Here’s what I observed.

1. The mayor has defended himself by saying the remarks came at the end of a long, difficult night and everyone was tired. Not so sure about that. Yes, it was a long meeting, but not the longest on record. Certainly not as long as the 5 a.m. budget meeting that happened under Sam Sullivan a few years ago. On the actual issue of forming a mayor’s advisory committee, the last item on the agenda, there were only seven speakers. They kept to their five minutes and they were mostly fairly civilized. I’ve seen way worse at council. In fact, one very quiet spoken woman made a simple case for better communication. (Her name is uncatchable on the video.)  ”I think the trust has been broken. We want to re-establish that trust. You have a vision. We’d like to contribute to that vision in a meaningful way.”

2. The West End Neighbours group has complained about the mayor’s appalling lack of respect for them. I would note that this is a group that has made repeatedly implied that the Vision councillors are being bought off by developers (an accusation that’s actually libellous, for anyone who cares, but I guess it doesn’t matter because that accusation gets tossed around so frequently). Chief spokesman Randy Helten inferred that again at the meeting, darkly mentioning the $650,000 that developers gave candidates in the last election. The group’s members also say they don’t trust anything the city does, that they think the city will just cherry-pick favourable candidates for the mayor’s advisory committee (the topic under discussion for the night), that developers are just going to rip the city off, and any number of other less than civil or evidence-based allegations. Raymond Louie, at the end of the meeting, said he would appreciate it if people in the gallery didn’t make motions indicating that they were cutting people’s throat. Talk about lack of respect.

3. Heather Deal, when she called me to also apologize about the remarks, said that some of the high feelings had arisen because of anti-renter comments that had come out during the evening. But when I listened, I only heard two people suggesting that the city’s advisory committee was going to be too pro-renter. (The mayor’s recommendation was that the committee should have 12 people who represent the demographics of the community, which he pointed out was 80 per cent renters.) Yes, those remarks were bordering on “creme de la creme” arguments, as they suggested that renters could give 30 days notice any time and move on, but condo owners had a real investment in the community. Rather insulting to renters who have lived in the West End for 20 or 30 years, and certainly open to a reality check about how committed owners are to their communities. But not as rabid as I’ve heard at other meetings. 

4. The mayor doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on who people are in the community. When he asked whether the speakers were “NPA hacks,” he clearly had no idea that Carol Walker was a former COPE candidate, that Randy Helten is a regular apolitical guy who works on sustainability issues, that Tiko Kerr (whose statement was read by a friend) is an artist is more likely to support protests over the loss of social housing than go to NPA fundraisers, or that Ned Jacobs (son of the noted urban theorist Jane Jacobs) is also about as far from the NPA as you can get without falling off the edge of the planet.

5. Everyone is acting as though the mayor’s remarks showed that the fix was in, that the Vision council is unwilling to listen to West End Neighbours. Well, actually, the council had already voted on the motion that WEN was opposing, so the accidentally recorded remarks only added an unpleasant topping to the reality that WEN’s opposition had been unsuccessful.

6. People are also carrying on as though Vision bulldozed through some horrible motion that will forever extinguish any West Ender’s ability to talk about housing issues or voice an opinion on city plans. The mayor’s advisory committee is going to be formed will be made up of 12 people.

For sure, strategically, they’re not going to appoint 12 people from WEN, any more than they would appoint the 12 opponents to anything as the sole members of an advisory committee. And I have no doubt that this move is strategically designed to provide a platform for people who have differing opinions from the WEN group. 

But I also have no doubt that there are spots reserved for a number of WEN members on the committee. And, although Mr. Helten said there was no promise of transparency or accountability, Robertson did say, in public and on the record, that he expects this group to hold public meetings, to make its own decisions about how to do public consultation, and to be as open as possible. “It’s probably not perfect but we are staying true to our intent to do something innovative to engage the community.”

There, now you’ll all have to listen to the item yourselves to find out if I missed anything (which I surely did).

One of the biggest is what is happening with the Vancouver Art Gallery. If you’ll recall, Premier Gordon Campbell made the strangest announcement of all time last May when he said the gallery would be relocating to a site near the old Expo Plaza of Nations. That was even though he is 1. not the owner of the land 2. not the director of the art gallery 3. not a city planner or council member. Whatever.

There was an obscure line in the news release saying that the landowner, Canadian Metropolitan Properties, which now owns the Plaza of Nations land, was willing to allow the gallery to move there in return for “future development considerations” from the city. We’ve NEVER had the details on what all of that meant and neither has the city. Staffers to this day will talk about how the announcement came as a “total surprise” to them, even though they were in the midst of allegedly trying to plan this area.

At any rate, fast forward a year and the VAG has has feasibility studies done by architect Richard Henriquez. Neither I nor anyone on council has seen the report, but there seems to be a lot of information floating around from it about the negatives for the site. It’s essentially fill, which means construction will be tricky. The water table there is high, which means you can’t go underground for storage or parking or anything.

I haven’t heard anyone specifically mention it, but it is a bit of a bold move to put an art gallery in an area that currently doesn’t attract what I’d call a super-arty crowd. There are two sports stadiums, a casino, a Costco, a nightclub and, if I’m not mistaken, a sports-video-gaming type place. As well, it’s cut off from the rest of the city by the stadiums, the two sections of Pacific Boulevard and the mini-cliff at that edge of the downtown.

On the other hand, you could imagine that area transformed into a dramatically new kind of waterfront filled with activity, like London is along certain parts of the river. The Tate Modern, which occupies a former power plant on the river, has turned into a hub of activity, with all kinds of bars, restaurants, and other forms of entertainment clustered around it. There are many who’ve criticized Vancouver over the years for creating such a boring waterfront, with walkways and parks and nothing else. An art gallery on the seawall might be just the ticket to start changing that.

So it could potentially be a great spot, if everything converged in the right way — or it could be disastrous.

However, it is sounding increasingly as though that argument is moot, as you can read here. People from the gallery are holding to the line that they are still looking at the site as an option, but I am hearing from several, including mournful ones who would have liked to see the gallery there, that it’s increasingly unlikely.

As far as I can determine, that includes all the Vision councillors at the time — Raymond Louie, Tim Stevenson, George Chow, and Heather Deal — and COPE councillor David Cadman. I’ve been able to verify with everyone except Kim Capri from the NPA side that they took the test or were willing to. (Elizabeth Ball was dealing with family issues and hadn’t taken it yet, but had told police she would.)

To add to all the many tangles in this mysterious case, Inspector Les Yeo said it was also clear that any information leaked to the media, i.e. Gary Mason at the Globe, came NOT from that document but from minutes produced after the meeting. For those who don’t recall the timeline — the meeting where the document went missing was Oct. 14. It reappeared two days later in B.C. Lee’s office. Gary’s story appeared Nov. 6, in the heat of the election campaign. Then-mayor Sam Sullivan asked police to investigate Nov. 11 (i.e. after the leak, not immediately after the document went missing)

You can read the entire police report on the matter — well, except for the two-thirds of it that they blacked out — on their website here.

Inspector Les Yeo said police were also not able to come up with any evidence through forensics or video footage that provided enough evidence to lay charges. I guess we won’t find out now until Gary’s Deep Throat decides to provide a confession in his old age, a la Mark Felt. Hope I live so long.

Interesting the sudden jump to this drastic new approach to the budget. Apparently it all came about pretty quick. The ink on the news release was still wet — okay, that’s not really true, since they were using a laser printer but you get the point — when it was handed out to council as Raymond stood up to make the motion.

I ended up hanging around until the end of the meeting (all the way through bylaws, new business, new motions, etc), which allowed me to get bummed out all over again about how unpleasant council can be at times. As one new councillor remarked to me recently, there’s a whole lot of a lot of dysfunctional “pattern behaviour” going on.

Mr. Mayor seems to be trying to exert a bit more control over the fractious proceedings, especially over Suzanne Anton. In the first couple of meetings, Gregor Robertson sat there kind of stunned-looking as she attacked him and his council, as though he couldn’t really believe it was happening. He hardly said anything — I couldn’t tell if it was because it went against the grain to hit back or he was too taken aback to think of anything to say.

In this meeting (as Suzanne went on the attack over Firehall 15, of all things), he cut her off after she’d had her say a couple of times. She kept talking over him, saying it was outrageous that he was stifling debate or something like that.  He said there’s a rule that allows him to end debate once everyone’s had their say. She said there’s no such rule. He said there is, etc etc. Eventually, he prevailed.

You can watch the crazy scene yourself on the city hall website if you want to see it live.

I have to say, it would be great if this mayor and all future mayors would enforce that rule, for people from all parties. You can’t imagine how much time gets wasted as each and every councillor feels the great need to stand up and explain their his/her position and then stand up again five more times to rebut every other point that the opposing councillor makes.

And on that note, here’s three things I’d love to see change at city hall.

1. I think it’s beyond inappropriate for councillors to make negative comments about staff people and their performance at public council meetings. Both David Cadman and Kerry Jang berated the city’s facilities manager for, they claimed, having allowed staff to deliberately let Firehall 15 fall into disrepair. They didn’t sound as though they had any definitive proof, from what I heard, just comments that had been passed on to them by residents lobbying to save the hall as a heritage site. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; it was hard to tell from what was said. But I don’t think responsible employees harangue their staff in public, especially when staff, for obvious reasons, are in no position to challenge them. The mayor or city manager should step in and ask for a report back on staff efforts re the firehall or whatever so that a. there’s some facts at hand and b. it’s not turned into a public whipping with claims that “you ignored what the city asked you to do.”

2. It would be great if only two designated hitters at a time beat up on Suzanne Anton. I remember how distasteful it was when Jenny Kwan was the lone COPE representative on an NPA council and, every time she tried to make a point, the 10 other councillors would each solemnly stand up and give wonderful speeches about how wrong she was. It’s just as distasteful this time around. There should be a system so that only one Vision and one COPE councillor gets to stand up, per issue, and declaim about what a misguided, misinformed, dangerous bubblehead their opponent is. We really don’t need to hear it multiple times, phrased in slightly different ways. (To be fair, several councillors seem to be staying out of the fray on this, notably Andrea Reimer, Heather Deal, Ellen Woodsworth, and George Chow).

3. To repeat what I said above, we would all cheer if council could move to a system where councillors made their points once, but weren’t allowed to come back three and four times to say essentially the same thing. We get it, you know. As a wise editor of mine used to say, “You don’t have to hit people over the head with the point you’re trying to make in the story. Telling them once is usually good.”

On a (somewhat) positive note, it’s nice to see Geoff Meggs seconding Suzanne’s motions, even though he goes on to criticize them. But his seconds help her to get them on the floor for discussion.

The other is organized by the Renewal Partners/Stratcom/Convergence Partners nexus. It attracts many of the same people, although with more attendance by people whose job titles I can’t quite comprehend, possibly because I am an old linear-thinking fart. (I asked one guy this year what he did and he said he works on “agreement building.”)

They’re both deafeningly loud and must-dos for a certain crowd. They were popular again as usual, but the second one this Saturday night was certainly the gathering of the new power clan in Vancouver, since its hosts — Joel Solomon’s Renewal Partners (along with the many businesses he invests in), Mike Magee’s Convergence Communications, and Bob Penner’s Strategic Communications — form a pretty tight circle around new Mayor Gregor Robertson.

The party spread out over the two rooms and three floors of the cool and arty Canvas Lounge (former Sugar + Sugar) in Gastown, providing a Tom Wolfian-style gathering of the New Green/Enviro/Socially Conscious Capitalists and their associates.

Among those in attendance in the eclectic gathering: theatre owner Leonard Schein, who has supported Renewal and its associated businesses for years; the peripatetic Michael Geller, recently defeated NPA candidate and urban thinker about town, and his daughter Claire; CUPE union leader Paul Faoro; many Vision pols and candidates, including Mayor Gregor, of course, Kashmir Dhaliwal (also with his son along), Heather Deal, Geoff Meggs, George Chow, Andrea Reimer, Aaron Jasper, Heather Harrison, and who knows who else I missed in the crowd of 400 or so; COPE’s Rachel Marcuse, people from Smart Growth, people in social housing, people in real estate, and a few media types such as myself pretending to party but really waiting for people to get loaded so we could pry information out of them. (No luck — I couldn’t get a thing out of any of them, even after holding them down and pouring vodka straight into their gullets, about who might be next on the chopping block around city hall. They just kept trying to tell me about citizen empowerment.)

Lots of talk about Vision’s aggressive new agenda and the previous day’s switcheroo of city manager Judy Rogers for former deputy health minister Penny Ballem. LOTS more talk of why Judy just had to go, no two ways about it.

BTW, the prevailing theory among the NPA or Judy-supporting types is that Geoff Meggs, former chief of staff to Mayor Larry, former B.C. Fed guy, was the driving force behind Judy’s ouster. But, from what I heard at the party, it was a pretty united front on the subject from all and sundry.

And, a sad note I noticed as I went out the door into the falling snow sometime after midnight, a table full of candles in memory of Ben Banky, the natural-foods entrepreneur who was killed at his company’s Christmas party on Friday. Banky had been a supporter of the Robertson campaign.

One of the more amusing double-events of the night was the B.C. Federation of Labour-organized rally in favour of the coalition government (and against Stephen Harper’s politics, hair, and everything else) held at Canada Place, which just happened to be across the street from where the province’s big developers were holding their annual wingding at the Fairmont Waterfront.

The Urban Development Institute party attracts the who’s who of the development world, which includes a LOT of mayors and councillors.

So several Vancouver councillors got to do double-time, managing to attend both the rally and the UDI party. Vision’s Heather Deal, Geoff Meggs and Andrea Reimer, along with COPE’s Ellen Woodsworth, all hustled from one side of the road to the other to make both events, each of which was quite well attended. The UDI event offered yummy dim sum and pasta snacks, however, which the Fed rally did not.

Here’s a precis of the events at the rally. No speeches at the UDI party, just lots of anxious talk about the gloomy immediate future of development.

Interesting things of note: Gregor and the most senior members of the Vision team are going en masse to sit at the Metro board — not like Mayor Sam, who didn’t take much of a role there for himself and left it to his other councillors to represent Vancouver.

Councillor Geoff Meggs, former communications director for the B.C. Federation of Labour, is going to be Vancouver’s rep to the GVRD labour-relations board — the group that oversees the contract negotiations for all the municipal unions. That ought to be an interesting experience for all involved.

Andrea Reimer and Heather Deal are chair and vice-chair of the planning and environment committee, Raymond Louie and Meggs same for the budget committee, and COPE Councillor David Cadman gets to chair the transportation commitee with George Chow as his vice-chair — a diplomatic nod to the coalition team

Interesting tussle in the works, as the recommendations have Raymond Louie as council’s appointee to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities with “effective date to be determined.”

What that polite phrase means is that there’s a lot of unhappiness about the fact that NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton is the actual current appointee to the FCM but her term doesn’t run out until June. That means Vancouver is represented for six months by a very minority member of council.

I chatted with Anton last night at her campaign volunteer thank-you party (where they were gleefully celebrating their new reputation as a “legendary ground team,” which I apparently called them on one of my radio appearances). She said she’s planning to serve out her term. But the Vision team are anxious to have a full-court press of Visionistas here, there and across the land to push their agenda on housing, childcare, homelessness and the rest.

I await further news.

The new duties reflect the unofficial portfolios that councillors are going to be taking on, as Vision gets its troops in place to push a rather ambitious agenda.

Rumours around city hall yesterday were that the new council had already picked its new citizen reps for police board and others, but, if so, no one is willing to say that. In fact, George Chow, Kerry Jang and Ellen Woodsworth are on the nomination committee to choose those people.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if it does all happen fast. This crew wants to get out the door fast

For those with short memories, i.e. most of us, the winning COPE crew in 2002 decided to take government out to the people by having their inaugural ceremony at the Roundhouse community centre.

This time, it’s south Vancouver that’s being honoured. That’s in part to acknowledge the heavy involvement of the Indo-Canadian community in the election. In spite of the fact that almost none of the Indo-Canadian candidates running got elected, except for Vision’s Raj Hundal to park board, the 49th and Main area was a hotbed of political activity. There was a sign in almost every yard on 49th between Main and Fraser.

Bill Yee, the councillor (and lawyer) who was Mike Harcourt’s sidekick during the 1980s, will be the judge who swears in the new council in the ceremony, which will be held in the gymnasium. (There’ll be overflow areas with audio provided.)

Then everyone will repair back to council for the first meeting to appoint committees and so on. Insiders are deriving some amusement from the fact that all the gal councillors are lined up in the right side of council with Tim Stevenson (in order: Heather Deal, Tim, Andrea Reimer, Suzanne Anton, and Ellen Woodsworth), while the left side will be the testosterone row: Raymond Louie at the head, George Chow, Kerry Jang, David Cadman and Geoff Meggs. (Seats are chosen according to how many votes people got.)

And then after that, the work will start. Word is that staff are being told they’re not supposed to bury the councillors in weeks of briefings, as had happened in the past. Instead, the new Vision crew wants to concentrate on the big problems: affordable housing, homelessness, the Olympic village, and the budget.

Sorry I disappeared but it’s been a crazy few days and almost impossible to keep up with events as they unroll unless you pretty much type non-stop, which tragically leaves no time to actually interview anyone or get any facts. While some people may prefer to operate that way, I don’t.

It was a wild media day yesterday, with the Non-Partisan’s Peter Ladner all over the media continuing to say that council just can’t bring details of the city’s financial arrangements with Millennium into the open because there are ongoing sensitive negotiations (though hard to see what more damage could be done at this point), Vision councillor Raymond Louie blasting away on NW, Vision councillor Tim Stevenson trying to make a motion at last night’s Opus Hotel hearing to have the decision reconsidered, Gregor Robertson and Ladner both holding end-of-day news conferences to fire off a few more rockets. And then every blogger and commentator in the world was weighing in.

Well, and people said this election might be boring. The question in my mind is: Will this spark people’s interest enough to make them want to vote? I say yes. If nothing else, all of this controversy — even if you think it’s hard to figure out which party is behaving worse in all of this — is like a giant billboard reminding people that they can have a say on Nov. 15.

Anyway, here’s the stories the Globe had (mine and Robert Matas’s) along with a few others I found interesting, like Pete McMartin’s column in the Vancouver Sun here and Mike Howell’s blog summary of the day for the Courier here.