The campaign donation lists are in. But the news is not always news. For their 2014 campaign, Vision Vancouver has raised $2.25 million dollars, and it’s no surprise that the development industry is Vision’s biggest donor by far. (The $2.2m does not include the $25,000 plates at a private fundraiser hosted in March by ‘condo king’ Bob Rennie, which…
Category: NPA
Not So HandyDART
A vote for COPE is a vote for more buses and lower fares for everyone. To make transit more accessible, COPE will implement an identifying card or sticker for riders with disabilities to display when using transit. COPE will also advocate to expand HandyDART service, and make HandyDART a direct subsidiary of Translink rather than…
Kirk LaPointe’s Flip-Flop
Today, I would like to address the issue of transit along the Broadway corridor. As we all know, Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver colleagues are promoting a subway down Broadway out to UBC. That’s pretty much all we hear from them these days — let’s build a subway down Broadway, the developers want…
Vision’s Vision is Getting Blurry
In politics, as in our personal lives, sometimes we need to revise our expectations. Other times, we have to admit we are wrong; we are required to concede that we simply did not do enough. In the case of Vision Vancouver’s highly touted and infinitely flexible promise to end homelessness, it appears that a rather…
Reflections on 2012: COPE has made great progress since election loss
As 2012 draws to a close, I find myself taking stock of this last year and getting excited about the remarkable rebuilding, energy and action within COPE. This is especially remarkable coming in the aftermath of one of COPE’s worst election outcomes: on November 18, 2011, COPE elected not one of its three candidates to…
Why I Oppose Sullivanism
The Georgia Straight recently published a cover story titled “Sullivanism versus Jane Jacobs”, detailing former NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan’s continuing efforts to push high-rise densification onto the city. In the article, Sullivan praises former Mayor Tom “Terrific” Campbell’s reign of free market ideology. The issues are clear. Do we let capitalism run roughshod over democratic processes and the…