Posts from — May 2009
TripEd: a common sense fare solution
Three happy riders on the TripEd campaign bus.
When city librarian Shula Leonard noticed that elementary school classes were no longer dropping in because transit fares were too high, she turned anger into action. The result is TripEd, a grassroots campaign demanding that Translink create a $10 transit pass for use by schools and others in off-peak hours.
It sounds like a no-brainer: it creates new revenue for Translink, supports public education, requires little or no extra service. So far, though, Translink won’t bite.
At the May 15 official launch of TripEd at the Vancouver Children’s Festival, Leonard had the support of Vancouver School Board Chair Patti Bacchus and Mayor Gregor Robertson — I was on hand to bring greetings from council — as well as legendary children’s entertainer Fred Penner and more than 40 parents and their kids.
With Translink’s current fare structure, a simple outing can cost $100 for transit alone. Private bus rental is an unrealistic alternative. Often equally-expensive, private buses can also be very unreliable. The day of the TripEd launch, four classes found themselves stranded at the Children’s Festival for hours when their rental buses returned hours later than scheduled.
Look for TripEd to join U-Pass as a new feature of Translink’s fare structure.
May 20, 2009
Economic management: a contrary view
Did the Campbell government build a post-secondary education and training system that could help us through economic hard times? In this column for Business in Vancouver, I say no.
May 16, 2009
Main and Prior: art, punk, slums, condos
901 Main artists Dennis Brown and Eri Ishii in Ishii's studio
The dirty, noisy corner of Prior and Main, where conflicting pressures in the city’s life are grinding together, is seething with conflict and controversy.
The 901 Main artists, who highlighted Vancouver’s crisis in creative space with their 2008 campaign to fight eviction, now confront a new threat, just one of the arguments raging among the communities living in parallel universes in this two-block area.
The activism of the 901 Main artists last year produced a commitment from Amacon, which wants to convert their studios to a private residence for Amacon’s owner, to provide new space at an upcoming heritage development further south on Main.
But Amacon wanted much higher rents at the new location and the talks foundered earlier this year. Now the developer is imposing major increases at 901 Main, forcing some artists out and placing the future of the entire group at risk. This for a building where the toilets often don’t work and residents bear the brunt of basic maintenance and security. The 901 group is a pillar of the Eastside Cultural Crawl.
The 901 Main building, a former BC Electric workers hostel built just before the First World War, stands above the Main St. off-ramp of the Georgia Viaduct, which nearly destroyed Chinatown and Strathcona in the 1970s. Across the street is a condominium project and the old American Hotel, boarded up after police a police crackdown on gangs and drug dealers several years ago.
Next door is the Cobalt Hotel, owned by the notorious Sahota family. The Cobalt is one of the properties that housing advocates think of when they call the Sahotas “slumlords.”
Some may want the Cobalt closed upstairs, but downstairs, where the punk rock bar programming is often organized by unsuccessful independent council candidate wendythirteen, there’s a grassroots campaign to Keep the Cobalt Open. The pro-Cobalt movement, which sees the 2010 Winter Olympic Games as the dark force threatening their venue, numbers more than 5,300 on Facebook.
In a recent issue of Vancouver’s excellent street paper Megaphone, wendythirteen reported noise complaints from neighbours had triggered three police calls in in less than a week. Was it noise from the bar or the shouts of distraught tenants upstairs?
No one was sure and city officials were unaware of the complaints, but wendythirteen is unready to help the Sahotas improve soundproofing: “I can’t afford it, nor am I willing to do it,” she told Megaphone. “The slumlords won’t fix their shit — why should I put money into fixing their building?”
She blames new residents in the latest Citygate tower behind the Cobalt for the complaints, a reasonable assumption given the top-of-market prices they paid to live next to an off-ramp and behind a skid road hotel with a punk rock bar.
The Citygate folks are doing their best, conducting periodic cleanups, needle collections and Keep Vancouver Spectacular anti-litter drives. These are duties formerly undertaken by the artists, who may soon leave.
Can’t these people all get along? Perhaps it’s time for a community meeting.
After all, they live there. The Sahotas and the Amacon owners do not.
May 15, 2009
B.C. has bobbled the post-secondary education and training ball
With BC’s economy shedding 69,000 jobs since October, the heat is on for the province’s post-secondary education system.
These newly jobless workers expect BC’s college and institutes can provide them with the skills and knowledge necessary to find new employment.
But this critical component of any economic recovery is in lamentable condition after years of provincial government restructuring, rebranding and underfinancing.
“So far our pattern of job loss is tracking Ontario, with a delay of six months to a year,” says Cindy Oliver, president of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators, the union representing the overwhelming majority of BC’s college instructors.
“As unemployment rose in Ontario, so did enrolment. It’s already up 10 percent. It’s hard to see how our BC system could absorb an increase of that magnitude given the funding pressures we face.”
By contrast, BC’s latest budget forecasts a very modest two percent growth in enrolment this year, despite the deepening job losses that were already evident when Finance Minister Colin Hanson tabled it.
Oliver points to last year’s 2.6 percent cut in operating grants to post-secondary institutions as the beginning of serious shortfalls in post-secondary capacity.
Despite feel-good rebranding of various colleges into instant “universities,” the 2009 provincial budget forecasts a virtual flatline for funding in future years. Oliver calculates that provincial funding per student, on an inflation-adjusted basis, had actually declined to $9,145 in 2008 from $10,184 in 2001 when the Liberals took office.
Yes, tuition revenue is expected to climb. Unbelievably, says Oiver, the province’s 2009 budget “projects that tuition revenues will surpass corporate tax revenues to the provincial treasury.”
But will unemployed workers likely to be able to finance year-over-year tuition costs when they’ve just lost their jobs? The Canadian Federation of Students says tuition costs are up 100 percent since 2001, BC tuition fees are well ahead of other provinces, and student debt higher than anywhere in Canada outside the Maritimes.
For unemployed workers who are using savings to pay the rent, a $500 tuition cost could be an insurmountable barrier to achieving the training needed to move to a new career. (The 2009 budget provided no increase in student financial assistance.)
Then there’s the apprenticeship system, only now coming up for air after years of government-driven restructuring, reorganization and partial privatization.
The 2002 decision to demolish the Industry Training and Apprenticeship Commission (ITAC) in favour of the Industry Training Authority, which was to turn over the direction and funding of training to Industry Training Organizations, recently received a failing grade from provincial Auditory General John Doyle.
Despite government claims to the contrary, Doyle found that apprenticeship numbers are just now recovering to the levels achieved under ITAC in 2002.
Costs, however, have ballooned as the government tried to jump start the welter of industry training organizations that tried to step into the void, each with its own CEO, administrative costs and jurisdictional claims.
Unlike previous provincial recessions, which saw the economy contract and then resume growth, this one looks like a different kind of beast. Will forestry ever resume its leading role? What kind of economy is built on industries like oil and gas, or private power, which spin money without spinning off many jobs?
If BC had used the boom to build an accessible, innovative and flexible education system, capable of constantly retraining a highly-skilled workforce, the answers would be easier to find. We did not.
Business in Vancouver, May 5-11, 2009
May 9, 2009
Website development by