Ladner can’t believe the police need people to agree to polygraph tests in order to complete an investigation, can’t believe councillors refused to take them, and can’t believe that police are releasing the news of their decision on a day when it’s most likely to be buried by other news, i.e. the provincial election.

“If you want to bury this thing, that would be the perfect time to announce it,” he said. He suspects that the new council will now decide to abandon any further attempts to investigate and simply let the whole issue go away.

“It’s not a great outcome and the ultimate losers are the public,” he said. “And I’d say anyone who didn’t take a polygraph but gained politically is suspect in my view.”

Even though police have said that the information that got leaked to the media appears to have come from the minutes of the meeting and not the report (which laid out staff’s case, but didn’t have the results of the vote) that went missing for a couple of days immediately after the Oct. 14 meeting, Ladner and Anton both insist that finding who took the document is important.

And they don’t believe it went missing by chance, perhaps picked up by someone accidentally. Anton said staff went “white with shock” when they knew the document was missing within minutes of the Oct. 14 meeting ending and they sent out an alert immediately. She doesn’t see how anyone who had picked it up accidentally wouldn’t have discovered that right away, given the level of panic.

Yet that’s what Vision councillors believe. “My best guess is that it was picked up by accident,” says Tim Stevenson. “I know most of the people fairly well and I just don’t think we have those kind of people.” He said he declined to take the polygraph test because he had sought advice, and he was told polygraphs are unreliable and inadmissible in court.”

He didn’t think much of the whole request for a police investigation, which he said seemed like a “big fishing expedition” that was bound to lead nowhere.

Hmm, that might give readers a clue as to what’s going to happen to the second half of the Richard Peck investigation into the missing document. Remember, Peck was hired to make suggestions for improved security and do an investigation. The first half, he reported on and apparently staff will come back in June with recommendations on how to implement his suggestions. It’s now up to council to decide whether to proceed with the second part.

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.

For some, the biggest danger for Vancouver is that it will become a resort city if office space isn’t defended zealously. For others, the biggest danger is that it will become a Houston-style monoculture, losing the diversity that make it a different-style downtown that attracts the cultural creatives of the world.

Not many spectators there (in fact, it was almost clubby, there were so few people — clubby enough that the mayor announced the final score at one point while the debates about zoning, density and mixed use were going on).

City staff, who are at the tail end of a five-year re-think of the downtown, recommended that a much wider swathe of the downtown core be preserved for business-only, although some exceptions will be allowed. If a mixed-use, part-condo development can help preserve a heritage site or residential hotel or if it’s a particularly large site, then council can consider allowing it.

The new area will cover about 15 per cent of the downtown peninsula, extending east and west from the CBD core that exists now, whose centre of gravity is, it seems to me, the multiple Bentall towers on Burrard.

But all of that dry description doesn’t really capture the dramatically different visions that different people have of the downtown and what they think this policy will do.

The Board of Trade/pro-business set came out to speak in favour of the new policy, which they think will set some limits on the housing encroaching-resortification that’s happened the last 20 years. That group has never been in favour of Vancouver’s Housing First policy. They opposed it back in 1986 and they’re still opposing it. They particularly went on the warpath a few years ago when the city allowed a few residential towers — the Hudson, the Shangri-La, Jameson House — in what had been seen as serious business space. In response, the city put a moratorium in place five years ago until it could study the situation and develop a policy.

City staff (head planner Brent Toderian and other planner Kevin McNaney) seemed to be mostly agreeing with the business types, saying that the previously flexible zoning that allowed mixed uses or residential very close to the CBD was driving up the price of land everywhere, making office-space construction unaffordable. They also talked a lot about how business people want a business-only enclave and that they also don’t really like mixed-use buildings, like the Shaw Tower.

On the other side were a couple of development consultants and a couple of residents of 788 Richards. The latter, interestingly, made the case that they bought condos in that building thinking that the area was going to be allowed to develop as more residential, and now they’ve been beached there alone, because the new policy will discourage residential all around them. Reza Sherkat said he’s lived in that area for 12 years and he can’t understand why the city would want to prohibit residential around the library, a great neighbourhood resource.

But the passionate plea of the night came from Chuck Brook, a former Vancouver planner who has made a living for the last couple of decades helping developers steer their projects through various city councils. He argued that Vancouver had created a unique downtown by allowing such a mix of housing, office and other uses in its downtown and that it was the way of the future. “Just when we’ve got a good thing going, we want to go backwards.”

He also made the interesting argument that “these big office buildings are the Hummers and the Escalades of the development world.”

Brook said that a homogenous office district becomes unsafe — with no one walking around at night, the lone traveller walking among the office towers is prey for bad types hanging around in deserted downtown spaces.

His colleague, development consultant and last fall’s council candidate Michael Geller, backed him up.

“In the interests of ensuring enough statistical office space, we’re potentially threatening the vitality of the streets and what has made Vancouver a success.”

Toderian and company kept saying that the downtown is still going to be mixed use, since at least a third of the available development sites in its shoulder areas could be considered for mixed use. But, they also said, the city has to preserve room for offices because, while residential can be built in many other parts of the city, there is only one place in the city where high-end/downtown-style office buildings can go.

The conversation took a few detours through the evening, with Tim Stevenson at one point bemoaning Vancouver’s boring architecture and Ellen Woodsworth worrying that Vancouver has created a “concrete jungle” downtown.

But it seemed clear that most of the councillors were gearing up to support the staff recommendations (they’ll do their official post-public hearing vote May 5), with Kerry Jang noting that Hong Kong doesn’t have people living downtown and that there won’t be a monoculture, since the CBD will allow all kinds of commercial uses from hotels to bodywork parlours. “You could have a lot of fun down there,” he reminded everyone.

Well, that’ll be a fun vote for all of them to explain to the many developers who donate to Vision and who are not very enthusiastic about the proposed policy. Those developers, a generation that has made its fortune in the last two decades building condos, don’t think office space can sell and they’ve been grumbling away in the background about how dumb they think this new policy is.

For the moment, though, it might seem as though they’ve lost — and for quite a while. This policy is intended to guide downtown development for the next 20 years. But then, maybe not. The city could still end up raising height limits in various parts of the downtown where residential is still allowed. We don’t know yet what mix of office and residential planners will recommend for the next big build-out downtown area, Northeast False Creek. And it feels to me like there are still lots of “exceptions” available for savvy developers to get hold of.

We could have started with one of those hushed-voice golf types for the first part of the meeting, when motions were being punted gently here and there to this committee and that. It felt like the new council was, possibly, going to be civilized.

Then one of those tennis commentators might have been good for the next round. Things started to warm up a little as Lonely Girl NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton started questioning why the Visionistas had to get reports back so durn fast on everything. How would staff be able to take proper holidays, she kept asking, when they were being asked to produce reports on arts councils, car-free days, sustainability and Nationalization of All Private Apartment Buildings (okay, that last one not true — just said it to get those apartment owners going again) by only January or February.

Staff, likely thinking they’d rather have no holidays at all than a super super long one like Judy Rogers is enjoying, kept reassuring everyone that they’d have no problem getting those reports done by January, so Suzanne had to give up on that one.

Round Three probably needed a soccer commentator — you know, the kind who can keep things going for the viewers as the ball just gets pushed around the field, no one really ever scores, and players occasionally fall over their own teammates.

In Round Three, things got testy for a bit, when the new COPE bloc (David Cadman and Ellen Woodsworth) suggested that the motion for car-free neighbourhoods be expanded to talking to everyone, not just three neighbourhoods, and making sure that businesses were included in the discussion because not all of them think car-free days are an unmixed blessing.

It looked like a fight might break out between them and the Visionistas, but it turned out in the end that actually they all agreed on everything. And the whole discussion helped poor Tom Timm, head of engineering, who had thought that Andrea Reimer’s motion meant he had to do a massive city-wide consultation on which three neighbourhoods the car-free Sundays should go to, along with studies on the possible impacts, like rerouting trolley buses and finding people to run the car-free days (now done by volunteers, but unlikely to be the case in future if car-free days are every Sunday for three months instead of once a year). As it turns out, Andrea’s motion meant his over-the-holidays report should set the stage for going out to consultation to find the best neighbourhoods.

But then it got to Round Four. Now that really needed a boxing commentator, someone who could tell you when something was just a vicious jab and when it was the equivalent of a knock-out punch. Round Four was the discussion about putting money into the city’s new homelessness efforts and it started out with Councillor Raymond Louie’s motion to put in $750,000 — not the $300,000 he had originally proposed. (Because they put $500,000 into a plan with the premier earlier that morning for 200 shelter beds.)

Well, people got distracted a little by David Cadman’s suggestion that the city should put all $1.34 million from the remaining money in the 2008 contingency fund into homelessness. There was all kinds of back and forth about that, with Raymond saying they weren’t putting everything in because it wouldn’t be prudent and David basically saying, Well, you said there’s a crisis so why not put all the money in that you have?

But that was nothing compared to what happened next, when former Crown prosecutor Suzanne got up and started popping out the punches.

“Unfortunately, your worship forgot to ask me to the press conference (about the homelessness emergency action team, she meant) and, at the moment, HEAT is only the product of your press conference and not the council. I hate to be churlish (I’ll bet she did), but I don’t actually know what HEAT’s mandate is. And your worship, with the greatest of respect, you cannot create entities on your own.”

And off we went into almost an hour of debate, where Suzanne kept asking them about the legalities and the process of what they had done, in creating a homelessness action team and handing out money to various initiatives.

Along the way, she managed to pin staff to the mat, with deputy city manager james Ridge saying he’d have to consult with the legal department before answering her question. And Gregor, I mean your worship, just kind of sat there taking it, not really saying anything. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was trying to maintain the neutrality of the chair or because he couldn’t think of what to say.

But eventually, the other side woke up to the fact that they were being socked in the stomach and started to hit back.

David Cadman was first up off the floor with: “I have to say, it’s a little bit rich of Councillor Anton” and then went on to list the many announcements former mayor Sam Sullivan announced about his various initiatives, long before he ever presented them to staff or to council formally. David also was the first to trot out the classic line so frequently used post-election: “We won and you didn’t so nyah nyah.” Oh, actually, that isn’t what he said. It was just the sub-text. What he actually said was: We asked the electorate, they said yes and we’re taking action.

Anyway, it went on and on forever until we were begging for mercy in the media-peanut gallery, with councillors displaying many of the idiosyncratic traits that we will undoubtedly come to know and love.

Suzanne kept going on about process and legality, grilling everyone in her prosecutorial way. She also pushed as many in-your-face buttons as your average provocative teenager (“I guess there’s no sense of facetiousness or irony in this chamber.” “I guess I’m an observer of this council and not a participant.” “This is shocking, shocking, shocking.” “This is a remarkably contemptuous way of dealing with this issue.” “I want to be assured that I am a part of this government.” Etc Etc)

And she kept making the argument that Vancouver is now trying to take on all the problems of the Lower Mainland and it already provides most of the shelter beds already, so why is it now throwing its own city money into even more.

Raymond kept interrupting her on points of order or trying to claim that there was nothing out of order with the procedure. Kerry Jang accused her of scare-mongering (before Suzanne rapped him on the knuckles and said he should not be directing comments at her personally). Geoff Meggs and Andrea Reimer mostly stayed out of it except to make succinct points. Tim Stevenson made an eloquent speech that wandered all over the issue of the homeless and why they come to Vancouver. George Chow was mercifully silent. And Gregor, towards the end, quietly said he would take into consideration her remarks about process and that he had been trying to work quickly, but perhaps things could be improved.

On the whole, not pleasant. Suzanne did raise some questions about process that piqued my curiosity and I’ll be waiting to hear the answers on those.

But I wonder how far her attacks will get her. She seemed to be trying to go after the new city manager, Penny Ballem, asking her several times to clarify city policy, which clearly Penny was in no position to do and had to pass off to the deputy, having just started the job last week. It felt like Suzanne was trying to make that point, but in an indirect way. It made me think: If you want to accuse her of being an inexperienced political appointee, why not just say so instead of trying to embarrass her this way?

Also, I’m not sure all the fuss about policy and procedure will go very far with the public. The election clearly showed that the public had little enthusiasm for Peter Ladner’s argument that the city had followed proper policy in not releasing information about the $100-million loan approved for the Olympic village developer. It’s hard to see the public storming the gates of city hall because Gregor didn’t wait to go through public consultations and policy meetings before deciding to take some action on homelessness.

It also seems to me that the public said pretty loud and clear that they did not want a council that was going to say, We’re not going to do anything because the other municipalities and the provincial government should be doing it.

Oh, by the way, the $750,000 for the homeless initiatives got approved. Then all the councillors went into  — tada — an in-camera meeting, where they spent the next four hours. I had to go back to city hall at 9 p.m. because I’d left my bag there by accident and they were all just emerging.

So that was two hours of public meeting, four hours of in camera. Welcome to your first day.

Tomorrow will be the first council meeting with real business and a chance to see Dr. Penny Ballem in the city manager’s chair.

In the meantime, Vision councillors have a raft of motions on the new agenda to kick off their new era. Among them is Councillor Tim Stevenson’s motion to ask the provincial government to stiffen up the Residential Tenancy Act.

That has apartment owners and sellers in a tizzy, warning that council is “attempting to influence the provincial government.” Uh, boys, that’s what they do every day of the week. It’s their job.

Anyway, my guess is that most of the actions in Stevenson’s are unlikely to go anywhere with this government or even, in a parallel universe, an NDP government. A nice gesture, though.

There is a chance the provincial government might move to provide a few more protection for renters, given that their NPA friends probably told them that, in the recent civic election, the NPA couldn’t even get renters to talk to them. Maybe because they feel like they’ve been thrown out to the wolves the last few years, as they grappled with rising rents, economic evictions, demolitions, a zero vacancy rate, and everything else that strikes fear into the heart of renters. By the way, the latest CMHC report came out today and the vacancy rate is now at 0.3 per cent.

Anyway, this is what’s going around in the landlord-type circles.

From: Mark Goodman [mailto:mark@goodmanreport.com]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:38 PM
To: [deleted]
Subject: The Goodman Report: Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums

Dear [deleted], While The Goodman Team was not planning to publish any further newsworthy items until the New Year, unfolding events dictate that we immediately address issues that we consider vital to our readership. There are growing concerns that Vancouver city council is attempting to influence the provincial government, as predicted by The Goodman Report a couple days ago, wherein we commented on “the spectre of increased government action concerning evictions and renovations.”

In today’s Vancouver Sun, in the front page article Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums, columnist Don Cayo writes, “Specifically, it calls on the province to amend the Residential Tenancy Act to require landlords to allow tenants evicted for the purpose of renovations to reoccupy their units once renovations are completed at the same rent as they were paying prior to the renovation.” David Goodman is on record in the forgoing article decrying the fact that Vancouver city council is advocating that landlords “subsidize tenants by making new investments that are guaranteed to show no return.”

Read: Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums >>

Further, Mary Francis Hill writes in The Vancouver Sun today on the same topic.

Read: Councillor Stevenson urges eviction protection for tenants >>

Included in Councillor Stevenson’s and Mayor Robertson’s motion to go towards Council next Tuesday, Dec 16th include:

• “First right of refusal” for rental tenants whereby landlords cannot raise rents even after substantial renovations
• Giving the City the authority to demand improvements on apartment buildings wherever and whenever they deem necessary
• Eviction notices to extend from 60 to 90 days
• Landlords to report to the Residential Tenancy Branch annually all turnovers, rent increases, and reasons for eviction.

To better appreciate the serious ramifications of Council’s initiative, please
download the MOTION ON NOTICE >>

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Be proactive and write your MLA, write the City of Vancouver, write the media and to the Mayor Gregor Robertson and Councillor Tim Stevenson.

Mayor and Council as a group: mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca

Mayor Gregor Robertson
gregor.robertson@vancouver.ca
Phone: 604.873.7621
Fax: 604.873.7750

Councillor Tim Stevenson
clrstevenson@vancouver.ca
Phone: 604.873.7247
Fax: 604.873.7750

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

British Columbia Newspapers

Vancouver Sun
sunletters@png.canwest.com

Vancouver Province
provletters@png.canwest.com

Local Newspapers

Vancouver Courier
editorial@vancourier.com

Westender
editor@westender.com

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Comment on the news stories of the day!

---

CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report To further assist our readership in setting their suite rentals at appropriate levels, we are delighted to share with you the just released CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report. Vancouver Highlights: Strong Demand for Rental Housing Vancouver’s rental apartment vacancy rate moved lower in 2008, after two years of stable but already low vacancies Same sample rents increased at a slightly slower pace than last year The stock of purpose-built rental apartments declined in 2008, while the number of rental apartment condominium units increased The rental condominium vacancy rate rose slightly compared to 2007, but remained below one per cent Vacancy rates will stay below one per cent in 2009, while rents will continue to edge up in the 3-5 per cent range CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report >>

Yours sincerely,

David & Mark Goodman

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.

The billboards are starting to go up. (There’s one a half block from my house with Peter Ladner and his smiling team saying something about creating a green and affordable city.) The Visionistas are happily out delivering lawn signs.

Yes, it’s time for the main battle. Well, almost, as soon as those two byelections in Vancouver-Fairview and the West End are out of the way. But we’ll pretend they aren’t happening.

So what is the world we’ve woken up to post-federal election? Well, media throughout the city continue to pursue the story of what’s happening with development and there seems to be fresh meat out there to feed them. CBC had a story tonight about the developers of the mega Infinity Towers project in Surrey, Jung Developments, asking for creditor protection. Their lender was Lehman Brothers. Oops, say no more. A link to their story here (go to the video clips on the left) and I’ll post the inadvertently hilarious news release that was sent out by the company earlier today. I understand there’s also another (not good) Millennium-related story about to break on a news radio station tomorrow.

That could end up colouring this campaign a fair bit. After all, land use is the main business of cities.

Speaking of which, since the development industry isn’t going so well these days, I hear that developers are letting political parties know that there won’t be as much money to throw around as in previous years. Maybe this won’t be the $2-million-per-party election after all.

That means it will all come to just plain hard work and scrappiness. So far, Vision is winning the scrappiness stakes. They had their guy, Gregor Robertson, out on the cameras in double time last Monday, when the story broke that the Olympic village might be in a bit of the mess and the city could end up being involved. Ladner’s team, as I noted previously, only managed to get out a news release late in the day.

At council yesterday, it sounds like the Visionistas ran rings around Ladner and team, as they backed them into a corner over the idea of banning plastic bags. Tim Stevenson brought this up earlier this year and it was such a hit with the public that, even though it’s far from the most effective environmental measure the city could take, he’s come back with it to champion the cause again. I understand that the meeting looked something like one of those unbalanced soccer matches where one team executes perfectly co-ordinated passes amongst the players while the other team flails around kicking the ball aimlessly and losing it on a regular basis. In the end, the NPA had to go along with Stevenson’s motion to get moving on the road to a ban. The Vision people are definitely feeling their oats. Look for Allen Garr’s column in the Courier tomorrow for more details on this.

On the other hand, the NPA’s been grinding away at all the hard policy stuff, one reason we are happy to sit at home with a beer and let them do the heavy lifting. The results of their one-day session held a few weeks ago, where they pulled together about three dozen experts in all kinds of issues, will be released tomorrow morning when they come out with their 50-point plan. (Uh-oh, this sounds a lot more ominous than Mayor Sam Sullivan’s or Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s five goals.)

In the meantime, Peter is struggling to keep up the pace because he’s been having tooth trouble. That was the reason he had to cancel his appearance at one of the thousands of Robertson-Ladner sparring matches that are still to unroll before election day. The Vancouver Peak Oil group got notified late last night that he wouldn’t be able to make it tonight because he was going in for one part of his three-part root canal sessions. Yuck.

Gregor went anyway and did his thing. Must be all that soccer training. But Peter, a marathoner, isn’t down for the count yet.

That’s all for the night. My blog stats continue to show startling numbers of you reading until 3 a.m., so enjoy.

Oh, and here’s the Infinity Towers news release.