It’s Vancouver’s oldest and some would call it the city’s most venerable political party, since it has dominated our local political scene for decades. The Non-Partisan Association, or NPA, was founded in 1936 to claim the centre-right when Vancouver’s business class was petrified of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or CCF — a socialist democratic party…
Category: Canadian politics
What Edward Snowden can teach us
My partner, Penny, recently turned me onto audiobooks from Vancouver Public Library. I don’t know why, but I was initially quite reluctant to switch from print to audio. I was convinced I would get nowhere near as much pleasure from listening to a book being read as I get from silent reading. How wrong I…
This NDP victory spells h-o-p-e
Wow! The results are in — or they almost are. And predictions have it that even after all the mail-in ballots are counted, the provincial NDP will have secured an historic election victory. They’re leading in, or have won, 55 ridings, and they’ve earned 45 per cent of the popular vote — the biggest share…
Hats off to council — for getting behind $1 billion for housing!
Last week, I tipped my hat to Mayor Stewart Kennedy for his $30-million proposal to address homelessness. This initiative was a welcome and significant step forward in addressing our current emergency homelessness crisis due to COVID-19. It was also a major first — never before has a Vancouver mayor proposed spending such an amount of…
Our legal system needs many more RBGs and Beverley McLachlins
On Friday, September 18, my attendant, Cory Wilson, gave me the bad news — he’d just received a text from his wife that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away. RBG was an icon in the American legal community, and far, far more. Before being appointed to the US Supreme Court by then-president Bill Clinton, she’d…
Sharing the gold gleaned from real estate development
Last week, Mayor Kennedy Stewart called a special city council meeting regarding a motion he was introducing to address Vancouver’s homelessness crisis, especially the 300 or so unsheltered people now living in Strathcona Park. I’m pleased to see that at this Monday’s council meeting, councillors directed staff to look into and report back on the…
Let’s take a page from Joe’s bold, green, economic plan to recover post-pandemic
Centuries ago, I sat on the board of Vancouver City Savings Credit Union. Toward the end of my tenure, in the mid-1990s, we provided a significant amount of seed money to help get a brand-new, left-wing version of the Fraser Institute off and running. It’s called the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives — an independent,…