No Party for 100,000 people facing homelessness in BC

Social Housing Coalition BC statement on BC Liberal and NDP housing platforms, written from unceded Coast Salish Territory

On Wednesday, April 24th, the BC NDP released its platform statement on housing. Consistent with the party’s position on welfare rates, there is very little in the Platform for low-income people. While the BC Liberal platform is completely silent on social housing and welfare rates, the NDP platform promises are woefully inadequate.

During the current tenure of the BC Liberals, homelessness and the acute housing crisis has expanded considerably. From 2002 until 2010 homelessness in Vancouver nearly tripled to 1,713, and throughout the province over 10,000 people are visibly homeless. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are tens of thousands of people among the “hidden” homeless and over 65,000 are at risk of homelessness, paying above 50% of their income for rent, often for inadequate and insecure housing.

Vancity elections: Democracy or patronage?

As the elections for three of the nine Board of Directors positions draw to a close at Vancity (today is the last day to vote), members will soon know who will hold the decision-making power at Canada’s largest credit union. The election results for the three board positions will be announced on May 7th at Vancity’s Annual General Meeting.

Vancity elections have been marred by controversy for the past three years, ever since rules were passed in 2011 allowing the pre-existing Board of Directors to recommend candidates through a Nominations and Elections committee. This change was made under the guise of creating a more “transparent” process in which voters would be better informed. However, beneath outward motives of transparency is a more complex process of power-jockeying and patronage, and the process has come under sharp critique from some Vancity members.

Lisa Barrett’s six years, or two three year terms, on the Vancity Board of Directors ended in 2012, after running for the third time and getting half the number of votes than three years previously. In 2009 she was elected with the support of 8,996 members. In 2012, after the recommendation system was put into place, Barrett didn’t make the list of “starred” candidates, and only 3,206 members voted for her. The same happened to another incumbent, Wendy Holm, who swung from 12,273 votes to 3,582 in the same two-year period.

After the 2011 rule-change allowing for candidate selection by the incumbent board, the five candidates who came out on top were, not surprisingly, the five who were endorsed. The power of this system lies in the fact that most members vote with the information they are given — and that’s out of the less than 5 percent of members who actually vote.

Vision’s VPD fails to silence dissent

On Monday, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson confirmed his support of the criminalization of dissent. Following the Vancouver Police Department’s recent threat of arrests against peaceful protesters, Robertson stated: “I support the Vancouver Police Department’s prudent steps to ensure that the right to protest is balanced against the right of all residents and businesses to peaceful enjoyment of public and private spaces.”

The Police Department’s “prudent steps” include the publication of a blanket letter warning the public that they may be arrested on criminal charges for “shouting, screaming, or swearing”; VPD Spokesperson Brian Montague’s April 17th announcement that the VPD were “anticipating an arrest” of an unnamed individual on unspecified charges “related to the PiDGiN protest”; armed officers’ surveillance of the PiDGiN pickets, five nights a week; visits to protesters’ homes and workplaces; and the constant monitoring of “all the protests that go on in the City of Vancouver.”

VPD Goes for “Unusual Approach” to PiDGiN Protest

Preface

The appended transcript deserves careful examination. It records in writing what Vancouver Police Department representative Brian Montague said about PiDGiN protest at a press conference on the 17th of April, 2013.

The video stream currently available on the Vancouver Police Department web site only permits a straight play-through that lasts approximately twenty minutes. There is no slider button to permit backtracking and instant replay. Few watchers of the video are likely to have the patience or concentration to wait for a full circular twenty minutes to get one more listen to exactly what was said. This transcript seeks to avoid editorial smoothing, and attempts to capture verbal nuances of hesitation, uncertainty, and groping.

Persons unwilling to plow through the entire transcript may have interest in skipping to the appendix to view highlighted themes extracted from the VPD discourse, accompanied by questions that these themes raise. For a condensed version of the VPD’s unconstitutional decision to arrest the picketers, readers can also see a previous article here, written April 18th.

Notes on the text | All text is Constable Brian Montague speaking, unless marked as “Media.” The appendix contains commentary by Joe Jones. The source of audio and video stream can be found under “Latest Press Conference” at http://vancouver.ca/police