With income assistance rates frozen for over 10 years now, welfare recipients have a very small amount available for rent. With the province of BC providing a single person on welfare with only $610 a month, SRO landlords are very limited in what they can charge for rent. So they use the low rental revenue…
Category: Vision Vancouver
Double or nothing: Garbage collection vs. city councillors?
City council salaries are in the news again! The Vancouver Courier’s Mike Howell, in one of his recent 12th and Cambie columns, notes that all city councillors but one are earning more than $100,000 per year, and that’s before any additional remuneration they collect, say, for chairing other committees such as ones tied to Metro…
The power of Green
Will it finally happen? An NDP minority with the Green Party holding the balance of power in BC? Last week the writ was dropped and the provincial election is, finally, formally underway. What makes this election possibly unique in our history is the fact that the NDP and the Liberals are in a statistical dead heat…
Affordable housing: Gregor Robertson still doesn’t get it
It’s perfectly clear to anyone paying attention that we have a housing crisis in Vancouver today — a crisis that has been with us for quite some time and is only continuing to get much worse. But the only thing more troubling than the crisis itself is the lack of leadership and complete absence of…
A tale of two school boards: One fiery, one fired
One of my fondest political memories is the night when results came in for the by-election of a brand new Vancouver School Board in 1986. Two years earlier, in 1984, COPE (Coalition of Progressive Electors) had won a bare majority on the school board, electing five of the nine trustees. They had campaigned very heavily…
Empty home tax: All sizzle, no steak
At long last Mayor Robertson has announced a tax to encourage owners of empty residential properties in Vancouver to put these on the rental market. This would be great news if the plan had been well thought out and actually had the impact it was expected to have. But as has been the case with…
Empty homeless promises now painfully true
Tuesday the numbers from the annual homeless count were released. The headlines say it all: “Record number of homeless on Vancouver streets“. For those of us who genuinely believe there is absolutely no excuse for homelessness in any society, let alone a society as rich as ours, the numbers were not just bad, they were…