it collected to tackle drug-overdose crisis

January 19th, 2017 · 13 Comments

The first round of spending to tackle the drug-overdose crisis adds up to $2 million, mainly to staff an additional medic unit, to create a new community policing station for Strathcona, and to train more city staff in Naloxone use. The next $1.5 million available is still unallocated, although staff are looking at things like […]

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TransLink kicks off its first service bump in a long time, amid many questions about when the big chunk of federal money will arrive

January 19th, 2017 · 2 Comments

TransLink is going to be rolling out many, many announcements about improved service in the next while — all aimed at reminding people that their tax money is going to good use. They had their first on Tuesday. (My story here.) But amid the celebrations over more cars for Canada Line service, 15-minute service on […]

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B.C. Liberal Party’s high-profile fundraiser, Bob Rennie, steps back, saying he’s done his job

January 16th, 2017 · 3 Comments

I’ve been covering B.C. politics for more than 30 years. In that time, the fundraisers for various parties have been part of the scene. But none of them has achieved the high profile or hostile public reaction that Bob Rennie has. (Back in the Gordon Campbell days, Marty Zlotnik used to be the chief fundraiser. […]

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The tiny-house movement gets a boost in Vancouver from two dedicated advocates

January 16th, 2017 · 1 Comment

In the way that journalism works, the germ of this story sprouted at a public meeting where I was a moderator. The panel was focused on housing as a human right. But there were a lot of young people in the audience who were hungry for more — they were looking for practical solutions to […]

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Lower Mainland cities learned many lessons from 2008/2009 snowstorm, but not enough to make this round perfect

January 4th, 2017 · 50 Comments

Spent the day yesterday collecting stories from people about their experiences with the snow/ice situation, as well as phoning as many municipalities as I could to find out how things were going. It was interesting to hear how many city staffers talked about the big changes they made after the multiple snowfalls that turned into […]

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Portraits of hidden parts of B.C.’s Chinese immigration history

January 4th, 2017 · No Comments

Through a young friend, I was alerted to the interesting photo project being done by Gu Xiong, a professor of art history at UBC. He has been shooting pictures of some little-known sites that were important to early Chinese immigrants to the province. Even though I thought I knew a lot about that history, I […]

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