Though we should treat the overdose crisis with the severity it deserves, desperately bleak portrayals in the mainstream press can overshadow the actual experiences, autonomy, community, and acts of solidarity among people who use drugs.
Category Archive: Analysis
In the wake of political events erupting across North America over the past month, we are now at a moment in history when Vancouver City Council can end police street checks for good – if it has the will.
The question posed by economic reconciliation is this: How can a nation-to-nation relationship be built with the federal government when so many Indigenous communities still do not have control over their land? Based on a public lecture delivered on October 16, 2016 as part of the University of Winnipeg’s Weweni Indigenous Scholars Series.
Class Struggle in Chinatown: Ethnic Tourism, Planned Gentrification, and Organizing for Tenant Power
Gentrification is alive and well in Vancouver Chinatown. This article gives an update on the current situation in Chinatown, how city planners are pursuing an ethnic tourism gentrification strategy, and what we can learn from the recent tenant organizing victory at Solheim Place.
The various iterations of the “Escaping Vancouver” narrative share a core unexamined underpinning: the idea that I, a hard-working, usually white, middle class person, did everything right, became successful, and yet am still unable to afford to live in the city of my choice. We must challenge the embedded privilege that characterizes what might be termed “middle class self-help advocacy”—the tendency to rely on individualized solutions to collective social problems.
What follows is a personal essay written by a long-term resident of Belvedere Court, Sean MacPherson. The Belvedere is a rental apartment in Vancouver that has recently been in the news following a wave of efforts to evict, intimidate, and coerce the residents into leaving their homes. In response, tenants have organized – with the support of the Vancouver Tenants Union – to protect their right to housing and preserve Vancouver’s vital affordable rental stock.
As Canada 150 draws nearer, those committed to supporting Indigenous sovereignty and dislodging the power of colonialism are faced with the task of dispelling the myth of Canada as a benevolent nation. While the expanding grip of neoliberalism has given rise to a reactionary global right-wing populism, the violence of supposedly “progressive” liberal settler-colonial states has fallen through the cracks of popular analysis and comprehension.