For when this blog and livestreaming council meetings just aren’t enough: Former Portland mayor Sam Adams is the keynote and the program is diverse, as it always is with the SCARP crew.    

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You all used to care about bike lanes. Now it’s just transit tax all the time. Okay, so here you go. Ian Jarvis is out, Doug Allen is the interim CEO, the search is on for a permanent one. An updated version with more reaction coming out later.    

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Vancouver is such a city of contradictions: endorphin-inducing natural beauty and some of the tackiest housing and development in North America; the glass condos of Coal Harbour and the hovels of the Downtown Eastside. One that has always perplexed me is how, in a city where it’s hard to find a shack with a piece […]

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It’s now up to 250+ comments on the post about the last transit plebiscite. Time to start afresh, folks. The latest stories on the transit plebiscite. The launch The province’s very fast switch to a harmonized tax after the Retail Council said it would go to war over a new, separate third tax And, in […]

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Been a lot happening recently, so I’m catching up here and packaging a few things together since things are sometimes changing daily in the fast-paced civics world these days. First up, the “origami” tower came to the urban design panel, where it was not supported in a 4-2 vote. My story here. For those not […]

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This was a bombshell yesterday. More to come. No one seems to know all the scenarios that might play out (could this void the city’s land sale with Brenhill? will public hearing process need to be changed?), all of which sound serious and complicated. Lots of interesting things in Justice McEwan’s ruling. He stayed out […]

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The people who sell us stuff are on pins and needles these days, waiting for the B.C. finance ministry to tell them exactly how a new transit tax might work. Unclear yet: – will it apply to alcohol – will it apply to exactly the same things as PST does, or will people need to […]

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Made the trek to Langley (75 minutes there, 40 minutes back) to hear Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Jordan Bateman and pro-Yes campaigner Bill Tieleman face off, to get a sense of the main messages we’ll be hearing for several months. My Globe story is here but to add a few observations to what is in the […]

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The design for this office tower at 555 West Cordova is creating quite a stir, with former planning director Ray Spaxman describing it as “the Martian has landed,” development consultant Michael Geller deploring it generally, and former Globe reporter Rod Mickleburgh calling it a “glass carbuncle.” Ray’s comments in detail (with others chiming in) over […]

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The wave of change that has hit Chinatown in the last while is making a significant number of people uncomfortable. A proposed nine-storey development by the Beedie Group at the corner opposite Sun Yat-Sen Gardens kicked it into high gear, but there was rising unease even before that, with three major condo developments, a number […]

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