Posts from — February 2010

The 2010 Games were an acid test for Translink and the region’s transportation engineers: get athletes to every event on time, move 30 percent of drivers off the road, run the system flat out for the better part of a month, set new records for capacity and efficiency.

If they failed when the eyes of the world were on them, they could count on Victoria to make their lives nasty, brutish and short.

As Frances Bula points out in today’s Globe, they have exceeded all expectations, shattering previous ridership records and moving unprecedented volumes of people.

Translink is the public corporation that Victoria loves to hate. A comptroller general’s report was cooked up to seek evidence of waste in Translink, with limited results.

Regional consensus on a massive investment in public transit was torpedoed last fall by Transportation Minister Shirley Bond.

Finally, February’s Throne Speech made this ominous pledge:

The success of the new Canada Line has reinforced government’s commitment to invest record amounts in public transit, fix TransLink and get on with the Evergreen Line.

Fix Translink? Which part is broken?

Bring on the record investment, but please save the fixes for a real problem.

NDP MLA Adrian Dix and Jim Sinclair, BC Federation of Labour president, with locked-out members of UNITE-HERE Local 40, at YVR.

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games have driven home the importance of tourism to the local economy, and you can’t have a strong industry without a capable, motivated workforce.

But that  lesson seems to be been lost on some employers, who have told their workers they will be disposed of after the Games.

YVR food service workers employed by HMS Host — many of them with more than 10 years’ service — are threatened with job loss at the end of the Games as HMS Host tears out a Milestones outlet to make way for a White Spot.

There will be jobs at the White Spot, but HMS Host wants to go non-union. After weeks of talks, 300 workers walked out for 24 hours yesterday, shutting 16 retail outlets.

Wages, although low, are not the issue. The key union concern is employment security.

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Saanich South NDP MLA Lana Popham is mobilizing cyclists against the HST with this “critical mass” approach to lobbying the Legislature:

Although the arts are celebrated for their contribution to human society — recent provincial cuts notwithstanding — few have made the same case for sport, even though many more participate in sports than in the arts.

Is the International Olympic Committee contributing to a better world through sport?

Bruce Kidd, one of Canada’s most famous Olympic athletes and dean of physical education at the University of Toronto, takes the question head-on in this podcast issued by Intellectual Muscle, a remarkable series of lectures on sport and society sponsored by the Globe and Mail in association with VANOC.

No starry-eye booster, Kidd is candid about the IOC’s shortcomings, but spells out how the IOC “deserves credit for the steady, persistent way it has spread sport around the world.” Although critical of the IOC’s refusal to allow women’s ski jumping, for example, Kidd argues the IOC has done much to advance women’s sports, much more than the professional sports leagues that dominate North American sport, where “women’s sport has been symbolically annihilated.”

Kidd is visiting Vancouver this week and again March 13 for a lecture at the Chan Centre on the Vancouver Games’ long-term legacy.