South of the border, any time high profile politicians such as Bernie Saunders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even gently criticize Israel for breaking international law, they are labelled by President Trump and others as antisemitic. Over the last number of years, the pro-Israel lobby has been very successful at getting governments, both in the US and…
Category: City Hall
1000-page packages!? City council needs to take charge
Vancouver Courier recently ran an interesting article by Mike Klassen in which he was rightfully calling out the huge agenda packages Vancouver city staff members are producing for city council. According to Mike, agenda packages frequently exceed 1000 pages these days! From my six years of experience on council (1999-2005), I’m totally surprised at this…
No quick fixes to sky-high property taxes
Vancouver’s commercial businesses — big and small — will soon get a break on their property taxes. City council has passed a motion to shift 2% of property taxes from commercial businesses and onto residential properties over the next three years. It will see a shift of 1% in year one, followed by 0.5% in…
Lots of problems with Rental 100, not city councillors!
Carlito Pablo, who has been doing a great job covering Vancouver’s Rental 100 program and its shortfalls for a while, recently reported in the Georgia Straight that city manager Sadhu Johnstone is concerned that Vancouver city councillors are “causing a lot of problems” by pushing for more affordability in the program. But the problems are…
Good news for Vancouver renters
There’s been a lot in the news lately about issues that impact renters, and I’m happy to say most of it is good news. First up is the announcement of a new resource at city hall — the creation of a Renters Office. This office, with its newly dedicated staff person and phone line, will…
UBC SkyTrain will haunt us for generations to come
I am so disappointed that Vancouver city council voted by a margin of 9 to 2 to approve the SkyTrain extension from Arbutus all the way to UBC. Even the three Green councillors all voted in favour of this very un-environmental proposal! As I pointed out in my recent blog on this topic, UBC professor…
Imagining a different Vancouver with Kennedy Stewart
I was reading Mike Howell’s interview with Mayor Kennedy Stewart in the January 7 Courier, and I was struck by the extent to which our new mayor appears to be genuinely interested in collaboration with all members of Vancouver city council, no matter what their party is. The interview got me thinking about how differently…