If you were trying to get a hotel room in Vancouver from Thursday on last week, good luck. They were filled up with city councillors, mayors, city managers, and city financial officers from across the land, coming here for the annual convention.

While they were focused on garbage, sewers, housing and roads, we in the media found other worthy subjects. The Province’s story this morning is about local councillors who stayed overnight downtown in hotels. Many writers continued to focus on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, even though he was notable mainly by his absence and sniping from Toronto about how people out here were drinking martinis (martinis? in Vancouver? I think not) and not really doing city business.

Meanwhile, at the convention, most politicians I talked to had zero respect for Mr. Ford or his comments. One, from Dauphin, Manitoba, suggested wryly that Ford probably didn’t want to come out to a gathering like this because he might “get too learned-up.”

My relatively staid stories about the weekend non-festivities here and here.

As I said on CKNW this morning, there’s a kind of politics of resentment being played these days, where the most popular thing a politician can do is to attack other politicians for wasting taxpayer money. It’s easy, when everyone is a little worried about whether their job is safe or what will happen if mortgage interest rates go up, to play on everyone’s anxiety by blathering on about how some politician got a nice meal or took a taxi or stayed in a hotel room.  (Strangely, none of the aforementioned ever offer to give up their salaries as part of their deep concern for the taxpayers.)

The problem is, those attacking frequently don’t distinguish between the hard-working ones, spending their convention days going on landfill tours or sitting through excrutiating discussions of cellphone-tower agreements, and those who are just taking a freebie and not putting in too much effort. It’s discouraging to those who are working hard. A little more critical analysis would be good.

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Vancouver’s official advocate for the homeless had her last day at city hall Thursday, along with her birthday.

My story about her in the Globe is here but I wanted to add a few words.

I started covering city hall for the Vancouver Sun in the fall of 1994 (when I was a toddler, of course). There wasn’t a huge amount of coverage about homelessness in Vancouver back then. An occasional story about an individual fallen on hard times. But most of the stories about homelessness in local papers in the 1980s and early 1990s were about the problem in Toronto or the U.S. or the rest of the world.

But I did start to hear concern about people starting to sleep on the street and crowded shelters throughout the mid-1990s. In 1998, I got a fellowship to study homelessness in Canada and elsewhere. Sometime around then, I went on my first walkabout with Judy Graves, then called a tenant relocation officer or some such thing. We went out near midnight, walking through various alleys and, I remember, into Cathedral Park on Dunsmuir. It had a canopy at the back end in those days, which made it a favoured spot for those sleeping out but an unnerving place to go for people like me. The square was dark and isolated-feeling. (The city later removed the canopy to discourage the campers.)

The thing about Judy was that she just wanted to know about these people. She wanted to know why they were there, how they were surviving, why they couldn’t get housing. She didn’t make assumptions. She asked questions.

Judy wasn’t the only person who alerted me to the increasing problems with homelessness. Many took up the torch. But she became a touchpoint for all kinds of people because of those middle-of-the-night walks. Frank Giustra went out with her twice. Gregor Robertson started going out on walks with her when he was still an MLA and has done others since then.

As Alice Sundberg says in my story, Judy made everyone think about “the homeless” as people, not just numbers or a social problem.

Another thing about Judy — she could do that because she started her little private research project at a time when reporters like me could call city staffers like her, people down the hierarchy but who were still allowed to speak to the media. She was always careful about what she had to say (as were almost all city staffers) but her ability to show people the reality of the issue did more than all the city manager reports in the world.

I personally regret her retirement from city hall not just because of what she did for homelessness, but because she represents a vanishing generation at the city — the knowledgeable mid-level staffer who is passionate about his or her special area of expertise, who has the detailed level of knowledge that those higher up the food chain just can’t have, and who is free to impart that to reporters in order to tell a better story about the city.

Sometimes as a journalist, you write about things because you have to. Other times, you get to write about what you love. This is my story about the new old corner store. Many thanks to Andy Yan for generating the map and data on their locations.

(BTW, a piece of information I didn’t squeeze in here is that apparently anything that existed before 1980 as a corner store retains the right to be used for commercial uses. So potentially there are many more of these. But there are also some “except in the case of” restrictions. Would love to hear about anyone’s experience who tried to convert back to commercial and wasn’t allowed.)

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Last week, the Vision council brought out the first recommendations from its Engaged City Task Force, with more heavyweight ones to come later on.

The report with their recommendations is here and my story, one of several done on the day, is here.

A few of the quick starts here inspire me with a certain nostalgia. Participatory budgeting (allowing community groups to decide how they want to spend a set amount of money on local projects) was much loved by the COPE council of 2002 but disappeared shortly after they were elected, lost in the dust as that council had to grapple with one daunting issue after another, from the Canada Line to Wal-Mart.

But, as good or as long-standing as some of these ideas are, there are residents who are going to wonder why they are coming forward now and how much they’ll really change the culture at the city. Many people have had the experience of participating in a city process only to walk away and wonder, “Did anything I said really matter?”

Obviously, not everyone can get 100 per cent of what they want from the city all the time. Not only a logistical impossibility (since there is always one person who wants exactly the opposite of another), but not good planning. But I do believe there is a longing by many to feel that they are more than just the window-dressing, brought in towards the end of a development proposal or a new bylaw, to spout their little “concerns” and be over-ruled.

As my story in Vancouver magazine this month showed, there’s a critical mass of changes going on in the city that is making the city hall-citizen conversation very tense. The task force is one attempt to address that.

Whenever I’m asked at panels/workshops/conventions what the problem with public dialogue is in Vancouver, my usual answer is: Regular people have no idea what part their opinions should play in the process. Not really. Too many of them believe that if they just line up enough delegates at the microphone, they should get to prevent anything from coming into the city.

So if they don’t get their way exactly, then council and planners are “bulldozing ahead” or “in the pockets of developers.” Which I know the more thoughtful readers of this blog will understand is too simplistic an explanation.

But there is a tendency for those at city halls to assume they know what’s best, bring people in too late in the process for their opinions to have any real impact and then dismiss them as NIMBYs when they go berserk.

There are some recommendations in here, and to come, that I think could have an impact on all of that. But it will take real faith on the part of the city that its citizens aren’t just knee-jerk Opponents of Everything and some effort on the part of citizens to understand the how and why of planning.

Will any of the quick steps help? They’re a tiny start. I await the bigger news.

(Advance warning: I won’t be posting the boring old name-calling comments. People who’ve been through city processes or observed them and have thoughtful things to say about how that went are welcome, as always.)

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This just out from the city’s communications people:

The City of Vancouver wishes to advise residents near the lower Fraser River that on Friday, May 24 there will be several planned and authorized helicopter low altitude fly overs. The flights are all part of two filming projects underway around the city. The pilots are not in distress.

The helicopter will fly at an altitude of approximately 300 feet over the Fraser River, Kent Ave SE and Boundary Road. The flight is planned between 6 p.m. and midnight. If poor weather doesn’t permit the flight, it will take place either Saturday 25 or Sunday 26, again between 6 p.m. and midnight.

On Friday, May 24 a second helicopter will fly at an altitude of approximately 500 feet over the downtown core, Kitsilano and North/South False Creek, between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., and again between 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. If the flights must be cancelled due to weather, they will be permitted to try again from Saturday the 25 to Thursday 30, during the same time blocks.

Final approvals from Transport Canada are pending, and dependent on weather and other conditions.

I post this story with trepidation, having observed already on a few Twitter exchanges that the cycling crowd immediately jumped into trashing these businesses for not being progressive enough while the predictable anti-bike crowd weighed in.

Can I just reiterate one more time. These businesses ALREADY HAVE 4,000 bikes a day going past them, so the argument that they will discover that having a bike lane on their street will produce increased business seems not very relevant.

They are also not arguing that the street needs to be made safer. There’s no quibble with the plan to shut down Union west of Main, which will discourage some traffic from using Union east of Main as a shortcut to downtown. There’s also strong support for improving the signage, signals at the Main/Union intersection, where, as it so happens, pedestrians are much more likely to be killed or injured than cyclists.

Hoping against hope here that there can be a civil discussion about how to make streets safer while respecting businesses that, whether you like it or not, are still dependent on customer getting there by car. As several of them noted, the area that they have sprouted up in is not one that everyone is comfortable walking long distances in. Those of us who know the city well feel perfectly safe, but not everyone does. These businesses are going to contribute to this area, one day, being seen as comfortable to walk around in for many more people, but that’s not the case now.

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My account of condo marketer/power broker Bob Rennie’s speech to the development industry, which began with him saying “I told you so” and continued from there.

(For those recently living under a rock, Rennie was one of Premier Christy Clark’s most vocal backers, convinced to the last minute she would win.)

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Christy Clark used a card from Gordon Campbell’s book to draft candidates — she plucked them from city councils around the province.

As a result, about a dozen new MLAs will be leaving their jobs as mayors and city councillors to sit in Victoria. Here’s my story from this week on what a few of them had to say about their priorities. TransLink ranks high on the list.

I’ll be waiting to see how they exert their influence (if they have much as newbies). As a few reporters/columnists around town have noted, here and here, there are a lot of municipal issues at the table.

I note that former Sam Sullivan staffer Daniel Fontaine keeps twitting (yes, double meaning intended) Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson about having to now plead his case for transit and housing with Sullivan and Suzanne Anton, his former municipal foes.

But I’m wondering if he will. The Vision team established pretty solid connections with Christy Clark’s people in the last two years. And, when it comes to transit, my guess is that it will be the developers, who have turned into the biggest transit fans ever, who will be joining forces with the mayor for a Broadway line.

And let’s not forget who handed Clark the biggest electoral defeat of her life: Anton and Sullivan, who more or less called her a carpetbagger with a nasty bunch of Liberal campaigners behind her when she ran for the mayoral nomination back in 2005.

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I note that the places where the NDP did make a few gains were in particular spots where the NDP candidates managed to combine the usual party line with a green message: West Vancouver-Sea to Sky, where NDP candidate Ana Santos didn’t win, but achieved the biggest gain for any riding in NDP votes. Vancouver-Fairview, where former Suzuki Foundation director George Heyman managed a win over Margaret McDiarmid; David Eby in Point Grey, where tankers and pipelines were a major talking point.

But is that only a winning combination in certain urban ridings and an NDP vote-killer elsewhere? Or a new direction the party should contemplate?

Just a question to toss out among many. Go to town on election post-mortens here: the complete off-sidedness of the pollsters; the campaign message that worked; abysmal voter turnout; all of the above.

I’ve always wondering about those dedicated souls who turn out to vote Liberal in Vancouver-Mount Pleasant or Surrey-Green Timbers, or the equally hardy souls who vote in West Vancouver-Capilano, Vancouver-Quilchena or Kelowna-Mission, where there’s not an ice cube’s chance in hell that their candidate will win.

My story today takes a look at that phenomenon.

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