Posts from — October 2011

With the election scarcely three weeks away, almost no time has been spent on what all agree is perhaps the most critical issue facing Vancouver: the cost of housing.

Mayor Gregor Robertson’s platform announcement yesterday set out VisionVancouver’s proposals to tackle the problem, including a key pledge to begin work on affordable market housing.

After a scant three questions, however, reporters turned to more pressing issues, like the possibility of rats at the site of Occupy Vancouver.

Nonetheless, Robertson spelled out what Vision Vancouver will do if given a new mandate Nov. 19. Here’s exactly what the Mayor said:

“It wasn’t that long ago that people thought Vancouver’s toughest social problems were permanent fixtures.
Homelessness… unaffordable housing… Too bad, some people would say, but you’d better get used to them. They’re just part of the backdrop, like the mountains and oceans.
Well, three years ago, homelessness hit the crisis point. And the people of Vancouver decided it was time to start moving mountains.
We knew Vancouver could do better. We knew we have to do better. It’s what led me to run for Mayor. [Read more →]

It was one of those “you’ve got to be kidding” moments when you’re sure something has been lost in translation: a guide on Guangzhou’s brand new 22-kilometre rapid transit line in 2005 solemnly declaring that a further 220 kilometres of underground rapid transit would be completed by 2010.

Wasn’t there an extra zero there?

No. In China, where community consultation is an empty category and money is plentiful, things move quickly.

The lines were done by 2010 and Guangzhou keeps on building. Here in Metro, meanwhile, we’ve finally just greenlighted another 11 kilometres on the Evergreen Line, which won’t roll for another four years at the earliest.

I was staffing Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell on a tour of Guangzhou’s gleaming  German-built underground system. Vancouver’s sister city was vaulting, along with the rest of the country, from a city of bicycles in the 1980s to an automobile gridlock zone in the 1990s and then a rapid transit city 10 years later.

In 2005, Vancouver had just ground out the decision to complete the Canada Line, a fractious regional debate that itself took many years. Still to come: a decision on new funding sources for Translink, without which some rrapid transit relief for riders on the Broadway Corridor is impossible.

Metro Vancouver won’t achieve carbon neutrality in 2012, as required by the BC Climate Action Charter, and wants a provincial commitment it won’t face penalties as a result, according to staff reports heading to the Metro board Friday.

The staff reports (see Section E 2.3 on the consent agenda here) are a response to the province’s Becoming Carbon Neutral — A Guidebook for Local Governments in BC, the latest version of which was released in May. Although local governments have been told they won’t be penalized for missing carbon neutrality if they are “making progress,” the reports to Metro make it clear that some fundamental problems remain, including:

• the requirement that municipalities purchase offsets from the private sector, if necessary, to become neutral, instead of investing the money directly in greenhouse gas reductions in their own communities;
• the lack of a clear written commitment to eliminate penalties for communities that are “making progress” but are not carbon neutral; and
• lack of clarity on calculation of benefits from organic waste diversion.

In a related report, Metro staff warn that the region could face delays in procurement of a proposed waste to energy plant and up to $3 million in new costs for the existing plant under the province’s cap and trade plans.

Just growing pains? Or a sign that the Climate Action Plan is coming unravelled?

The discovery of two Rivers Inlet sockeye salmon smolts infected with deadly ISA (infectious salmon anemia) is dreadful news for BC’s wild stocks, not just because this disease has caused devastation elsewhere, but also because its arrival here was predictable and preventable.

As the editor of The Fisherman, the publication of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers, I did extensive coverage during the 1980s about the disease risk posed by farmed salmon, particularly non-native stocks like Atlantic salmon.

I also had the opportunity to visit the Owikeno watershed, the vast wilderness nursery in the central coast — now dubbed the Great Bear Rainforest — where the Rivers Inlet runs spawned. [Read more →]