Vancouver City Councillor

Despite nine years of unremitting hostility from the BC Liberals, the province’s construction unions are again making their presence felt.

Buoyed by the continuing need for skilled workers who can complete complex tasks on time, without compromising quality, a new coalition of building trades unions is finding allies in the private sector for project labour agreements. These agreements would see multi-billion dollar projects built entirely union.

It’s a return to an old labour relations arrangement that the Liberals have done their best to stamp out.

In this column for Business in Vancouver (Aug. 24 – 30 edition) I outlined how this trend played out in the debate over Metro Vancouver’s solid waste management plans: [Read more →]

City engineers have been working closely with Hornby St. businesses during August to identify and mitigate any negative impacts of the proposed Hornby St. bike lanes. (I hope to take a long walk up and down the street myself this week to meet with as many businesses as possible to prepare for a report to council expected later this month.)

Meanwhile, from indefatigable cycling advocate Richard Campbell, this small study from San Francisco suggests that hope, not despair, is in order for those who do business on Hornby. Two-thirds of the merchants interviewed four years after bike lanes were installed report a favorable impact. (Arno Schortinghuis advises that the San Francisco project involved conversion of a traffic lane in each direction to a bike lane. So the street changed from two lanes in each direction with parking to one lane, a bike lane and parking on each side.)

The findings in brief: [Read more →]

The refrain of the Song of the Sockeye and choruses of The Coho Flash Silver echoed through the Maritime Labour Centre yesterday as the family and friends of fisherman Al Brown gathered to remember a remarkable man whose life summed up so many of the strengths and values of BC’s now devastated salmon fishery.

The 30 million sockeye now thronging the Fraser have come too late for those who hoped to follow in Brown’s footsteps, fashioning a living by harvesting a renewable resource that supported commercial fishing for more than a century.

Brown died Aug. 15, before the magnitude of the current run was confirmed, but if advancing years and declining health had not taken him, the news of this latest monumental example of fisheries mismanagement might have finished him on its own. He was 86. [Read more →]

Tranlink’s latest  update on the Canada Line’s 100,000-trip a day numbers has sparked dreams of moving up the date at which Translink will be able to retire the debt required to build the project in the first place. Translink pegs that happy day as early as sometime in 2022, rather than 2025.

That day could have come even earlier, of course, if the project had been funded entirely by the public sector. Instead, the province forced Translink to contribute a share of capital and to repay the construction, operation and maintenance costs of Intransit, the private operator. Private capital always costs more.

Fortunately, the P3 craze seems to be fading, with the Port Mann Bridge replacement and the Evergreen Line both marked down for public finance.