Posts from — February 2009

With next week’s council motion on affordable housing, proposed by Councillor Raymond Louie and me, the Vision team begins delivering on the campaign commitments to build a legacy of affordable market and rental housing.

Action can’t come too soon. Also up for debate next week is the demolition permit for 4550 Fraser St.,  a significant and affordable 89-unit rental housing complex slated for redevelopment as condominiums.

The rate of change bylaw, which requires one-for-one replacement of rental units in much of the city, bisects the site, so 48 rental units will be built as part of the overall development, but they will not be affordable under the current plan. In all, 167 units are affected by the development plans. Between 30 and 40 of the units remain occupied by tenants unable to find new accommodation in a city where the vacancy rate is at .3 percent.

This project alone will affect two percent of the city’s rental housing stock in the C2 or commercial zone, which is not covered by the rate of change bylaw. (City staff report that 1,500 units have been proposed for construction in this zone.)

Solutions are available to generate affordable market housing and the private sector is ready to play a role. The Vancouver City Planning Commission is proposing one innovative approach – special zoning around transit nodes — in a report also before council next week. For more solutions, watch Monte Paulsen’s series in the The Tyee, also beginning today.

The key will be city leadership. That’s why next week’s motion proposes a quick consultation with city experts, then sets out a firm timetable for action.

Hazel Venzon, Lissa Neptuno, and Melissa Dionoso (from left) give voice to the women who immigrate as live-in caregivers. Alex Waterhouse-Hayward photo.

More documentary than drama, Nanay, a testimonial play about the experience of live-in caregivers that concluded today at Chapel Arts, is a challenge to Canadians who think they understand Canada’s immigration system — or our child care and health care systems.

More than 22,000 women work in Canada today under the Live-in Caregiver Program, the overwhelming majority of them Filipino. They are at work tonight in countless Canadian homes, providing round-the-clock care for seniors or children whose families cannot or will not do it themselves.

Often nurses, accountants or skilled professionals in the Philippines, they join the LCP to earn the income necessary to provide their own children a better life. They are paid very little, suffer long-term separation from their own families, are vulnerable to sexual and economic exploitation, and frequently fail to overcome the obstacles to their real goal of landed immigrant status in Canada. They are paying the price for our failure to create decent care for our children and seniors.

Today’s two performances at Chapel Arts were jammed. Crowds circulated from the upstairs performance area, where the audience met actors representing Canadian employers — teachers, lawyers, Yaletown career couples — to a downstairs installation that recreated a caregiver’s bedroom. This tiny room — they are often in a cold basement storage area — is complete with letters from home, calling cards, rosaries and the heart-breaking personal testimonies of Filipino women working in the program.

The audience discussion at the end of the 90-minute “performance” provoked conflicting emotions from those present, many of them Filipino. For some, including some Philippine Women’s Centre activists, the LCP is a racist program that must be scrapped. For others, including a nurse whose mother used the program to bring most of her family to Canada, it is a deeply flawed bridge to a better life that must be reformed to protect the women involved. For her, the question is “how will we treat our old people and our children and fight for them?”

A key attraction in the LCP for Filipino women is the prospect of permanent residency if they complete 24 months of work during their 36 months of LCP term in Canada. For those 24 months, they are at the mercy of their employers. Failure to complete the two years’ work means deportation. It is no exaggeration to say, as one audience member did, that Canada is “letting women come to work in modern-day slavery.”

The LCP is the template now in use by the Conservative government to reshape Canadian immigration as a temporary workforce program in which every worker is dependent on the needs and whims of an individual employer. It is the tool we are using to help those with money overcome the absence of quality public child care and seniors’ care.

The Chapel Arts performance, mounted by the Philippine Women’s Centre, was part of the PUSH International Performing Arts Festival, an  element of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. For more, read Carlito Pablo’s assessment here.

Most of the people who work in Vancouver can’t afford to live here. That’s why Vision Vancouver’s 2008 platform pledged to create “an affordable housing boom” to tackle one of Vancouver’s most persistent problems: the lack of affordable rental or market housing for the vast majority of citizens who make our city work. I’ve been working with Councillor Raymond Louie on a motion for council debate that seeks to make our campaign commitment a reality.

If we’re successful, the benefits could be even greater than we expected during the campaign. This shrewd and insightful comment by Marc Lee indicates that a major casualty of the economic slide — housing construction — could be the place where government stimulus would do the most good. It will not only generate jobs, it will make our cities more socially inclusive and sustainable.

The clatter of helicopters over Vancouver participating in Operation Silver, the 2010 Olympic Games security exercise, underlined the counter-terrorism element of Games preparations.

A very different perspective emerged during today’s council debate on a  motion by Councillors Raymond Louie and George Chow to cut off city funding for the Ambassadors program, the private security operation directed by a number of Business Improvement Associations.

Real community security needs to tackle the root causes of crime, argued PIVOT’s Laura Track, but it must also reflect community priorities and concerns.

“Real consultation is essential,”  she said, “to identify the security concerns of the community. One of their priorities could be the conditions of the buildings they live in.  It could be the concern of sex trade workers to be safe.  Or their concerns could relate to being illegally locked out of their rooms.” Track opposed funding for the Ambassadors based on the findings of a recent PIVOT report on private security.

Track’s comments pointed to a possible model, already used in the Carnegie Outreach Project, to deliver on the city’s IOC commitment to consult on Games security before plans are finalized. Community leaders are getting frustrated. With Operation Gold, the final exercise, planned for the fall, that consultation needs to begin soon, as council reminded its Olympic partners earlier this month.