Premier Christy Clark’s government has so far avoided taking stands on controversial issues unless pushed, so I was surprised to see Environment Minister Terry Lake come out yesterday with an approval for Metro Vancouver’s garbage plan. That plan includes a commitment to explore incineration as a big component of the plan, which has provoked a […]

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Toronto has decided to pull up its bike lane and move it over one street. I thought perhaps the same might happen here if results showed that business losses on Hornby and Dunsmuir were severe enough. Looks like that won’t be the case. The reports out yesterday (which I summarize here) get business losses at […]

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The latest scuffle is over the naming of deputy city clerk Janice MacKenzie to be Chief Elections Officer, instead of having the City Clerk (in this case, Marg Coulson) as Chief Elections Officer, as is the tradition. NPA and candidate Mike Klassen setting out their case in news releases here and there this morning; Jeff Lee’s […]

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The civic election is less than six months away, which means no hiring or appointment or purchase of paper clips goes unscrutinized these days as the Non-Partisan Association fights to get back some ground in this election and Vision Vancouver fights to keep them at bay. At school board, much kerfuffle about the hiring of […]

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Someone’s ready for a fight to the death here, it sounds like. This just out from the mayor’s office. Do We Want our Region to Become Los Angeles? Let’s make one thing clear:  Metro Vancouver Mayors approved a two cent per litre gas tax increase and the money will not be used solely to pay […]

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I read dozens of riot stories in Europe, but when I came back, one of the impacts I heard about — which I hadn’t read — was the effect on employees who had been in the stores invaded and wrecked. Not surprisingly, when I called WorkSafeBC later to find out more about that, that agency […]

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In Italy, as my trip and some voluminous reading about it revealed, people don’t see themselves as Italian. Nor do they see themselves that much as Tuscan or Umbrian or Piedmontese. Instead, their first loyalty is to their city. That’s a legacy of the hundreds of years when Italy was not a country at all, […]

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Sitting facing the palace of Federigo da Montefeltro in the bright afternoon sun, sipping “water with gaz” and hooking into a rare WiFi spot after my latest two-hour hit of Madonna with Child paintings, not a car in sight on this elegant cobbled street and plaza. It looks almost like La Citta Ideale, the painting […]

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I realize that the riot is two weeks old now and that, for lack of other news, it’s been analyzed to pieces but a small personal perspective on why young people participate. I was in a small riot in Paris many years ago, when I was a student there. It was on New Year’s Eve, […]

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Nothing like seeing a car barrelling towards you IN YOUR LANE to make you appreciate the differences in culture between one country or city and another. Coming up to almost three weeks now in Italy, we’ve had lots of time to do what is the best part of tourism: ponder what is the same and […]

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