As my faithful readers know, I’m a reasonable person who’s always willing to consider all sides of an issue, sometimes to a fault, and I rarely get foot-stomping angry over anything.

But if there’s one thing that does raise my blood pressure, it’s governments who make it difficult to get information. Usually that’s confined to unhelpfully funnelling everything through a “communications officer” who knows nothing or making you put in a freedom-of-information request to get the simplest report or number.

This time, though, the problem is a move to reduce the amount of information available by limiting Statistics Canada’s activities. As my friend Andre Picard points out in today’s Globe, that is a serious blow to our ability to understand who we are as a nation, what we’re doing collectively, and how to plan for the future.

I freely acknowledge that I’m a statistics geek whose fondest dream has been to fill out the census long form. But even if you don’t put yourself in that category, the kind of information that Stats Can gathers through the long form and other types of data-gathering currently under threat are vital.

In the complex society we live in, I see statistics gathering as the higher-order brain function of the national body we live in. If we don’t get that feedback to the brain about what is happening in all the various regions of the body, we can’t react to early signs of danger.

At the city, people are concerned about it too. When planners figure out the future density needed for a neighbourhood, they look at existing demographics and immigration information and project them forward. Transportation planners rely on the regular statistical information about who is walking, biking, taking the bus, driving alone, or driving with someone to see how patterns are changing … or not.

Raymond Louie told me yesterday (while we were talking about other things) that he’s going to be bringing a motion forward to have staff come up with a list of all the kinds of statistics they use for planning and what they might have to do to continue to get that information, i.e. collect it themselves. He’s worried that this will end up being just another form of downloading, as cities have to spend more money to get essential information about activities inside their boundaries.

I imagine this is something that will be unquestioningly supported by all parties, as it should be. This isn’t a partisan issue. I encourage all of you to register protests with your local MPs or the PMO’s office directly about this.

Community centres are among the most popular social centres in the city. They’re all packed to the rafters and the park board/city can’t seem to build them fast enough.

Every three years, the park board gets the unlovely job of deciding which one or two centres will be replaced in the next three-year capital plan. Although they look at factors like age of the existing building and the population that the centre is serving, another factor is how hard the community fights for a centre and what it’s able to contribute.

So the lining up starts tomorrow (July 8) at the planning committee of park board, 6:30 at the park board offices (agenda item attached below).

One of the debates this year is going to be over the whole messy outdoor pool issue. As people who follow this blog know, the Mount Pleasant community is up in arms over the closure of the small outdoor pool at 16th and Ontario. There is a new outdoor pool at the new Olympics-built community centre but 1. it’s not open yet and 2. the pool is just a wading pool, not the kind of pool that allows people to do laps outside or be a cool teenager hangout. (Scuttlebutt in the community is that there was supposed to be a real full-size outdoor pool, but that park planners bowed to opposition from nearby residents, who were worried about the noise that would emanate from a full-size pool.)

At the same time, people in Sunset are also mad that their outdoor pool was closed. For the last few years, the mantra at park board has been that those neighbourhood outdoor pools are passe and too expensive, given that they only operate three or four months of the year. To which irate residents point out that there are three lovely, huge outdoor pools, one recently built, all north of First Avenue in the city, but absolutely nothing easily for the other four-fifths of the city.

I had coffee the other day with park board commissioners Aaron Jasper and Sarah Blyth, who are feeling the heat on this issue and seem to be searching for some kind of solution — possibly digging out the wading pool at the new Riley Park centre and turning it into a full outdoor pool for the central city that could be used by people from Sunset and Marpole as well.

So, if you want something in your neighbourhood, best start crusading ASAP or it could be shuffled aside for other priorities.

As promised, the agenda

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about West Van’s efforts to slooowly bring in a few more housing types to the community and I highlighted efforts to start some pilot projects for small secondary houses on large lots, along with a duplex and a four-plex.

I especially focused on a plan by one set of West Van homeowners, Rick Gruneau and Shelley Bentley, to build a small house designed by Barry Downs (one of Vancouver’s leading architects of the last generation) on a large property that they could move into when they retired, while selling off the big house.

Sadly, it seems as though that project has fallen through because of their fears thatseveral members of  council are so lukewarm that Gruneau and Bentley could end up spending a lot of money and get turned down in the end. (They had already spent about $18,000 to get to this stage in the pilot process.) They say that it appears West Van has created a pilot project programmed to fail.

Here is the strongly worded letter that the couple sent off, which underscores the problems cities have when they try to introduce new policies while bending over backwards not to alienate any possible resisters.

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As some of you may know already from following my twitter posts, I was in Seattle for the last few days. (Thanks to all the enthusiasts for keeping the blog lively while I was playing hooky.)

Besides paying no tax on anything I bought there, as a result of the state’s controversial (and now court-challenged) decision to exempt B.C. residents from Washington sales tax, I also spent some time riding around on the city’s new transit systems.

First off, the new light-rail link from downtown Seattle to the airport, which opened last July and was just lovely. As much as we think the new Canada Line is swish, it really comes off looking a bit like a Vancouver special compared to the money that Seattle invested in its line. It cost half a billion more than the Canada Lineand part of that seems to have been invested in truly gorgeous station design.

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Today’s the day that Vancouver holds its special council meeting to hear from various parties about the issue of oil tankers in Burrard Inlet.

I had a story in Saturday’s Globe looking at how this ties in with efforts that environmental groups have been making to get public attention around oil tankers in general, along with how it meshes with the mayor’s political agenda.

If the Non-Partisan Association was hoping that a debate over changing its name would draw attention and crowds, that strategy didn’t totally work. A grand total of 42 people appeared at the Vancouver Museum last night to vote on whether to change the name to Vancouver First.

(I don’t think attracting crowds was the strategy, by the way. This initiative comes largely from a couple of guys, former TEAM member Bill McCreery being the leader, who haven’t been active in the party before. In fact, I’ve heard members grumbling that these newcomers were sucking up energy the party didn’t need to waste on their efforts to turn the NPA into TEAM or some facsimile thereof.)

There were a few passionate speeches. McCreery noted that 76 per cent of people who voted in the online survey showed a preference for choices other than Non Partisan Association. Among other choices: Vancouver First, Vancouver Citizens’ Alliance, New Progressive Alliance, One Vancouver, New Progressive Association, and New Positive Action. Former NPA park commission Diane Ledingham supported him, saying that a new name would mean “the NPA can evolve into something new. Vancouver has changed rapidly and this would allow us to move forward into a new name that speaks more of inclusivity.”

On the other side, one-time aldermanic candidate (Class of ’82) Paul McCrea said that he was around after the NPA was whomped by the Mike Harcourt-led group in 1981 and everyone fretted back then that they should change the name. The party “went on to three sweeping victories” after that, he reminded everyone. As well, as someone who’s worked in advertising, he also pointed out that “it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to impress a brand name as well known as this one.”

Charles Flavelle of Purdy’s Chocolates said that, if his company had fallen on hard times, “I would have changed the direction, not the name.”

And Councillor Suzanne Anton, in a campaign-style speech, listed everything wrong with the current Vision administration (park board doesn’t actually even believe in independent park boards; school board has no faith in the school system; city council has politicized city hall and is spending its time fighting another order of government. She wrapped up with a stirring “It is important that we rebrand our image but we do not need to rebrand our name.”

The party broke up while it was still light out. I didn’t see whether any attendees drifted over to the Moira Stillwell party going on in another part of the building. But I doubt it, as NPA people keep telling me that only Vision and COPE work in suspicious lockstep with the provincial NDP.

And now, on to the election. I didn’t note it in a previous post, but the NPA are planning to nominate a first round of candidates in November, a year before the 2011 election, presumably to get some strength on the ground that is hard for them to maintain now, with only one city councillor, two school trustees, and one park-board commissioner

Another day, another neighbourhood group that gathers steam to oppose development in their neighbourhood.

Marpole residents had a first community meeting last night, the first that has brought them together to exchange information and gear themselves up to have more input into development in their neighbourhood. This was, of course, provoked by the plans for the big Marine Gateway project in their neighbourhood (covered extensively in previous posts).

This bulletin from Jo-Anne Pringle, one of the residents who was surprised at what she discovered was being planned.

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It was a short sweet meeting, as Bill McCreery tried to persuade the small crowd to vote for rebranding but the mainly loyal NPA stalwarts resisted. The meeting was over in less than an hour. I’ll post more in the morning.

A small brief in the local media last January caught my eye: a 27-year-old had been hit in a pedestrian crosswalk near my house, but he had no identification and police were trying to figure out who he was.

The next blurb said he had died in hospital. Police never released his name. But the little mention stuck in my head. My son is 27 — the age when you think your kids are safe. So I kept trying to find out what happened.

My column in Vancouver magazine coming out soon tells the story of who that young man was and what happened. I also discovered, along the way, just how many pedestrians are killed in Vancouver — far more than Toronto and Montreal. Some of it can be explained by the fact that we have more walkers here, although you’d think, if there are more walkers, there’d be more precautions in place to make sure they don’t get run down.

Other cities have drastically lowered their pedestrian deaths by trying out different strategies and going on aggressive campaigns. Montreal, which had 27 deaths two years ago, had only four by the end of May, when I wrote this story.

Thanks to everyone for sticking through the weird blog issues of the last two days. My domain name had lapsed and I didn’t get a notification from my hoster. So it got parked in an advertising site, available for anyone to grab.

Fortunately for me, pirates did not make off with it before I realized what was going on and paid to hold my domain name until approximately the end of time. Phew. In the meantime, I discovered that at least one place was advertising my site as being worth $5278 US. How thrilling. More than the 25 cents worth of chemicals that used to be the little factoid circulating in my teen years about what a human was worth.

A big thank you especially to all who emailed with supportive words.