Hidden in probably the most pretentious piece of writing I have read for many years is an art project involving pictures of construction in the DTES of Vancouver being pasted on a party wall which will itself be obscured by the development.

From The Globe and Mail

BEARCAT
Vancouver police to get armour on wheels

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

June 25, 2008

The Vancouver Police Department is beefing up its fleet, and the new machine's no puny gizmo: The city has approved $345,000 for an armoured rescue vehicle that will act as a mobile ballistic shield.

Inspector Tony Zanatta of the Vancouver police emergency response team says the armoured car will let officers go where they couldn't go safely before. They will be able to approach armed suspects with vehicles and barricaded in houses, deal with bomb scares and transport wounded people out of dangerous situations without fear of being shot.

"It's not a tank, it's a tool. It's simply that. It's a shield, it's a ballistic shield that's mobile," he said.

Some police forces in U.S. cities - including Los Angeles and New York - use Lenco "BearCat" armoured vehicles, one of the options Vancouver is considering.

Very comprehensive, very revealing.

DTES Demographic Study Final June 2008.pdf

Fearing it would hurt the poor, demonstrators want proposed development quashed

VANCOUVER -- Housing activists made a last-ditch effort to derail a Downtown Eastside condominium project at a city hall hearing yesterday, claiming the development would fuel "class hatred" and make it more difficult for low-income people who live in the neighbourhood to obtain decent housing and services.

"We need some indication that there is a future for poor people in this neighbourhood - otherwise these condos are a slap in the face," Carnegie Community Action Project spokeswoman Wendy Pedersen said yesterday at a development permit board meeting.

Ms. Pedersen and other activists attended the meeting to register their objections to the 160-unit Greenwich condominium project, which developer Concord Pacific has proposed for a downtown site at 58 West Hastings St.

The area is now dominated by single-room accommodation hotels and the rough edges of Vancouver's drug trade.

VPD veteran says province must renovate 18 single-room occupancy hotels
 
Mike Howell
Vancouver Courier

Wednesday, June 25, 2008


CREDIT: Photo-Dan Toulgoet
Makeshift shelters, including Mark Tobiasson's lean-to in Oppenheimer Park, populate the Downtown Eastside.

A senior Vancouver police officer says homelessness in the Downtown Eastside is the worst he's seen in his 23 years on the job.

Supt. Warren Lemcke, commander for the north part of the city, said the dire situation won't change until the provincial government renovates the 18 single-room occupancy hotels it purchased over the last year.

Priority will be getting a 'better handle' on crime, Rix says

"If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. But if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else."
 
Bruce Constantineau
Vancouver Sun

Friday, June 20, 2008

The Vancouver Board of Trade's new chairman says Vancouver businesses have to become more philanthropic and he'll push that concept aggressively over the next year.

"You can count on that," Donald Rix, 77, said in an interview Thursday after he became board chairman at the organization's 121st annual meeting.

The chairman of LifeLabs Diagnostics Inc. and Cantest Ltd., who's also a well-known philanthropist, told the meeting a recent U.S. survey found just 39 per cent of business leaders believe corporate citizenship is part of their business planning.

"To be successful over the long term, companies have to be involved and invested in their community," Rix told the meeting at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. "Not just chequebook involvement, but personal involvement.

"If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. But if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else."

In progress - Stephen

So a truck plant is closing because thankfully people aren't buying macho trucks.

GM and the CAW both whine about the loss of jobs.

Can neither see the opportunity?

The hundreds of coaches needed as we stop flying.

The electric scooters, the tiny cars so popular in Europe, but not available in Canada.

The railcars needed as we return to passenger rail.

The home generators required as we leave a one way electrical grid and produce heat and power on site.

Hasn't anyone heard the phrase 'transferable skills'?

And then GM says it will produce 'hybrid' vehicles at the plant...

and the losers with the CAW say

"We're going to continue to press General Motors to keep the best truck plant in the industry open and we're going to continue our fight," he said.

Hybrid trucks to be built in Oshawa, CAW says

Updated Sat. Jun. 21 2008 1:57 PM ET

ctvtoronto.ca

The Canadian Auto Workers union says General Motors has reversed its decision not to build any hybrid pickups in Oshawa, Ont., and will start assembling a hybrid truck this fall.

The company made the decision despite plans to close the truck plant there next year, CAW local 222 president Chris Buckley told CTV Newsnet on Saturday.

"It's a small win," Buckley said. "We need to take some larger steps to secure the jobs of our 2,600 members that will be affected (by the closure)."

The decision came out of a meeting between CAW officials and GM management on Friday, but the company has not commented on the reversal and the reasons for it.

Buckley said adding the hybrid at the truck plant shows "a glimmer of hope" that the plant can remain open, especially if hybrid truck sales take off.

Earlier this month, GM announced it was closing the Oshawa truck plant because of slumping demand for large vehicles. The plant employs 2,600 workers.

The decision was announced just two weeks after GM reached a tentative agreement with the union,  promising to continue production at the plant through 2011.

The CAW is considering taking its dispute with GM to the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

Angry GM workers have demonstrated against the closure since it was announced. Earlier this week, an injunction forced them to end a 12-day blockade at GM's head office in Oshawa.

Buckley said union officials will be meeting with GM officials next week to look at what new product can be brought to Oshawa.

"We're going to continue to press General Motors to keep the best truck plant in the industry open and we're going to continue our fight," he said.

Lori Culbert
Vancouver Sun

Friday, June 20, 2008

VANCOUVER - Gladys Radek will be thinking of her niece Tamara Chipman, who vanished along the Highway of Tears, when she leaves Vancouver Saturday to walk to Ottawa to demand justice for missing and murdered women.

She and other walkers planned to gather with supporters tomorrow morning at Trout Lake for a send-off breakfast before beginning their trek, which is scheduled to end Sept. 15 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. 

Well, yes, great, but in the last line of this report are the causes of the disproportionate rates of oral cancer in the DTES - no dental service being one. Yes, a free clinic will pull a tooth if you are in pain, but not give you a free cleaning. So where is the money and other resources for that? The DTES malaise is stuck at the band-aid stage, throw dollars at the results of a problem, and prevention of the problem itself seems to be beyond anyone's vision. See housing, addictions, mental health, poverty, nutrition (on welfare...huh), well being, isolation, and the same tired unimaginative approach continues.
 
Vancouver Sun

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

VANCOUVER - The BC Cancer Agency is launching a free mobile screening program in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where one out of 150 residents is thought to suffer from oral cancer, compared with a provincial rate of one in 10,000.

"We're taking a proactive approach and screening for oral cancer in populations of people more likely to get this cancer," said Health Minister George Abbott.

"The chances of survival are greatly increased if the cancer is detected early."

Dr. Catherine Poh, an outreach program leader with the agency's oral cancer prevention program, said a more intensive, closer-to-home approach for care is necessary to ensure people seek screening and treatment.

"One in 10,000 British Columbians is diagnosed with oral cancer annually, but the incidence rate is alarmingly higher for residents of the Downtown Eastside, where one in 150 suffers from oral cancer," Poh said.

"There is an urgent need to reach out to this community with strategies that will help prevent and identify disease at early stages when it is easier to treat."

"Our goal is to make access to screening easy," said Dr. Miriam Rosin, director of the program.

The increased risk for oral cancer among the downtown residents is thought to be due to heavy tobacco and alcohol use, compromised immune function, poor nutrition and poor oral hygiene, and limited access to dental care.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008

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VANCOUVER -- The next mayor of Vancouver is a bicycle-riding environmentalist who is super fit, loves the outdoors and has a passion for social justice. In his hippie phase, he went back to the land, became a farmer and grew organic produce. City councillor Peter Ladner winces at this list of typical West Coast clichés. Ruefully, he admits they're all true. The trouble is, they're also true of his opponent, Gregor Robertson. One or the other is going to be elected Vancouver's Olympics mayor this fall (unless Carole Taylor, who says she's not running, changes her mind).

But how will voters tell which one is which? "I have much more experience," Mr. Ladner says. Until last week, people expected Sam Sullivan to be Vancouver's Olympics mayor. But Mr. Sullivan's leadership wasn't nearly as inspiring as his life story - a quadriplegic who triumphed over adversity. So his party turfed him and nominated Mr. Ladner, instead.

From The Georgia Straight

 
Shelter plan is unfair to hard-pressed area
 
Beverley Bowes
Times Colonist

Friday, June 20, 2008

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code, is the result of flawed policy and poor decision-making. Today, a Victoria neighbourhood is headed down the same slippery slope.

Practical, rather than moral, grounds were the order of the day in the early 1980s when prostitution was chased out of Vancouver's middle-class West End and Mount Pleasant districts into the Downtown Eastside. The same situation occurred in 2003 in Victoria when sex-trade workers were pushed out of the downtown core and into Rock Bay and Burnside Gorge. Along with The Stroll came the drug dealers and higher crime rates.

The neighbourhood managed to absorb the influx because it is a strong and diversified community. The area comprises light industrial, middle- to lower-income single-family dwellings and condos, transient accommodation offered by single-room-occupancy motels, pockets of executive condo developments, office buildings, subsidized housing complexes, residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities, housing for the hardest-to-house and housing for federal prison parolees.

This community is now teetering on the edge of an abyss, at the bottom of which lies a hell similar to the Downtown Eastside.
.

A work in progress - Stephen


An Hour or So With a Mexican Scribe
From The Washington Post

Is this the way ahead?

Seemingly backwards?

The wonderful Schumacher used the phrase 'intermediate technology' to refine the distinction between tools which put the power into the producers of the tools and home made tools which perhaps don't offer the mechanical advantage necessary.

In the villages of old, imagined societies, not everyone did everything. You had a fletcher - putting the flights on arrows, a blacksmith - shoeing horses, a baker - baking the bread.

A local person was skilled and revered for their skill. That skill was passed down through families. It grew upon a natural aptitude as well as something in the blood.

So no one failed. The large boned blacksmith wasn't forced to use his large fingers to be clumsy with delicate feathers.

In today's societies we are somehow made addicted to self-sufficiency.

I recall an incident about 20 years ago when the sister of a friend of mine wanted her bicycle serviced and asked me to do this for her. I remember being very angry at her refusal to learn from me how to do it herself. I had become obsessed with the self-reliant, we must all do everything approach and this incident exposed my unease with it.

So the story of Mexican scribes using electric typewriters to compose bills, love letters or contracts seems refreshing.

In westernized Vancouver, obsessed with formal learning, of course this would combat the idea of an educated population.As Daniel Quinn points out in 'My Ishmael' and Ivan Illich says everywhere, a child knows everything they need by about 12 years old. The last six years just turn them into insatiable consumers. Consumers of goods and of 'training'.

***   ***   ***

So the poor people who did not write would be sent to school in shame and pity.

Equality would be cited; you have to be equal Equally dependant on capitalist baubles and trinkets.

The electric typewriter scribes would be sent for 'upgrading', in shame and pity, to become obsessed with computers and be current or modern and keeping up with the times.

But why should everyone be able, read lonely and independent, enough to know how to do everything that the educational and capitalist society wants?

Could it be that capitalism needs everyone to do everything to sell more of everything?

The photographer used to be called in to take photographs, now everyone has to have a digital camera.

So instead of one camera per say 1000 people there are 500.

A true graphic designer or illustrator used to be a talented person who had a gift.

Now everyone with a computer and a silly amonut of money to buy Photoshop thinks they are talented instead of just tooled.

Every house in a street has its own lawnmower, electric drill and other assorted owned tools used so infrequently that sharing could reduce dependency by perhaps 100 to 1/

So the illiterate would swap their illiteracy for dependence on typewriter and computers.

The social interaction with the scribes would be gone.

The scribes would have no work.

But everyone would have imbibed the expectation to purchase expected tools and be so called self-sufficient.

Progress.
 

Exactly.....

Saturday » June 14 » 2008
 
Why do cellphone users condemn us to share their tiresome chatter?
 
John Martin
Special to The Province

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

One evening back in the dreadful '70s, four or five of us decided to venture from the bland cul-de-sacs of Richmond and check out the mean streets of skid row.

It was yet to be known as the Downtown Eastside, and was more pitiful than dangerous at the time.

True, there was a fair bit of heroin. But for the most part, Main and Hastings was a refuge for low-income pensioners who spent the bulk of their waking hours in the many beer parlours that lined the streets.

The first thing we noticed upon entering one of these watering holes was the staggering decibel level.

But there was no music -- and upon closer examination, almost everyone was sitting by themselves, babbling incoherently to no one in particular.

I was reminded of this image last week while riding the West Coast Express from Mission to the Waterfront Station.

It had been years since I rode the train and things were remarkably different this time.

Every second person was chattering on their cellphone the entire trip.

It didn't matter what car or level I moved to, I didn't detect a single, normal conversation between two passengers seated side by side.

Instead, people were literally screaming into their phones and had zero apprehension about how public their conversations were.

Somewhere along the line -- and cellphones are not the sole reason -- we have collectively opted to forfeit any semblance of personal space.

Recall in the days of phone booths how we'd always glare at the next person waiting to make a call if they stood too close?

Everyone closed the door and typically cupped the receiver to minimize the possibility of strangers eavesdropping.

Similarly, when we would use the row of pay phones in malls or hotel lobbies, we'd move as far away from the next person as the cord would allow, to maintain some privacy.

And those in line fully understood the etiquette of the day to stand several feet away, much as we tend to do with ATM machines in modern times.

But now there is absolutely no concern over who hears our conversations, no matter how personal.

Given that most people talk two or three times louder than they need to on a cell, it would seem we actually want the world to listen in on our business.

This isn't simply about being rude and annoying.

It's also about people having delusions of self-importance and insisting on sharing their life stories.

Unfortunately though, most people aren't nearly as interesting as they apparently think they are.

And given all the blather I had to endure on the train last week, I'd say many aren't even as interesting as, well, the old rummies in that beer parlour on Hastings Street 30-odd years ago.

Contact John Martin, a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley, at John.Martin@ucfv.ca
© The Vancouver Province 2008


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CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
 

Globe editorial

The rights of drug addicts

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

May 29, 2008 at 6:09 AM EDT

Insisting that a Vancouver clinic be allowed to provide potentially life-saving supervision for heroin and cocaine addicts to inject their drugs, as a British Columbia judge did this week, is the right thing to do. It's right as a policy choice, but it's also right as a use of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect addicts from the arbitrary reach of the criminal law.

Well exactly - who really cares about Mr Ego Density?

Saturday » June 14 » 2008
 
You say Campbell's premier, I say he's mega-mayor
Municipal roles near zero as provincial leader races from project to project
 
Miro Cernetig
Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 31, 2008

You may have noticed we're in civic election season again, time to pick a bunch of new mayors for Metro Vancouver. But, honestly, do we even have to bother?

After all, we already have something better than 21 mayors, all looking after their various fiefdoms. We have the mega-mayor, otherwise known as Gordon Campbell, premier of British Columbia.

Think about it. The premier bestrides our various cities like a colossus. Is there anything he doesn't have his hand in?

Just consider the city of Vancouver. The biggest ideas transforming the city aren't coming from Mayor Sam Sullivan or his opponents. They come straight from the premier's office.

Want a new $400-million Vancouver Art Gallery? Then get the premier to kick in $50 million and it'll get off the ground.

Sullivan wasn't even in the loop on that one.

Will that art gallery be on the edge of False Creek, instead of in an old bus station, as many favoured? The premier liked the waterfront location and so did his representatives at B.C. Pavilion Corp., so a waterfront gallery it shall be.


 

Kamloops, B.C. -- In disagreeing with the B.C. Supreme Court judge's decision to protect Vancouver's safe-injection site, Margaret Wente argues that the real solution is to stigmatize the "crack whores" like we do the smokers, for their own good. Isn't the logic a little loose here? Society stigmatizes the act of smoking because it thinks smokers should know better. Society stigmatizes "crack whores" because it thinks they are a pathetic bunch less worthy of kindness and support. How many readers can honestly say they see humanity in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside?

Human dignity is a value central to our Constitution. It informs and is informed by every Charter right we know. Thus, Mr. Justice Ian Pitfield was not creating a "constitutional right for addicts to shoot up"; rather, he was recognizing that our community's collective dignity was being threatened by our government's disregard for human life.

Feature: Western Hemisphere's Only Heroin Maintenance Program Coming to an End