Posts from — October 2009
2010 Games and civil liberties
This story on the BC Civil Liberties Association challenge to the city’s 2010 Games bylaws arrived in councillors’ inboxes last week just a few minutes before this fact sheet and this letter from VPD Deputy Chief Steve Sweeney outlining how his force proposes to ensure longstanding events like the Women’s Memorial March can continue during the Games period.
Bottom line: VPD and city staff and working to ensure the Women’s Memorial March and the Chinese New Year celebrations go ahead on the dates selected by organizers.
October 12, 2009
October 12, 2009
Forest industry labour showdown looming large
For Steve Hunt, the steelworker now leading B.C.’s woodworkers, the recession is already four years old – not one – and the consequences are “ugly.”
“In the forest industry and manufacturing it’s devastating,” said Hunt.
“We saw it coming three years ago, with mill closures out of the norm. People were used to closures for fire season, snow or market conditions, but these were permanent shutdowns.
“It was overcapacity, in some respects, but the softwood-lumber deal had a devastating effect.”
The result is an industry in freefall, he said, taking down hundreds of jobs and dozens of communities while the forest companies battle among themselves and the government appears stumped for answers.
“I’m convinced they don’t know what to do,” Hunt said of Victoria.
He has seen three cabinet ministers come and go, along with a number of task forces, inquiries and forest czars since his union took in 30,000 B.C. woodworkers in a 2004 merger. And it’s no better on the employer side.
“There is no industry leadership anymore,” said Hunt, who is leading his members in bargaining with Interior forest companies this year.
“In the days of Forest Industrial Relations there was some semblance of order. Now we don’t see it.
“In the last round of coast bargaining, we had four different tables. The companies refused to meet in the same room.
“They showed outright contempt for each other.”
It was a stark contrast to Hunt’s experience in the mining sector, where competition is fierce, but firms will co-operate for the sake of their industry.
In forestry, he said, “they like to beat up on each other.”
As elected director of the union’s District 3, the proud former miner leads 55,000 steelworkers from Manitoba to B.C.
With countless collective agreements under his belt and the largest private-sector membership in the province, he is one of the province’s most seasoned labour leaders.
These days his work is dominated by the crisis in forest communities.
“There is terrible uncertainty and fear in forest towns,” Hunt said.
“Mackenzie and Port Alberni are the poster-children towns for the crisis, because they have the most extreme situation, but it’s everywhere.
“Families are now sacrificing assets. They own a house, but they can’t give it away.
“They don’t want to leave because a break in service will lose them half their pension.”
Without a recovery – and none is in sight – they lose everything.
The union’s 10-point plan for the forest industry has so far fallen on deaf ears.
The union has proposed collecting stumpage “at the back door of the mill,” rather than when the tree is cut, opening the door to stumpage incentives for value-added manufacturing.
Export logs would pay the highest rate.
B.C. forest workers are also pushing for some restoration of appurtenancy, the policy that linked harvest rights to local processing.
But with Victoria’s forest policy in a state of paralysis, the focus is on the bargaining table.
However, forest employers, apparently convinced this is the best of all possible worlds, are focusing on relentless cost-cutting while they wait for the American market to stagger to its feet.
The Interior companies, whose contract with the union expired June 30, have a long list of concession demands.
Steel’s hard-nosed, pragmatic response to such demands has its roots in the mining sector: the books are opened and workers, Hunt said, “look for economies elsewhere to try to help management.”
Any concessions are matched by a share of profits when economic health returns.
But with the industry in a deep slump, talks are moving slowly, opening the possibility that a contract might not be in place when coast firms come to the table next year.
The scene would be set for provincewide confrontation that could be decisive for the forest sector.
October 2009
October 10, 2009
Tracking Vancouver’s missing children
The latest report from BTAworks, the urban think tank sponsored by Bing Thom Associates, highlights declining enrolment in Vancouver’s schools, noting that enrolment has declined while population increased.
Councillor Andrea Reimer, a former school trustee, points to the Vancouver School Board’s open enrolment policy, imposed by the province, as a source of the problem. This policy allows parents to enrol their children anywhere in the city.
Better-off eastside parents move their children west — away from schools graded poorly by the Fraser Institute or to escape some of the consequences of tight school funding — which hit those schools harder. They are taking up west side spaces vacated by children headed for private or independent schools. So enrolment drops in the east, but is steady in the west, while the number of children in the city grows.
Andy Yan, the researcher and planner who wrote the brief, acknowledges all these factors, but says they are “compounded by a lack of affordable housing that is suitable for young families with children.”
Michael Heeney, a Bing Thom principal who is a member of the Vancouver Economic Development Commission asks that “if we cannot create a city where families want to send their children to the school down the block, what chances do we have of creating the greenest city in the world?”
More proof, he says, that generating affordable housing is one of the city’s greatest sustainability challenges.
October 8, 2009
October 8, 2009
KPMG report tears cover off Olympic Village developer selection
The critical new element in the KPMG report on Vancouver Olympic Village financing, released today at city council, is the disclosure that Millenium Development Corp. was actually third and last of the three firms that competed to build the project based on the city’s evaluation matrix.
In an April 2006 report, council was told “the three proposals were of a remarkably high calibre and were very close in terms of Evaluation Matrix points.” The exact ranking was not disclosed. Although all three bids were compliant, Millennium was last on marks.
How did the firm go on to win? KPMG explains that:
“No points were allocated to the offer price in the Matrix. However, the scores developed using the Matrix were then re-evaluated by undertaking a sensitivity analysis and allocating between 0% and 90% to the purchase price. This indicated that once the price was allocated at least 14.5% . . . Millennium Development Corp., which had the lowest score in the Matrix, would be the winning bidder.
“Detailed financial information was not included in the submissions from the three developers and, accordingly, there was a limited basis to assess financial ability.”
In other words, someone decided to apply the weighting necessary for Millennium to win, based on price, but did not determine if the firm had the capacity to pay. City Manager Penny Ballem could not say who had made the call when pressed by Councillor Kerry Jang.
When Millennium later ran into trouble, the city wound up paying more than $100 million in project advances, then taking over financing from a Wall St. hedge fund with powers that it took a special session of the Legislature to obtain.
It was, as Mayor Gregor Robertson put it, a “train wreck,” but a train wreck caused by the NPA’s mismanagement, not by Millennium. Millennium did everything it had to under the bidding process and will now deliver the project on time to VANOC — the only good news of the morning.
October 6, 2009
October 6, 2009
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