One of the aims of the city’s plan for becoming the Most Greenest City, though it wasn’t spelled out anywhere, was not to moralize about how everyone should be a better environmental person. To that end, they focused on incentives and opportunities rather than scolding and penalties, as I note in my Globe story here.

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Brad Cran has been named as Vancouver’s new poet laureate and will be official inducted tomorrow at council. You can read his official bio on the city website, but here’s a brief literary pause to read one of his actual poems which has, you’ll be pleased to note, a kind of urban development theme. On […]

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The debate over the bike-lane trial on Burrard Bridge is clearly going to be intense, judging by the volume and passion of comments on this blog. Here is what the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, which has maintained a pretty consistent position on this over the years, has to say. Decision on whether it’s going […]

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In a desperate search for non-ammonia-treated strawberries on the weekend, I stopped in at the new Whole Foods on Cambie at Eighth and discovered a major party going on. Well, that’s what it looked like, with people jamming into the store like it was the night before Christmas dinner. Some major organic-vegetable-buying going on there. […]

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Hey all. It’s a beautiful Friday afternoon and I think you’re all winding down for the weekend, except for gmgw, glissando and LP, who are still energetically duking it out on the blog comments. Thanks, you guys. I never feel lonely when you’re there. Anyway, I got a new blog-stats counter that allows me to […]

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A big report on the city’s homelessness efforts is on the agenda for next week. Most of it states a lot of what we’ve heard throughout the last few months in terms of the state of affairs here in Vancouver re homelessness and where the city would like to go. A new squib that was […]

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Weirdly, the long-awaited report on the Burrard bike-lane trial is available on Councillor Geoff Meggs’ website here but it’s not available on the city website yet. This will likely fuel [yet more] speculation in certain quarters that Commissar Meggs is secretly running city hall, though I suspect it’s just he got the report along with […]

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There had been many rumours that the head of Vancouver’s cultural planning department, Sue Harvey, might be ousted by the new council when it came in. Those rumours went to sleep for a while, leading many to wonder what was happening. Latest news in is that Sue is decamping from cultural planning — but only […]

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Because this topic seems to be generating a lot of controversy, I will do a bit of notebook dumping here to give everyone all the evidence available before they come to a verdict.  And then we can move on to other things.

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Mayor Gregor Robertson’s comments that city hall bureaucrats are leaving because they can’t handle the pace of his aggressive agenda are really kicking up a s**storm. The comments, for those who haven’t seen them, are in Jeff Lee’s story in the Sun here and the mayor said substantially the same thing to me, which will […]

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