Newser at city hall at the tail end of a day that started with a heroin overdose at the Occupy camp.

The fire chief, John McKearney, said protesters are being told they need to get rid of unoccupied tents, clear out garbage, space tents further apart, and get rid of tarps that are spread out over several tents. He also said firefighters found two empty propane bottles, in spite of a prohibition on propane and generators because of the fire dangers.

That was after a young man was found unconscious, I take it, of a drug overdose and, after the camp’s first-aid responder tried CPR, the firefighters on permanent standby at the site were called. McKearney said staff had a hard time getting into the tangle of tents and also getting out, with the garbage, tents sitting on wooden pallets, tents clustered together and the rest.

The incident saw Mayor Gregor Robertson taking on a more negative tone when he spoke afterwards, saying that the situation is “degenerating.”

He noted that other protest or homeless camps Vancouver has had in the past have seen a similar dynamic, where “conditions degenerate and the city doesn’t have a choice, it then has to enforce bylaws.”

And, echoing what I imagine he’s hearing from many, he said he’s “very frustrated” with the camp and “I think everyone in the city has a level of frustration.”

But he wouldn’t set some kind of ultimatum, saying that every time a city has set an ultimatum, it has resulted in more people rallying to the site and some kind of unpleasant showdown, either involving multiple arrests or some kind of violence.

(Oddly, he didn’t mention that, in Oakland, after the camp was cleared out, protests continued and unions there held a general strike, which shut down the port temporarily.)

His line is: “I’ve made it clear the encampment needs to end –but we are looking to achieve an end that is sensible and peaceful.”

He’s also not a fan of just asking the campers to move to another site, as some other cities have, saying that the protest is about global economic issues, not tents, and there are other ways to make the point.

Mayoral challenger Suzanne Anton came to the news conference and said again that the mayor should just deliver an ultimatum. She says that the Vancouver protesters are peaceful and that it’s wrong of the mayor to keep saying they’d be violent. (FTR, in other cities, the violence has arisen when police have started to drag people off or fire tear gas at them.)

Reporters asked if she really thought Vancouver protesters were the type to go quietly and she said yes.

That’s all for today in the ongoing drama, Occupy Vancouver.

People love to say Surrey is going to be bigger than Vancouver within 10 years. (And that all the businesses and developers are moving there, as well.)

Stats nerds know that’s not true and frequently tell me so. Now, blogger Gordon Price has nicely laid out the numbers.

This break from stupid election stories brought to you courtesy of me.

News release from the VPD makes it sound like there will be more mayhem downtown on the weekend.

As I noted to the protesters who came to city council yesterday, they’re running a very large risk that their tactics will alienate many of the 99 per cent who they claim to represent. Can’t help but think this is exactly the kind of thing that will turn public opinion against them.

Here’s the VPD release

Vancouver Police will be liaising with bank security personnel in advance of the Occupy Vancouver “Bank Transfer Day” march on November 5th.  

The group has announced plans to march around the downtown core and potentially occupy several banks. Vancouver Police will be meeting with representatives from the banking industry to discuss any possible disruptions to business.

The march is scheduled to set off at 11 am on Saturday morning from the Vancouver Art Gallery. Additional VPD resources will be assigned to monitor the march and traffic disruptions are anticipated.

There was a lot of hissing and scratching at council today, but there were also some delightful moments (I got to hear about the advantages of brine over rock salt as city staff explained their winter snow-removal plan.)

One of the nicer ones was the prayer from Councillor Geoff Meggs, at this administration’s last council meeting, as he passed on wishes to the new council.

Prayer

Nov. 1, 2011

This council’s last meeting before the November 19 election gives us a chance to reflect on the problems that have faced this council and those that will face the new one.

Elections are a time of change and renewal.

On our city’s 125^th anniversary year, the magnitude of the changes our city has seen come into focus, perhaps most of all when it comes to transportation.

No matter what happens on election day, we can be quite sure our successors will face some tough debates about our city’s streets.

Streets are the veins and arteries of a city, but they’re the public spaces where life takes place, people encounter each other, politics happens and goods and services move from place to place.

We’ve all seen the pictures of our streets in 1888 or the turn of the 20^th century.

Streetcars with old growth trees on either side.

Horses.

A few bicycles.

Pedestrians in the middle of the road.

No cars. No parking meters.

That was the old normal. It seemed to work.

Fifty years later and things changed: streetcars, buses, lots of cars, but no horses, few bicycles and many pedestrians.

Of course, our streets have always been used for more than driving or walking: recall the pictures of the Post Office riot, with unemployed workers being clubbed to the ground in Hastings St.; marches to the Cenotaph, or the massive Depression-era rallies  and marches that started at Oppenheimer or the Cambie St. Grounds, now Larwell Park.

Don’t forget the long, bleak lines of Japanese Canadian families walking to Hastings Park for deportation or the massive peace marches of the 1980s, with tens of thousands crossing the Burrard St. Bridge.

This council has had its own share of street pre-occupations and occupations:

We had the Burrard Bridge and bike lane debates.

Street closures for the Granville Entertainment district.

Then there was the occupation of the downtown core for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Car-free days.  The Santa Claus parade.

And now Occupy Vancouver.

So as the gavel drops on this council’s three-year term, let us wish our successors well as they manage our city’s streets.

May they be granted sound judgement, a sense of perspective, a willingness to experiment and a mandate to keep our Vancouver streets the centre of our city’s democratic life.

The last council meeting of the Vision administration became the site for a round of political theatre Tuesday, after the Vision council pulled in staff to explain what’s going on down at the Occupy site.

The explanations were fine, but then Vision politicians couldn’t resist driving in a nail with a jackhammer, by asking all kinds of questions aimed getting staff to state the case for doing nothing. No sooner were they done then Suzanne Anton stood up to blast the mayor for having no plan.(No explanation, as usual, for what her plan is except some vague order to tell protesters to leave.)

Cue scrums out in the hallway with all and sundry, including several Occupy Vancouver protesters and more. My story, which condenses the drama considerably, here.

The main legal point of the afternoon appeared to be that police don’t want to go in anywhere without an injunction and then an order to enforce. (I’ve heard they insisted on that in previous homeless camps.)

City manager Penny Ballem said the city’s legal department is not confident a judge would grant an injunction, since they tend to give a lot of leeway to freedom-of-expression arguments unless there are problems of health and safety, destruction of private property, or criminal behaviour.

I don’t understand the fine details of these Charter arguments but council candidate Sandy Garossino, a one-time Crown prosecutor who used to job-share with Suzanne Anton, has been educating a group of us via 140-character tweets.

In the meantime, as I reported yesterday, businesses around the site are beginning to get concerned about the long-term impacts. For some, like the hotels, it’s more the traffic problems. But, ironically, the food carts that Vision Vancouver loves to brag about are among those hardest hit.

One of the evolving parts of the Occupy Vancouver camp is how the protesters are responding to this. The people I’ve talked to seem genuinely concerned that they’re having a negative impact on businesses or the general public. The Occupy tweeter put out a message this morning asking people to visit the food trucks.

Another young woman, Kaleen McNamara, who is part of the newly formed community liaison committee, also said they are going to try connecting tomorrow with groups like the Santa Claus parade, the Grey Cup festival planners, and the group that traditionally lights a menorah at Hanukkah to make sure they feel welcome at the plaza.

However, many of the protesters (I had a chance to talk to several of them because I arrived early at council to stake out my spot) also insisted that they’re not going to leave. They say that before the Occupy movements set up tents, no one paid any attention to the issues they’re talking about. (Not sure that’s completely true, but for sure, it has increased the attention.)

However, our conversation did head for rockier ground when I kept asking, “But what if your tactics and your camp end up actually turning people off your message and you alienate the general public?” Some said the public supports them, that it’s just the tabloid media that makes it sound as though there’s opposition.

But others said that, if they feel they are truly turning the public against them by continuing the camp, they’ll have to re-evaluate. However, as it now stands, those are just random opinions. Anything that happens at the camp has to be voted on by the general assembly, which is never quite the same people every day.

I caught part of Vision Vancouver’s town hall meeting Sunday night that was focused on housing issues, where it was obvious that there’s high anxiety among regular voters over the cost of housing in the city and uncertainty about what the city can do.

“David” asked what the city can accomplish given that the price of housing is dependent on the free market. “Robert” was worried about the fact that his kids won’t be able to live in the city.

I can’t imagine that Mayor Gregor Robertson’s answers gave either of them much assurance, since they were all filled with talk about leveraging city land, maximizing affordable housing, creating more density on arterials, (especially on Cambie), and so on. Vision may have some great ideas, but I couldn’t figure out what they were specifically from that kind of non-specific bafflegab.

Nor, I have to say, does the platform from the NPA/Suzanne Anton fill me with confidence about how affordable housing could be created. Lots of talk about cutting red tape (wow, never heard that before in a civic election) and pre-zoning areas in order to speed up development.

In both cases, the parties seem to be unable to come up with a clear way to communicate exactly what they plan to do, especially for the critical demographic of people who are not homeless, not on welfare, but entrenched solidly in the lower middle of the 99 per cent.

Those people don’t want to hear about smaller units or increased density on arterials or pre-zoning for Cambie Street.  They want to hear, in particular, about how the city might create affordable units that are suitable for young families who don’t want to live in some cramped box 10 floors above the street for the next 20 years.

It’s relatively easy to create small units. The city has experimented with that in the past and could do more of the same. But townhouses or low-rise apartments with two, three or four bedrooms with some kind of access to green space is what is the hardest to do and what you want to try to create for young working- and/or middle-class families.

It would be great if both parties could articulate that more clearly.

As far as I can tell, the NPA’s approach is strictly to increase supply by reducing friction in the development process: establishing a flat rate for the money developers contribute towards community benefits, speeding up application processing.  Developers certainly argue that’s the best way to increase affordability. I always wonder what mechanisms there are to ensure they pass on those savings to buyers, but have to rely on their word that, if they can find a way to offer their product at a lower price, they’ll take it, as that increases their pool of buyers.

Vision’s approach, on the other hand, seems to be focused more on offering developers incentives (density especially) or providing discounted city land to try to create new housing, some of it with specific guarantees about the price it will be sold or rented at. That’s tricky too, because as soon as you create a category of below-market-value units, you then need a process to figure out who is entitled to get access to it.

No point creating $800-a-month apartments if just anyone can rent them. So that requires a whole bureaucracy to monitor that. The city’s two universities, UBC and SFU, have both been running affordable-housing experiments systems, in order to be able to attract faculty and students, so it’s not as far-fetched as some might assume. But it does take work as well.

That’s all for the, as I said, working residents of the city.

As for homelessness, well, that’s a whole nother set of issues. As I note in my Globe story today, Vision’s achievements in reducing street homelessness could start to move backwards this winter. That’s because the reduction is street homelessness has largely depended on the province’s willingness to fund winter shelters.

The province has declined to provide the operating capital for four of the shelters outside the downtown. That’s 160 people for sure out on the street this winter.

I predicted weeks ago that we’d be seeing nasty stories surface about various candidates in the Vancouver civic election. I’m sad to see that I was completely right.

No election seems to be complete these days without someone digging up a candidate’s bad report card, stupid Facebook photos, previously unrevealed lawsuit, and the rest.

First out of the box was the revelation of a silly “date matrix” site created by NPA candidate Jason Lamarche from his old Langara College days, where he rated various women on their intelligence and performance in bed. (One of the many stories published/broadcast here.)

Silly, and not surprising, considering some of the less-than-mature tweets Lamarche has been sending out during the campaign. (Slagging one of his critics as a guy who still lived in his parents’ basement was probably the low point to date.)

Vision people claim they had nothing to do with this story emerging but if someone connected with them didn’t leak this to media, I will eat the Gregor Robertson flyer that just arrived in my mailbox last night, which is fairly large and glossy.

Even if they didn’t leak it, they certainly filled up the twitterverse with their outrage over Lamarche’s alleged transgressions, thereby overplaying their hand and leading to some backlash from commentators, who noted that Lamarche’s background didn’t bother them when he was running the campaign for Vision candidate Sarah Blythe in 2008.

It makes me wonder if that might alter the game plan for revealing information about other NPA candidates, some of whom have left a trail through the local courts.

Clearly, it would be nice to establish a narrative of a weak NPA team by having negative stories about more than one candidate. And it’s easy to do, since the NPA team is very green and it doesn’t look as though there was the kind of candidate screening that alerted anyone to these kinds of background problems.

But there’s always the danger of overdoing it.

On the other side, we’ve seen the story about the company that Mayor Robertson founded, Happy Planet, moving to Burnaby also mysteriously emerge this week, as we march towards voting day on Nov. 19.

Funny, the company moved in February and yet the story only comes out now, just in time to supposedly make the point that the mayor’s own company doesn’t believe Vancouver is a good place to do business.

I don’t expect this will be the last little scoop to suddenly make its way to newsrooms in the coming weeks.

I’m still waiting, as I said in earlier blog posts, for negative stuff from inside city hall to possibly fall into the hands of waiting reporters. There are an awful lot of unhappy staff from there, either still working or recently resigned.

Happy democracy, everyone.

I’m no libertarian, as many of you may have guessed over the years. But frequently the strange rules of doing business in this city baffle me.

The latest is what’s happened with the Rio Theatre at Broadway near Commercial, which has turned into one of those businesses that help create a neighbourhood. It has had movies, live music shows, and various other events there in the last few years that have drawn healthy crowds.

As this week’s stories revealed, the Rio has been successful in getting a liquor licence for the theatre, but at the cost of being able to show movies. The city okayed the liquor licence, but the province’s rules don’t allow licences to go along with showing movies.

What a shame. When I was in Portland this summer, we discovered an amazing new theatre called The Living Room, conveniently placed between the Ace Hotel and Powell’s Books. It had giant chairs like Lazyboy recliners, footstools, and a restaurant/bar attached. You could order food or a drink or popcorn, and it would be served to you in the movie theatre. (The popcorn came in lovely, square ceramic bowls.)

It was so heavenly that we went to two movies in a row while we were there, one of which hadn’t been on my top-ten list.

I wondered why no one had had the idea to do something similar here. I now know what would happen if they did.

And what would be the terrible thing that would happen if movie theatres were allowed to serve drinks? I’m trying to imagine and failing utterly.

After Mayor Gregor Robertson said earlier this week that the Occupy Vancouver movement has a right to protest, but not to a permanent camp, I did the reporterly thing of calling to find out what was happening at ground level.

My story here describes that, although not completely. I had heard that deputy city manager Sadhu Johnston had been down to the site, talking to campers about the issue of leaving but he was out of town and unavailable for a call and no one else seemed to know what was going on.

However, I was told, after my story was filed, that there are staff working to try to establish lines of communication and talk about the long=term plans.

As I alluded to briefly in my story, past camps (Woodward’s, homeless camps outside Science World and elsewhere, in 2002, 2003, 2004) were not taken down easily.

People who managed to do it, like Mark Townsend from the Portland Hotel Society, say it took a lot of time to establish links and to figure out who the real leaders are. (Everyone I’ve talked to about all of this says that, no matter how leaderless a protest may look or say it is, there are always people who are de-facto leaders.)

It was also important to keep police presence to a minimum while that was going on, in order to prevent protesters from feeling threatened and escalating the possibility of conflict.

The Woodsquat protest was eventually resolved when the city opened up more than 100 units of housing at the Stanley/New Fountain, giving some people on the sidewalks a place to go, and the rest didn’t protest when their stuff was packed up.

The homeless camp at Science World was handled slightly differently. People were offered housing and the camp was slowly reduced until only a small group was left that became the target of criminal activity. Police then moved in to clear out that much diminished camp.

Obviously, offering housing is not a solution here. Staff have found very few homeless people at the site.

So they, like city officials elsewhere, are trying to figure out what will work: simply letting cold, wet weather do its attrition work? asking people to leave once another pre-booked group needs to use the space (that’s happening in, I think, Calgary)? persistently harassing them about health and safety regulations until it becomes no fun? letting the group start to fray and splinter internally, as we’ve seen some signs of in Vancouver? coming to an agreement about an end date?

Everyone’s looking for the answer, especially after the attempt to clear out the Oakland protest resulted in national stories about teargas and violence, an apology from the mayor and the resignation of the police chief.

The media’s (that’s me!) relentless focus on Occupy Vancouver can be seen as a bad thing — a trivializing of all the major issues in the city that need to be discussed. I prefer to see it as a positive.

Perhaps more than 30 per cent of people will now know there’s an election campaign going on, thanks to the endless droning on by all of us about how this is going to affect the election. (I was the resident expert gabbler on no less than four media outlets today, so I know it must be a hot story.)

And frankly, given low turnouts, anything at all that will get people interested is a good thing.

The great thing about watching the mayor and Suzanne Anton respond to the Occupy Vancouver camp (should it be torn down, do they support the ideas behind it) is that this is something they haven’t had three years to think about and prepare for. It’s all happening in real time, with public opinions drifting and shifting all around them.

And we get to watch them respond. That’s quite different from, say, the Olympic Village financial mess that dominated the 2008 election, which was essentially an attack and defence related to actions that happened months previously. It was all rearguard action.

And to think, there’s more to come as events twist and turn. And we’ll get to assess how each candidate responds and whether we think it’s the right leadership style, something that I look at in tomorrow’s story with the help of SFU professor Mark Wexler.