So what’s going on with the NPA is a topic of much interest among political observers these days. The party seems poised to win in the 2018 civic elethat ction, given Vision’s apparent wilting and uncertainty about any co-ordinated response from non-NPA parties. However, the NPA seems to be undergoing some internal tussling, with putative […]

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Got this note from Councillor Kerry Jang yesterday, confirming what city-hall people have been hearing for a while, which is that he won’t be running again. Not a surprise, as he has a busy second life as a psychiatry professor at UBC. Jang has been Vision’s point man on issues like shelters, marijuana dispensaries and […]

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This story is an example of how following a trail of breadcrumbs on a story can lead to outcomes you never expected. I started out planning to write something about yet another West End site selling for a crazy price — $79.5 million to newbie developer Vivagrand, with only one messy project so far on […]

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Every retired planner I talked to in the last month was convinced that the development company Beedie Living would take the city to court after the surprise decision from the development-permit board in early November to reject the proposal. The board has never completely rejected a proposal before. Many of us wrote that it had […]

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I’m surprised more media didn’t report on this Supreme Court decision that found the city at fault for delaying so long on a decision about a Shaughnessy house (whether to allow demolition or designate it as heritage). Perhaps it didn’t take off because there were no easy heroes to cheer for. It pitted some offshore […]

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Catching up on posting some stories here, so that this blog can continue to be a useful archive. As we all know, the development-permit board made a historic decision on Nov. 6, with a 2-1 vote by the city’s top officials to reject the proposal. Although I and many other reporters had written that there […]

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If you want to be guaranteed loads of clicks in this town, write about how everyone is being driven out by high real-estate prices (caused by heartless politicians, shadowy foreign investors, the real-estate cartel, etc etc) and/or about a study that tries to bring real data to the anecdotes. So this recent study from UBC got […]

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Catching up on posting some older stories here. First up: the stories before and after the Oct. 14 by-election, which provided a story with endless interpretation possibilities (Vision dead; no, progressive vote on the rise; no, NPA on the rise; no, people-power politics on the rise; coalitions the politics of the future; yada yada). First […]

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One of the great pleasures of my life is connecting with a wide variety of students as a journalism teacher at the University of B.C. and Langara College. International students, in particular, bring a different eye and an ability to connect with communities here that many of locals aren’t always capable of. My students at […]

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A friend who visited Montreal recently commented on the number of outdoor ping-pong tables there when he came back. Out of idle curiosity, I asked on Twitter if there were any in the Lower Mainland. The answers I got made me realize that, yes, there were some scattered around but, more fun, there seemed to […]

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