The Mainlander | 2011 October

From the monthly archives: "October 2011"

INTERVIEW | The Civic Green Party’s Adriane Carr & Stuart Mackinnon

By Tristan Markle and Sean Antrim On October 30, 2011 · Add Comment

Here Sean Antrim and Tristan Markle of the Mainlander interview Adriane Carr and Stuart Mackinnon of Vancouver's Civic Green Party. Mackinnon is an incumbent Parks Board Commissioner, and is running for re-election. Carr is a candidate for City Council. On June 26 2011, the Civic Greens rejected Vision/COPE's offer of only one candidate spot as part of a joint slate. Instead, the Greens are running three independent candidates - one for Council, one for Parks Board, and one for School Board. The election takes place Nov 19 2011. Sean Antrim: What are you going to do to make Vancouver an affordable City? Adriane Carr: That’s a big question. It has to be answered, and I want to really focus on that. It’s not an easy set of solutions, because we’ve had programs like EcoDensity from the NPA and the STIR program from Vision, neither are delivering affordable housing. These programs are also creating social conflict, with spot rezonings for incredibly high towers where they don’t fit. People are upset.To get affordable housing you have to work within the zoning that’s there so we don’t get the social conflict. People are okay with four storey or six storey or even smaller high-rises if it fits in with the neighbourhood. So let’s get that straight. There are incentives that are being offered to developers that include density incentives that I think should be off the table. There are other incentives that could bring down the cost of housing. Those incentives might include reducing parking requirements in areas where you have good transit. You have to make a deal with the developers that says, if we give you these incentives, the cost of construction is going to come down, and that will be passed on, in a lower cost of housing, whether it’s rental or not. We’ve also got incredibly strong lobbying from the City to the federal government to reinstate the kind of tax breaks that enticed developers to build intentional rental housing. I’ve talked to developers about whether or not that would work, and they’ve said yes, especially if you include some ongoing tax breaks for upgrading and maintaining rental housing, because it’s hard for delopers to say “I could build this condo unit, sell the unit off, make a bundle, or do I build this rental housing unit which has ongoing costs.” You have to entice private investors, you have to put those tax breaks in place. One idea that Stuart and I have talked about is creating some of those affordable units in neighbourhoods along the transit corridors, near shopping and community centres already are, and create them in a variety of sizes and types so that people who are reaching retirement can sell a home that’s too big and move in to a unit that’s in the neighbourhood they love. We don’t have that in Vancouver right now, that level of affordable housing for every stage of the life cycle. Tristan Markle: Where are some neighbourhoods or areas where that might work? Adrianne Carr: You name one it will work. I can’t think of a place in Vancouver where there aren’t people who would relish the chance to do that. Dunbar, Marpole, East Vancouver, all over this city. We are an aging population. There are people who have homes that are too big. Those corridors exist. Stuart Mackinnon: Look at Renfrew or Nanaimo, that’s a really good example where there are smaller homes. The population in that area is aging. Nanaimo and Renfrew are fairly busy corridors, and people don’t necessarily want a house along there, but you could build town-houses or lower-density buildings and get a lot more people in that neighbourhood, and those people are going to stay there. That’s what makes a neighbourhood strong. Tristan Markle: I have a tough one now about the Downtown Eastside. Ellen Woodsworth just came out in favor of a moratorium on condo development in the DTES until the community plan is in place, with a strategy for housing people. I was wondering if you had a response.

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The October Revolution

By Sean Antrim On October 27, 2011 · Add Comment

A massive, global social movement has erupted weeks before a municipal election. Its goal is to bring light to the injustice and unsustainability of a corrupt capitalist system. In Vancouver, hundreds have taken the North grounds of the Vancouver Art Gallery, with a general message that change is needed now. But, the mayoral debate has orbited around the issue without touching it. Like the Czar on the eve of the 1917 revolution, the two most electable candidates are fighting over who is better at getting rid of the protest rather than who will better address inequality. The ballot question they want is: whose autocracy will better calm the masses. It's almost as if they don't understand the issue, and the polls are showing that most people are unhappy with both of them. What has happened to make Vision sink in the polls? It's not an NPA surge, that's for certain. HOUSING. The failure to address our housing crisis. In the 2008 election, Vision Vancouver won on progressive values, promising to end homelessness and implement an empty condo tax. But now, without the tax, condo prices are at historical highs, and homelessness is higher than it was three years ago (despite public relations spin to the contrary). Social housing has been sold out at the Olympic Village, and three years on the Village still has hundreds of empty units. CORRUPTION. The corruption of developer-council collusion is only growing. The two major parties are accepting over $4 million in donations this year, much of it from developers. In the absence of a ward system, councilors answer only to the big money players and aren't accountable to particular neighbourhoods, whether it is spot-rezonings or wholesale giveaways to developers in the form of blanket height changes. PARTY POLITICS. The agreement with COPE has meant that instead of competing with progressives for a more equal and just City, Vision must compete with the NPA in a contest to see who can make it more unequal. Perhaps rightly thinking that they will receive the progressive votes by default, Vision challenges the NPA on the right-wing front, guaranteeing three more years of politics for the 1%. NEO-LIBERAL POLICY. In lieu of the progressive promises of 2008, Vision is now embracing conservative ideas:

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Artifice of Law: Information on the Structures By-Law

By Nathan Crompton and Andrew Witt On October 23, 2011 · 2 Comments

Many occupiers have wondered about the city’s Street & Traffic By-Law 71.1, posted on city signs throughout the Art Gallery grounds. The purpose of this article is to give information and analysis about the By-law and its impact on #occupyvancouver. • "NO CAMPING: No structures (tents or other shelters) permitted in this area or on any other city street, sidewalk or boulevard. Street & Traffic By-Law 2849 Sec. 71.1." While these words read like eternal declarations, seemingly handed down to us from the founding laws of our colonial state, the reality is that they are recent history -- very recent. This past April, Vancouver’s city council and Mayor Robertson passed amendments to Section 71 and other sections of the Street & Traffic By-Law that seriously restrict protest in public space. The April meetings of city council were called for legal reasons. In October 2010 the By-Law had been ruled unconstitutional by the BC Courts, who gave the city six months to change it. On April 7th 2011, council presented its new edits to the public. According to the new version of the By-Law, political structures remained illegal except with a special permit, which could be purchased at a cost of $200 plus a refundable deposit of $1000. The Mainlander pointed out that under the new By-Law, “no structures would be allowed before 8am or after 8pm, eliminating the possibility for extended protests.” The amendments were unanimously rejected by the public, including the the BC Civil Liberties Association, Pivot Legal Society and the Vancouver Public Space Network. City council was forced to re-work its amendments, and returned on April 18th to present its revised version at a “no debate” meeting. Despite unanimous public opposition yet again, the Vision-led City Council passed the motion. The allowable structure size was reduced, with the addition of new penalties for non-compliance with the law: anyone who does not follow the new rules faces immediate removal and a minimum fine of $1000. The changes were passed and are now being fought again in the courts. The current version of the By-Law is worse than the edits of April 7. The law is less constitutional than before and today the BC Civil Liberties denounces its “bizarre, unnecessary and arbitrary restrictions on political expression [that] violate free speech; full stop.”

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INTERVIEW | COPE’s Tim Louis

By Sean Antrim On October 20, 2011 · Add Comment

The 2011 Vancouver municipal election is in full swing. What do the candidates really think, and what can we expect of them? The Mainlander has interviewed some of the council candidates, and will be publishing a series of candidate interviews over the next few weeks. Recently, we sat down with COPE City Council candidate Tim Louis. A transcription of the interview follows.

The Mainlander: Why are you the best person for the job of City Councillor? Tim Louis: I don’t believe there’s ever anybody who’s the best. Don’t believe that I would ever say that I am the best. I think many different people bring many different skills, positions and world-views to the table. The reason that I’m running for Council is that I believe, and always have believed, that it is very, very important that issues are framed in a way for the public to clearly understand the differences between the developers’ agenda on the one hand, and common sense on the other hand. I think in life, unfortunately, the media, the mainstream media, the corporate media, do a very poor job, in the sense that they make most issues appear to be far too complicated, and don’t leave the public with a clear understanding of what the choice really is. ML: What would you say you would have done differently over the past three years? TL: Without meaning for a moment, any criticism of anybody currently on Council, including my two good friends [COPE Councilors] Ellen and David, I would have clearly, and without pulling my punches, without muddying the waters, articulated the choices to be made by Council. For instance, with regards to the tax shift, from business owners to property owners, criticism was couched. Criticism of a view that we should be shifting taxes off of businesses and onto property owners, where technically the businesses pay with pre-tax dollars, taxes the property owners pay with after-tax dollars - in other words, taxes that business owners can write-off but that homeowners can never write off. I believe that that policy, of the current Council, when criticized, was criticized very tepidly, and very timidly, and not with a clear message being sent to the public. The average person, the average homeowner in this city, to this day, is unaware of the fact that tens of millions of dollars have been removed from their pockets, and put into the pockets of business owners, and business property owners. So to come back to your question, what would I have done differently, I’d like to believe that for the six years that I was on Council, I tried very hard to present a very clear picture between what should be done on the one hand and what was being proposed to be done, by the developer Councilors on the other hand. We need to do as public officials a better job of making the choices that we are making clearly articulated to ensure that the public has a clear understanding of the choices we’re making. A clear understanding of the choices at hand. ML: What are the top two policies you’re planning to work towards if you are elected? TL: For me, the number one, is social housing. It is perhaps the one item that any Council has the greatest control over. Many would disagree with me and say no, social housing falls into the jurisdiction of the provincial or federal government, and it’s the one item that municipalities have the least control over, but I very vigorously disagree. There’s not a lot of good that a municipal Council can do as far as say, recalibrating income tax, which is federal, or implementing social programs, which is provincial. Most of what a municipal Council does is fairly routine, mundane stuff - getting clean water into our homes, pick up the garbage, et cetera. But as Harry Rankin, my mentor, always said, what we need to do is understand that City Councilors should be concerned with much more than dogs and garbage, and that their most powerful tool is the power they get at rezoning hearings. At rezoning hearings, Council turns dirt into gold. By way of a single motion, they literally, not figuratively, create tens of millions of dollars. As the Council, we have the authority and the ability, to make it a condition for any and all rezoning that this crisis of social housing is addressed then and there. Not in a policy document that gets cut-up outside the rezoning hearing as a meaningless set of watered down goals, but right in that rezoning hearing, that either a) or b). That a) build, in that development, a certain number of units of social housing, or b) pay a certain amount of money into a pool that the City would then use to build social housing. This City Council, as have previous City Councils, have done a wholly inadequate job of using that very powerful tool.

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News
- City and VPD move to arrest PiDGiN picketers, residents bring opposition
  18 Apr 2013
  
  Photo credit: DM GILLIS
  
  After ten steady weeks of nightly protests by anti-poverty activists in front of the PiDGiN restaurant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, police have stated that they plan to arrest picketers. In a press conference delivered yesterday, Vancouver Police Department spokesperson Brian Montague stated that his department is “anticipating an arrest soon.”
  
  A letter issued yesterday by the VPD states that PiDGiN picketers can now be arrested for “shouting, screaming, or swearing.” The statement cites section 430(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada, which means that the VDP is seeking to label the protest a criminal action. An associated VPD release states that the police are issuing the arrest order to prevent Vancouverites from being “denied the lawful use and enjoyment of property.”
  
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- Vancouverites walk for Welfare Justice
  1 Apr 2013
  On Wednesday, March 27, residents across the city joined together to walk 14.5km across Vancouver for Welfare Justice. The walk was organized by the Raise the Rates coalition to highlight the need for a significant increase in welfare rates as well as a comprehensive anti-poverty plan in the lead-up to the provincial election this May. The walk commenced at Christy Clark’s office on West 4th Ave in Kitsilano and ended almost 8 hours later outside Adrian Dix’s office at the Joyce Street skytrain station.
  
  Homeless Dave joined the walk for Welfare Justice on the sixth day of his hunger strike against displacement and gentrification. Welfare and housing are intimately connected and as Vancouver’s low-income housing stock erodes, people on income assistance are being hit the hardest. In 2012 alone, 426 SRO units in the DTES became unaffordable for people on welfare. A recent article by Seth Klein shows that despite government press releases, the actual increase in the social housing stock in BC has been negligible since 2006.
- Homeless Dave on sixth day of hunger strike against gentrification and displacement
  27 Mar 2013
  
  At noon on Friday March, 22nd, Homeless Dave began a hunger strike in support of housing rights and social justice in the Downtown Eastside. The strike was announced in front of the controversial Sequel 138 development site at Main and Hastings, where a developer is planning to build unaffordable market condos using a financial subsidy from the BC Liberal government.
  
  Homeless Dave, who is now housed and goes by the name “the artist formerly known as Homeless Dave,” has put three demands at the front of the indefinite hunger strike: that the city decline the development permit for Sequel 138; that the former Main Street police station be used for social housing; and that the Downtown Eastside be declared a “social justice zone.” “We’re not about smashing windows,” stated Dave, “we’re about smashing the old broken paradigms and building new paradigms that are more just and equal.”
- Anti-poverty activists call out Adrian Dix, demand a commitment to increase unlivable welfare rates
  31 Jan 2013
  
  This morning, anti-poverty activists protested inside NDP leader Adrian Dix’s office in the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood of Vancouver. They say that the NDP has yet to make a commitment to decreasing poverty in British Columbia. Recent research has shown that British Columbia is among the most unequal provinces in the country.
  
  Today is the one year anniversary of NDP MLA Jagrup Brar’s completion of the “Welfare Challenge.” For the month of January in 2012, Brar lived off the $610, the amount allocated to single welfare recipients in BC. During his challenge, the MLA lost 26 pounds.
  
  His challenge was an emulation of a similar challenge taken by former NDP MLA Emery Barnes in 1986. Since Barnes’ campaign, welfare increases have lagged behind increases in the cost of living.
  
  One of the organizers Bill Hopwood said: “A year ago today, Jagrup Brar finished his welfare challenge. He couldn’t afford to live on $610. He got in debt, had to borrow money, and lost 26 pounds. Nobody can afford to live on that.”
  
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- Protest against government bailout of Pantages condo project
  11 Dec 2012
  
  Tues Dec 11, 2012 — Today at 2pm, the Downtown Eastside not for Developers coalition (DNFD) is holding a demonstration against the government bailout of the Pantages condo project on the 100-block of East Hastings. News was recently leaked to the Province newspaper that BC Housing has bailed-out condo developer Marc Williams/Worthington Properties with $23 million in sub-prime loans. BC Housing said that it has a mandate to fund “revitalization.”
  
  The Province reported: “Dan Maxwell, vice-president, corporate services, and CFO of B.C. Housing, said Williams’ application to the province’s community partnership program was accepted because the development will revitalize the block.”
  
  The organizers of today’s demonstration are “calling on Marc Williams to sell the Pantages parcel to the City at the 2010 assessed value and for the City to buy the site and work with BC Housing to develop it as 100% resident controlled social housing with low-income community space on the ground floor.”
  
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INTERVIEW | The Civic Green Party’s Adriane Carr & Stuart Mackinnon

The October Revolution

Artifice of Law: Information on the Structures By-Law

INTERVIEW | COPE’s Tim Louis

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