Aaaaack! Okay, call me a hopeless bourgeois (as my friend Kim does whenever I admit to doing something like going to the art gallery), but it’s devastating news that Aurora Bistro has closed down on Main Street. It was my idea of the perfect restaurant — amazing, local, meticulously prepared food, along with a small […]

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Hey, I got two whole weekend days to do almost nothing, after the frantic election season where, as some of you have noticed, I was INESCAPABLE on all media platforms. Is there a thought I had in the past four weeks that you didn’t hear? I doubt it. So I really appreciated this story in […]

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I’m hearing a lot of grumbling from media types about Gregor Robertson’s sudden invisibility. His handlers say that he’s in deep transition mode and unavailable. Critics point out that Barack Obama is in deep transition mode but manages to make a public appearance every day. This could become a sore point as the weeks go […]

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I know it’s hard for some people to accept, but our outgoing mayor does have some friends out there, so presumably they’ll all be showing up for this shindig to honour him. They could actually turn this into a money-maker, since I’m sure there’s more than one person who’d be willing to pay top dollar […]

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So little time, so many questions to answer for the incoming Vision team. As you can imagine, people inside and outside city hall are in a tizzy of wondering what that Vision team is going to do on any number of fronts. I couldn’t possibly go into all the permutations but here’s a brief rundown […]

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In case other readers haven’t spotted it, there’s a fascinating and thoughtful (well, mostly) discussion going on in the comments section under my post from Sunday about Kashmir Dhaliwal’s defeat. To understand the complexities of race, party and civic politics in Vancouver, go read the back and forth

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City staff hadn’t even finished counting the votes when I heard people wondering whether the Coalition of Progressive Electors, that longstanding traditional left party that Vision split away from, was now going to become the official opposition at city hall. That’s because Vision has enough councillors to carry any vote at city hall, so COPE […]

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My latest column in Vancouver magazine looks at the way cities around the world are trying to reproduce Vancouver — some of them right down to the street names and hand railings, others in a more nuanced way.

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Pete Quily did this fascinating analysis of how well Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson campaigns did in using social media. You can read about it here. I’m supposed to be giving a talk on YouTube politics next week, which will be easy because it was so noticeable how much more people were using YouTube, Facebook, […]

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This just in from the emails at city hall, messages from both city manager Judy Rogers and Estelle Lo about the chief financial officer’s resignation. From: Lo, Estelle To: Sullivan, Sam; Anton, Suzanne; Ball, Elizabeth; Cadman, David; Capri, Kim; Chow, George; Deal, Heather; Ladner, Peter; Lee, B.C.; Louie, Raymond; Stevenson, Tim Cc: Hurford, David Sent: […]

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