Mayoral Candidates Debate Against the Public | Injunction to be issued to Occupy Vancouver

Mayoral candidates debate against the public

Tonight’s mayoral debate on homelessness and affordable housing was a heated fight — not between the two candidates, but between the City and its residents. Mayor Gregor Robertson and mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton were supposed to face off and debate the issues, but the real debate was with the people of Vancouver.

Rather than reveal disagreements, the event brought to the fore the overlapping politics of Robertson and Anton. If before tonight there was a sense that the candidates’ two parties — Vision and the NPA — were different in their respective policy platforms, tonight’s debate showcased agreement on housing strategy: let the market do it. When asked in vague terms if the market could provide all the solutions, both candidates hesitated, and Anton frequently brought in her party’s history of buying sites throughout Vancouver for social housing — admittedly more than could be said for Vision. But on actual concrete politics, the candidates converged more than they differed. Most importantly, both candidates stressed that they do not support a speculator tax on housing and do not support inclusionary zoning in Vancouver.

Inclusionary zoning is an urban planning policy used in cities throughout the world — including Vancouver’s Oppenheimer district (“DEOD”) — mandating the inclusion of affordable housing in all new multi-unit housing developments. In exchange for pushing up property values and exposing low-income renters to evictions, developers are forced to build a percentage of new units as affordable. In Oppenheimer it’s 20%. Tonight, the question was: “Would an inclusionary zoning policy, one where you require developers to build a certain percentage of affordable units into their projects like Richmond does, be workable in Vancouver?” Gregor and Anton said categorically: no.

Gregor was referring to city staff’s current review of inclusionary zoning in the Oppenheimer district. Earlier this year head Planner Brent Toderian stated that the city will have to make “tough decisions” about inclusionary zoning in the Oppenheimer district. Tonight Gregor repeated this plan for affordability: replace affordable housing in East Vancouver with $300,000 condominiums. Like Anton, who tonight argued for a “common sense revolution” of “removing red tape” for the developers, Gregor wants further de-regulation to accompany more STIR tax breaks.

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Throughout the debate, however, dozens in attendance disagreed with Robertson and Anton, shouting slogans like, “Housing is a Human Right,” “Stop the Evictions,” “Drown Out the Developer Parties,” “Gregor Lies,” and “Three More Years of What?” A big theme of the night was the debate format itself, pitting two candidates “against” each other in a false opposition. Attendees — dozens of them from #occupyvancouver, arriving at the debate with the recent announcement that Mayor Roberston has ordered an eviction of Occupy — rejected the format of the debate, which excluded any political party or candidate not funded by developers.

#OccupyVancouver: Ashlie Gough and the Right to the Future

Ashlie Gough, only 23 years old, passed away November 5th 2011 during a weekend visiit to Vancouver from Victoria. Ashlie passed before her time, and there is nothing more upsetting, more infuriating, than people passing before their time. This lost future has registered public attention because the overdose occurred at a political protest camp — Occupy Vancouver. In some ways, this tragedy was a chance accident in a unique situation. But it is also true that overdoses are far more common in Vancouver than anyone would hope, or than many would prefer to acknowledge.

During the 1990s, the number of lethal overdoses in Vancouver skyrocketed, with hundreds dying every year. Hep C and HIV reached epidemic levels in the injection drug-user (IDU) community, and people across the city feared that the epidemic would spread. In 1997 the Vancouver-Richmond Health Board called a state-of-emergency. The emergency situation was felt most strongly by those in the Downtown Eastside, who saw their friends and family passing away at an alarming rate. In 1997, community organizers filled Oppenheimer Park with 1000 wooden crosses, each representing a preventable overdose death. Over the next three years, another thousand lives were lost, so in the year 2000 the community planted 2000 crosses.

These thousands of lost futures traumatized the community, but also galvanized the community into action. The time of waiting for government to act was over — it was time to take pro-active measures. Organizers began experimenting with illegal needle-exchanges and safe-infection sites in the Downtown Eastside. An epic political battle erupted between proponents of harm-reduction on the one hand, and business improvement associations on the other — depicted vividly in Nettie Wild’s film Fix: Story of an Addicted City. Eventually, public opinion shifted in favour of harm-reduction, and both Mayor Larry Campbell and even Premier Gordon Campbell came to support Insite as an institution.

Preventable lethal overdoses were not the only lost futures. Women and young women were murdered and went missing from the Downtown Eastside every year, but authorities showed almost not concern, despite an endless stream of evidence and first-hand reports. This struggle is ongoing. One year ago, on September 15 2011, 22 year-old Ashley Machisknic fell to her death from the window of the Regent Hotel. Community members believed Ashley had been murdered, and held an overnight occupation of the police station demanding an investigation. As a result, a hotline was established to report violence against women. Just this past Sept 17 2011, on the eve of the annual DTES Women’s Housing March, Verna Simard fell from her 6th storey apartment, again at the Regent Hotel. March organizers dedicated the day to Vera, another life lost before its time. To this day, Occupy Vancouver is standing in solidarity with those protesting the sham Missing and Murdered Women Inquiry at 701 West Georgia Georgia.

Life-expectancy in the Downtown Eastside is well below the rest of the city, and it is well understood by everyone in the community that these tragedies are the result of systemic violence — legislated poverty, lack of appropriate and affordable housing, ongoing colonization, daily exploitation of women, and criminalization of addiction. These are the “hidden tensions” that underlie our society, and which cause so much inequality and injustice.

Mayor Orders Eviction of Occupy Vancouver — We Resist

Today the mayor announced that the city will be attempting to end the occupation of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The announcement comes as a surprise for some who have been following. So far the only candidates in the municipal election calling for the eviction of the VAG have been from the right-wing NPA and their blog at citycaucus. In reality the mayor and council have used forced to shut down tent cities ever since being elected in 2008.

In the three years since 2008, Vision Vancouver and Robertson have evicted all major tent cities and arrested dozens of housing activists at shelters and empty housing projects across the city. Maybe the question today is not why the Mayor has announced the closure of the occupation, but rather why it has been allowed to stay as long as it has?

After setting up on October 15, the mayor stated twice in separate sessions at city council that he would not order the removal of the camp at the VAG. In the weeks after the first tent, the Canadian occupations were deemed harmless to the Canadian elite, framed more as re-enactments of Occupy Wall Street than as local interventions. The Prime Minister argued that “we didn’t bail out our banking sector,” and news outlets across Canada doubled down on the talking-point that the Canadian occupations could not last for long, with no anchor in local issues. This was also the sentiment in the air in Vancouver, where the Mayor judged that the occupation was a “symbolic” protest that would disappear as the winter weather arrived.

Despite feeling safe from imminent eviction, we campers still worried about the ‘NO CAMPING’ signs posted about the Art Gallery grounds, which referenced the city’s unconstitutional structures by-law. In response, Mainlander writers posted an article about whether or not the by-law would be used to shut down the occupation, arguing that we should be ready for anything, since “for the police and city managers of Vancouver, every protest is legal up to a point — in so far as the status quo does not change.”

This turning point was October 22, after the first big march of 1,000 people on the banks.

The October Revolution

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: