‘Talk and Evict’: Why the Left’s Love Affair With Public Consultation Must End

Recently Vancouver’s ruling party, Vision Vancouver, appears to be working at cross purposes with itself. On one hand, it is pursuing the most aggressively pro-development, pro-demolition agenda in the city’s history, far more expansive and ambitious than Gordon Campbell’s NPA-sponsored development orgy of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. On the other, it has undertaken one of the most enterprising and comprehensive public consultation processes the city has ever seen around issues of governance, planning and development. Local area planning and citizen engagement processes seem to be a genuine priority for Gregor Robertson and his council majority. Meanwhile, neighbourhood activists throughout the city with concerns about densification, demolition, renoviction and gentrification are being actively courted as stakeholders in creating official local area plans.

Moves toward accelerated development would seem to contradict the active involvement of opponents in official long-term neighbourhood plans, consultations, planning commissions and the like. The contradiction is less sharp than we might think when we begin to recognize how and why Third Way governments use public consultation processes.

Third Way-ism is a fairly young political tradition. Developed by Britain’s “New” Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 1990s, it became the label under which previously social democratic parties could enact conservative or neoliberal policies. In a post-Cold War era, where the incentive for corporate capital to tolerate the existence of welfare states had suddenly disappeared, Third Way-ism was nothing short of essential to the survival of First World social democratic parties, as well as that of centrist brokerage parties like the US Democrats and Canadian Liberals.

Condos vs. Cottonwood Garden: How City Hall’s viaduct removal plan would make it harder to eat in the Downtown Eastside

City Hall is taking steps towards removing the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, leaving high-cost housing and new traffic problems in their place. The City claims that these new traffic problems can be solved by expanding one of the streets into the historic neighborhood of Strathcona. The two sites that are under threat of displacement are the Cottonwood and Strathcona community gardens, two of the oldest and largest in community gardens in town. The newer Purple Thistle Food Forest at Vernon and Charles streets, only a few blocks away, would also be threatened.

These gardens provide some of the city’s most peaceful green space and essential food sources for many Downtown Eastside residents. After this growing season and generations of use, the last thing many gardeners want is to have to struggle to protect their community from a major construction development.

The proposed street expansion on either Prior or Malkin would pave over significant portions of the historic gardens. The bulk of Cottonwood Garden’s three acres is spread along the length of Malkin street (see image below). In the expansion plans, Malkin would widen to six lanes, not including the bike lanes and dividers which gardeners estimate would reach up to eight lanes of space. According to City plans, this would destroy the majority of the garden. If the remaining space is spared by redevelopment, gardeners are concerned that this final sliver would be flooded with noise and air pollution.

Why Geoff Meggs Lost | ‘A Brief History of Neoliberalism’

This weekend NDP voters in the Vancouver-Fairview riding rejected Vision councillor Geoff Meggs as their representative in the upcoming provincial elections. The defeat of a sitting councillor represents a significant defeat for Vision Vancouver, but also a strong sign of disapproval for NDP’s leadership and union hierarchy. The party’s base of active membership has voted for George Heyman, striking down the endorsement of Meggs by the NDP-Fairview Executive, which includes CUPE’s Paul Faoro, a key player in labour’s rightward turn at the municipal level since the creation of Vision Vancouver in 2005.

Fairview is the former riding of Mayor Gregor Robertson. Due to this alone the rejection of Meggs signals a serious upset for Vision Vancouver. Fairview is a “battleground riding” in provincial politics, but also a weather-vane for the political climate of the city itself. But why exactly did members turn against Meggs?

Financial Crisis and Tax Evasion: Unpacking Vancouver’s Rent Bank

The Streetohome Foundation has officially launched its new Rent Bank program with a $366,000 three-year loan from Streetohome board member Frank Giustra of the Radcliffe Foundation. Smaller administrative costs totalling $49,000 per year will be paid by the City, although the program itself will be administered by the non-profit Inner-City Community Services Society.

One-time loans from the rent bank will average $835 and can reach up to a maximum of $1300 for an individual, with a repayment plan spanning up to two years. To qualify, tenants perform an assessment either online or over the phone. Tenants are issued a loan if the rent bank judges that they can afford the repayment plan, and if the tenant agrees in advance to repay the loan through automatic withdrawals on their bank account.

Both the rent bank policy and the Streetohome organization were born under previous NPA and COPE municipal governments. The City’s 2005 Homeless Action Plan, drafted under COPE’s last term in office (2002 – 2005), called for the rent bank to disburse both loans and grants to low-income renters in short-term crisis. The current version is less ambitious and removes the grant option, following instead the path set out under NPA’s pro-business term (2005 – 2008). The NPA formed Streetohome in an effort to incentivize the real-estate sector to solve homelessness through philanthropy and charity.