Did you know that our Vision-Vancouver-dominated City Council has a Bid Committee that operates in secret? Council gave it authority to award contracts of any size without going out to tender whenever Council is on summer break. The Bid Committee — composed of City Hall bureaucrats (namely the city manager, director of finance, and voting department heads) — can also award contracts of up to $2 million in value at any time. That added up to 39 contracts…
Category: Vancouver
A true hero’s tale
Tuesday night I had the honour and privilege of speaking at an event celebrating the freedom of one of the “Cuban Five” heroes, Gerardo Hernández. You might ask, who are the Cuban Five heroes? Let me tell you. (And let me give you a heads up. What you’re about to read is a long story,…
Has TransLink turned the corner?
On Wednesday, March 30, a number of HandyDART users spoke to the TransLink board at their monthly meeting in New Westminster. Together with HandyDART drivers, we were lobbying TransLink to bring HandyDART service in-house. Whereas conventional public transit is operated by TransLink through a number of wholly owned subsidiaries — Coast Mountain Bus Company operates…
City council: rewarding inefficiency
City council’s pay was in the news recently — city councillors will receive a whopping $9,000 annual raise, moving their salaries to roughly $80,000 a year. Allowing people to give themselves a raise for taking longer to do the same job doesn’t make much sense. Remember, this raise was approved by the councillors themselves. When…
Arbutus Corridor: Making housing out of thin air
At long last there is some very significant progress on the Arbutus Corridor. Just last week the City of Vancouver and CP Rail, the owner of the land, reached an agreement. CP will sell this 9-km rail corridor, stretching from Marpole to south False Creek, to the city for $55 million. Many years ago the…
Growing quality, not quantity
With the Globe 2016 conference happening in Vancouver, politicians and leaders from some of the world’s biggest businesses are coming together to try and address “sustainable business” — in other words, how to continue to grow their businesses and the economy while doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. The implied goal — indefinite, continued…
Death Penalty in the US: Implications for Canada and Canadians (March 24)
As a lawyer, I know first-hand and from bitter experience that the justice system does not always get it right. When one takes a moment to reflect, this is not surprising. No system is ever going to be right all the time. South of the border, a wrong decision can have catastrophic consequences for the…