My colleague (and, I note, fellow why-don’t-we-read-lists-of-corporate-donations-in-our-free-time type person) Sean Holman put up this thoughtful post today, thinking aloud about the ways that corporations and unions will be able to get around any new limits on political donations.

I do tend to agree with one of his posters, that it’s very unlikely that a company or union could require any members or employees to donate. They could strongly encourage them and likely a certain band of the faithful would do so. Enough to match the $770,000 that CUPE alone contributed to Lower Mainland municipal campaigns in the last election? I don’t think so.

My quick two cents of analysis on this is that it’s likely to benefit the developers more. They’re more numerous than the half dozen unions that get involved in civic politics unions and they’ve got all kinds of people working for them — architects, marketers, lawyers, designers and so on — who might be sensitive to understanding which political party their boss and rainmaker thinks is more advantageous for them.

Some might say good to the severe curtailment of union donations. But I’m hearing a lot of anti-developer talk out there these days. For those who are worried about developers having sway at city hall, what will be the counter-balance then to ensure that, once again, it’s not all developer dollars talking?

I’m not one, by the way, who has much patience with those who think that city councillors’ votes are likely to be swayed by $1,000 from this developer or that one. I’ve never been able to understand the kind of mind that thinks a councillor would sell his or her vote for that kind of money — which they don’t even get, by the way. It all goes into some party fund to pay off the last election’s polling bills or the next election’s billboards.

What I do think is more likely to intrude into the mind of any party or councillor who wishes to be more than a short-lived shooting star in the political firmament is not the donation of a single developer. It’s the cumulative effect of a whole sub-group that donates.

When city council ponders whether to bring in some decision that annoys a single developer, do you think they’re that worried? No. There’s another $10,000 where that one came from.

What they’re more likely to hesitate over is a rule or policy that annoys the whole herd of developers who’ve donated to them. That $1 million won’t come around again so quickly. The same is true on the union side.

The social season seems to be in full swing. These two notices here today. 

MEETING NUMBER ONE: VPD PUBLIC FORUM
 
The Vancouver Police Department is inviting the public and the media
 to an open community forum to explain and discuss the VPD’s planned move this fall
 to the Vanoc building at 3585 Graveley.
 
 
Hastings Community Centre
3096 East Hastings Street
 
Thursday, May 13th
6:30 p.m.
 
 
The public’s participation is welcome and encouraged

MEETING NUMBER TWO: TRANSLINK AGM

TransLink will hold its Annual General Meeting Tuesday, May 11, aboard the MV Burrard Pacific Breeze.
 
The ferry will leave from Waterfront Station at 10am and sail around Vancouver Harbour until 12 Noon, calling in briefly at Lonsdale Quay at 10:50am to pick up the featured guest speaker, Mr John Furlong, the CEO of VANOC.
 
This meeting is open to media and the public; however, due to space limitations, those who wish to attend should arrive by 9:30am to avoid disappointment. 
 
If there are enough people who miss the meeting and still wish to receive handout materials and take a short trip on the newest ferry in the SeaBus fleet, the Pacific Breeze will make an additional sailing from Waterfront at 12:20pm, returning at 12:35. 
 
We look forward to seeing you there!

Some days, the advertisements in your daily newspaper are just as fascinating as the stories. Today was one of those days. The Review section was a ringer with a ginormous double-page ad (not sure how much it costs, but believe it might be more than I earn in a year) advertising: A Vancouver masterpiece: A new home for the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Accompanying it, a long essay on why the gallery should move: ” While our current courthouse building on Robson Square has been a wonderful home for the past 27 years … After a thorough planning process … Our aim is to design and build a landmark art museum for all of British Columbia …” and so on.

Accompanying it are supporting statements by artists Jeff Wall, Gordon Smith and Doug Coupland, developer Terry Hui, power guy Jake Ker, and Tourism Vancouver CEO Rick Antonson. Okay, the big guns are out.

What you won’t see in the ad, of course, is that there is a cluster of developers and architects in town who are out lobbying just as hard to have the gallery stay where it is.

And on the back page, an advertisement about the awards for the Association of Women in Finance. In the top row, for performance and excellence, Patrice Impey, Vision Vancouver’s new hire who heads up the finance department.

My infrequent but carefully selected events listing service is taking note of the following:

Exploring the implications of demographic shifts.

Who’s Coming to the Party?

Join Glenn Miller, David Allison and Alan Boniface in this thought-provoking dialogue that will inspire and direct us to make changes in how we build and develop, in order to create more sustainable communities. What are the implications of demographic shifts over the next 4 decades and how will we address them?

Ø    What will Metro Vancouver’s population look like in 2050?

Ø    What demographic trends/shifts will shape land use and real estate development between now and 2050?

Ø    How will immigration patterns shape development over the next 40 years?

 Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 11:30am – 2:00pm

[Read more →]

We’ve been seeing a lot of action at city hall lately when it comes to bike lanes in a few areas. But there’s a much bigger, more comprehensive re-think coming in the fall, when the city will start talking about an update to its 1997 Transportation Plan.

One topic for sure that is going to come up in the debate, as I outlined today in the Globe, is a reallocation of the existing road space. The city has had a policy since 1997 of not creating new road space. Now it will be looking at who should get which part of its current road network among the groups competing for it: car drivers, commercial truck traffic, buses, future rapid transit, cyclists, pedestrians, taxis, car co-ops, skateboarders, motorcyclists, electric-bike riders and probably a few more categories that I missed.

Other cities have talked about “road diets” — squeezing cars into smaller spaces to make room for the other modes. Wait for that term to appear here.

I have to mark the passing at city hall of two women who went beyond the call of duty in serving the city. One is Ronda Howard, until recently the assistant director of citywide and regional planning.

Although former head city planner Larry Beasley is synonymous with Vancouver, he did his job with people like Ronda (she and Larry worked on the downtown plan for Vancouver back in the 1980s that created the heavily residential neighbourhoods we have there today). It was also her part of the department that called a halt to the residential boom in the commercial areas in 2004.

In her latest years at the hall, she dedicated a huge amount of time to the Metro Jobs study, figuring out who works in which parts of Vancouver’s various downtowns. I’ll miss the sessions I had with her and her meticulous slides detailing exactly how our downtown economy works.

Ronda’s already had her retirement party, if I heard correctly, but another one coming up — and this one was quite a shock to me — is Barb Windsor, the city’s chief licence inspector. Barb is the person who, in the nicest possible Emily Post but steely firm kind of way, told slum landlords they had to fix up their properties, dealt with the city’s most notorious hoarders, adjudicated the issues of porn theatres, and rode herd on the restaurants, pool halls and convenience stores doubling as drug supermarkets. Just listening to her calm voice explain some miscreant’s infractions used to make my whole day feel orderly.

I had thought Barb was going to be around for a while after being made Chief Licence Inspector only a few years ago. I’m surprised, surprised, surprised. Whether this has anything to do with the current low morale at the hall and the sense that city staff feel like they’re being treated like morons by the new Robertson regime, I have no idea. But some people are interpreting it that way.

One of the stranger news items that popped up earlier this year was the report that Arthur Erickson’s brother and executor had filed suit against the woman who was Arthur’s steadfast promoter and champion in his later years. The lawsuit was just the latest chapter in all kinds of messy tussling that had preceded his death in May 2009 and that continued apace afterwards.

My latest column in Vancouver magazine takes a look at all the people and organizations who were part of his world and who found themselves at odds with each other when Arthur died, leaving confusion behind him.

Mike Howell at the Courier has been on the case this week about why the big tract of land that Concord Pacific owns in the northeast corner of False Creek has been valued so low in land assessments, i.e. only $400,000 — less than the value of an average 33 X 120 lot in the city.

Irate local residents, who’ve been angry at Concord Pacific for over a decade because of their decision to delay building the park in that corner, have been complaining about this for a while. Their unhappiness has accelerated in recent months with Concord’s proposal to make the future park a long band along the seawall, with condo towers behind it, instead of having a big square block of park with towers clustered closer to the Plaza of Nations and BC Place.

While the city is not responsible for what BC Assessment Authority does, city manager Penny Ballem has promised to look into the situation, according to Mike’s latest story. You might think there’s nothing the city can do, but in fact the city has appealed to BCAA in the past over assessments that staff thought were too low and has fought to prove that they’re worth more.

When you cover politics in this province, you inevitably end up covering polling.

(Current interesting issue is Mayor Gregor Robertson’s numbers. I’ve been told consistently for the past year that his approval rating is at 70 per cent, which is very respectable in the politician world, but don’t know if that’s taken a hit in recent months.)

But the little-known fact about polling is how much its world is changing, just as the worlds of many other forms of communications with the public are changing. Like the mass media and music industries, polling companies also have to deal with the tendency for everyone to want free information. (Hence, many of the polls you see reported are polls they’ve done for free, mainly as marketing devices.)

They’re also making strides in the worlds of psychology (is this person really telling me the truth? how can I find out?) and social media to try to delve into what we really think. It’s a tricky world. As anyone who’s ever had to deal with a marriage, kids, employees, employers, or people on the bus will tell you, what people say they want/believe/have done or often at odds with what they really want/believe/have done.

I got to explore this world in a little more depth in BCBusiness this month, where pollster Angus Reid is exploring the online frontier, Evi Mustel is refining the ways to get people to give honest responses, and Greg Lyle is looking at the role that emotion and long-term values play in in how we think about the world (and what we say to pollsters as a result).

In spite of all that, as Bob Penner of Strategic Communications notes, they’re still not political analysts — even though they like to pretend they are.

The MSM (mainstream media) has taken a beating in recent years, as everyone from the far right to the far left to the far centre takes a run at everything they do wrong.

But they do some things right, thanks to the dedication of many journalists who see their work as more than just a job. The Vancouver Sun, and specifically my old work colleagues Lori Culbert and Chad Skelton, have undertaken the arduous task of tallying up campaign donations from the last civic election and making it easy for all of us to look at them methodically. (Hint on who the biggest donors are: one municipal union and one big developer.) This is the kind of project that bloggers won’t be undertaking any time in the foreseeable future.

The main story of the series is here and it links to all kinds of tables that are searchable by politician, donor, municipality and political party. I for one am looking forward to poring over it, especially so I can see the contributions to smaller municipalities where I’ve frequently been told it’s the Wild West when it comes to campaign contributions and development.

It will be a resource for me and others. It might even push the provincial government into changing the rules so that this kind of information is more easily available. Thank you.