Posts from — March 2009

Lawyer Richard Peck’s Vancouver Olympic Village Document Leak Review, Phase One, distributed at council yesterday, contains this striking disclosure: the much-ballyhooed numbered document system used to protect the Olympic loan secret had never been used before in the city’s history.

In other words, the very first time the City of Vancouver issued numbered documents to city councillors, a leak occurred that arguably changed the course of the 2008 civic election.

Peck’s report dryly documents the panic that followed the discovery that a copy of the secret report was missing after a lengthy in camera meeting Oct. 14, the day before the election began in earnest.

City legal services director Francie Connell told Peck that the numbering procedure, created by former deputy city manager Jody Andrews on the fly, was unprecedented and “extraordinary.”

Andrews and others were rushing to complete the report, revising up the last minute. It contained sensitive details of the options confronting council in the wake of Fortress Investment Group’s decision to deny new financing to the Olympic Village project. In fact, Fortress had been withholding funds for months, a fact not disclosed to councillors until they received Andrews’ report just half an hour before the meeting.

Each copy was numbered and had a councillor’s name on the cover. But “no sign-off or check-out system was used to confirm that all of the reports had been turned in before the participants left the room.” Councillors simply tossed their copies on the table as they left the meeting in the Mayor’s office.

Ten minutes after the meeting ended, Andrews discovered one copy — Peter Ladner’s — was missing. He approached Ladner and asked for the report. Ladner satisfied Andrews he didn’t have it. Councillors Kim Capri and B.C. Lee were approached and questioned as well. No report. Peck’s account of the search ends there.

Two days later,  Ladner’s missing report reappeared on B.C. Lee’s desk.

On Nov. 6, Mason filed his front-page scoop entitled “Athletes’ village to get $100-million loan.”

But as Peck notes,  “it is not clear whether the quoted information [in Mason's report] was drawn from the report itself or from the meeting minutes.”

The leak may not have been derived from the report at all. And as Peck notes, no one is even sure if  Mason actually received a copy of either document or had simply received an oral briefing. Mason isn’t saying.

But let’s assume it was Ladner’s report that somehow formed the basis of Mason’s story. What violations of protocol occurred that allowed this to happen?

“In fact,” Peck writes, “the City does not have any policies to govern the collection and destruction of confidential information after an in camera meeting.”

Former Mayor Sam Sullivan demanded a police probe of the leak, which is continuing. Calculated media leaks were organized to suggest that Councillor Raymond Louie was responsible for the leak because swipe card data that somehow found its way into media hands implied the Louie was in the City Hall councillor’s area about the time Ladner’s report reappeared. He steadfastly denied the allegations.

So what other possibilities are there for a source? What areas are police likely to probe?

Take your pick:

• “It is unknown at this point how many people had access to the drafts of this report in the hours and days leading up to the Council meeting,” but they include staff in the Clerk’s Office, the City Manager’s Office, reeal estate and legal services.
• “No one kept track of who returned their reports.”
• It is “not known how many persons within the City Clerk’s office are ‘designated’ to perform confidential photocopying.”
• It is the city’s “common practice to allow Council memberrs to take the contents of the in camera package with them.”
• There is no consistent procedure on shredding.
• The source could have been the minutes of the meeting, a possibility never raised until Peck’s report.

This could take a while.

Can Vancouver’s slumlords be forced to clean up their properties? A promise to step up enforcement of standards of maintenance bylaws was a key plank in Vision Vancouver’s election platform, a reflection of the widespread outrage at appalling conditions in some Downtown Eastside hotels.

In response to a motion moved by Councillor Tim Stevenson and me in December, city staff have prepared an analysis of the city’s options. (Download it here, item 4.) It will be debated before the Planning and Environment Committee meeting Thursday.

Housing activists have demanded that the city use its powers under the Vancouver Charter to step in when landlords fail to maintain their buildings. The city has the power, if necessary, to do the repairs itself and charge the owner for its trouble.

But the staff report argues the existing “collaborative” approach is producing good results and offers court injunctions, if necessary, as a better way to force reform.

Two families have faced the most criticism for the conditions of their buildings, the Sahotas and the Laudisios. The Sahotas, in particular, have been at the centre of a number of controversies regarding their properties — like the Regent, the Balmoral, the Astoria and the Cobalt — and are regularly called slumlords. They have not, to my knowledge, ever sued.

Laura Track, of Pivot Legal, says they are “responsible for the most serious and ongoing violations of the law.” She terms conditions in their hotels “shocking and atrocious.” (Remarkably, Portland Hotel Society director Mark Townshend defended the two families, calling criticism of them “very, very unfair.” The Sahotas are providing a service, he argued, for the hard-to-house. Housing Minister Rich Coleman scoffed at the suggestion: “they would just rather let it deteriorate to the level they can redevelop it.”)

The staff perspective is unlikely to satisfy housing activists, who will review the report’s appendices with interest. They list (with identities withheld), the city’s enforcement record during the past two years. It seems clear that collaboration works for most of the landlords most of the time, but not for some landlords at any time.

If the city can’t find a way to crack down on repeat offenders, why should ethical property owners make the effort?

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Vancouver’s Japantown, the neighbourhood centred on Oppenheimer Park, is it’s stubborn refusal to die. A Japantown Multicultural Neighbourhood Celebration celebrates that fact March 28 with a day-long program of cultural events and public forums that “reflect upon the journeys of the past, the diversity of the present and the promise of the future.”

In November 1941, the Interurban trams that trundled along Powell St. to Burnaby passed through a community of 5,000, with a full range of stores, three daily papers and a vital community life that spanned the political spectrum. In Vancouver and Steveston, the Japanese Canadians had their own hospitals. Stanley Park held the memorial to the Japanese Canadians who formed their own regiment in the First World War, suffering up to 90 percent casualties at Vimy.

In the wake of Pearl Harbour, this 60-year-old community was utterly destroyed. Between December 1941 and April 1942, every single property and home except one — the Japanese Language School on Alexander St. —- was seized and its owners or residents deported to internment camps. Every boat, car, truck, piece of furniture and all but 150 pounds per person of personal effects was expropriated and then sold or destroyed.

Despite this Canadian act of apartheid, the community persists, albeit in very different form. On March 28, I’ll be leading a walking tour, with my friend Lorene Oikawa, of the labour history sites that dot the neighbourhood. The research for this little project has given me a fascinating glimpse of our city’s past. Join us at Chapel Arts at Powell and Dunlevy at 10 a.m.

More details of the rest of the day’s events can be found here.

Welding rail for the 2010 streetcar project on 6th Ave.

Crews are hard at work along 6th Ave. between Moberley and Granville Island welding continuous rail for the Downtown Streetcar pilot project. The project is to be completed in time for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. A few days after welding began, the north rail ran like a strip of steel spaghetti for hundreds of feet along the roadbed, which has been prepared for concrete ties.

Bombardier, the project developer, is bringing two ultra-modern cars from Brussels for the Games, each 32 metres long. Together, they are expected to ferry one million riders back and forth between the Second Ave. Canada Line Station and Granville Island in the 60 days between Jan. 21 and March 21, 2010.

The city’s dream of a downtown streetcar began with a council approval in principal in 1999. Ten years later, this $8.5 million pilot program is scheduled for a 60-day trial. (A run all the way to Science World died when the security zone for the Olympic Village stretched across 1st Ave.)

Council after council has endorsed the project, but city staff has warned that the city can’t afford to build the project without senior government funding. Phase 1, from Granville Island to Waterfront Station, would cost $60 million in 2005 dollars. That’s serious money, but the current Translink discussion paper for the next 10 years of transit investment makes no mention of the Vancouver streetcar.

Unless there’s a dramatic change in federal and provincial commitment to greener transporation options, the pilot program could be all the city sees of 21st century light rail transit.