The latest Justason poll is out. My story is here, but there is already all kinds of mad spinning going on.

City hall’s Kevin Quinlan has tweeted out that Mayor Robertson has risen in popularity as the main news, while CityCaucus’s headline is that the NPA is in a statistical dead heat with Vision.

Vision people, meanwhile, are pooh-poohing the poll, saying people don’t vote for parties, they vote for leaders. Therefore, the vote intention for the party is kind of meaningless and the approval rating for the mayor is the key difference.

I await your analysis.

I love numbers. I remember my waitress number from my university days, “8,” because it was my favourite. I wasn’t surprised to hear later in life that it’s considered lucky to the Chinese.

One of my favourite memories of high school is my math teacher, Mr. Ryan (who encouraged me in math at a time when girls like me, even when good at it, tended to downplay their math skills), telling us about a famous mathematician who, hearing some 11-digit number on his deathbed, instantly recalled its square root or some such apocryphal thing. I related.

So naturally, I bond with telephone numbers that are both rhythmic (the last four digits of my land line, 6930, all multiples of 3) and meaningful. As a reporter, it was a thrill seeing numbers and knowing instantly what that told me about the person: 261/3/4/5/6 — Kerrisdale/Shaughnessy/Dunbar; 253/4/5 – the Republic of East Van; 681/2/4/5/7/8 – some single person in the West End.

And it was so helpful for finding people. Whenever I was looking for a school principal or a company president with a common last name, I’d call all the west side and West Van numbers (922/4/6) first. It was remarkably efficient.

Then came cellphones, which disconnected numbers from their geography. Argh. Then the 778 area code. So ugly, not something harmonious like 604 or 250. How can you have an area code with no zero? It’s unnatural.

And now 236, which is both ugly and probably is just going to be assigned randomly to people all over the region. Are the phone people trying to make me seasick?

The only fun I have any more is guessing, by the number, which cellphone provider people are using. Or, occasionally, I’ll get a call from someone who I know lives on the west side but who has a 322 or 321 landline number. Aha, migrants from southeast Vancouver who made good, I think.

Happy camping, all you municipal councillors who are fleeing this weekend for your annual break after having waded through an unusually large dumpster-load of city business. I couldn’t keep up. For those of you trying to so, a brief summary.

– Councillors voted 6-4 to approve the Wall company’s plans for Shannon Mews on the west side. Kind of stunning. No downscaling of plans, as some other developers have been forced to do so council could pass without having community in full revolt. Shaughnessy-Kerrisdale voters perhaps not so crucial to Vision Vancouver? (Charlie Smith seems to be the only one of us ancient boomers who managed to stay there til 2 a.m. His comprehensive report here.)

– Metro Van still slugging it out in Burnaby as I speak, okaying regional growth plan, fretting over TransLink plan that would include new fuel tax and two years of increased property tax.

– Homelessness/housing plan in Vancouver, which got attacked by both very left and somewhat right for not having enough social housing. Sets the stage for Vision’s campaign platform aimed at talking about affordable housing for the below-median income earners in the city.

– Toronto has a 72-hour hearing that includes singing, sock puppets, and more as citizens come out to plead for their libraries, pools, parks, garbage, etc., not to be decimated. Many across Canada follow by tweet.

Lots on the table this week, as Vision Vancouver moves to put forward big policy papers and get moving on various hot-spot issues. Pedestrian safety was one of them yesterday, with a raft of new initiatives as a result.

This move to pay attention to pedestrians was kicked off last November (seems to me, partly as a result of the furor over the bike lanes and some criticism that only cyclists and not pedestrians were getting attention from council), with a report due in the spring. It seemed to fade from view, until the toll of pedestrian deaths shot up over the spring months, with several high-profile accidents, especially around Main and Hastings.

As a result, new policy. What I wonder is: What is happening in the suburbs, where there are typically as many or more pedestrian deaths than in Vancouver.

Four weeks away reminds me, when I return, of the essential fact about Vancouver — that, like a river, it’s a city where it’s impossible to experience it as the same place twice because it keeps changing.

When I was in Paris a few years ago, I was agog as a Vancouverite to see how much was the same from when I had been a student there almost three decades previously. It wasn’t just the major landmarks that were exactly the same. It was dozens of little places that I had been to as a student that were still there, doing business exactly as they always had.

A paper shop near the Pompidou, the bookstores where I had bought books. Shakespeare & Co, of course. And the restaurant that we students had thought the height of elegance, Polidor, was still serving almost the same menu, including the exotic kidneys in mustard sauce that I’d first tried there, and its squat toilets hadn’t been updated a bit. (No wonder, I guess, that it’s featured fleetingly in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.)

But Vancouver. I was gone for 28 days. I come back and every time I leave the house, I notice some new thing that’s changed. Legendary Noodles on Main is gone, about to be replaced by an Indian restaurant, while the small Italian store nearby that had been there for the decade since I’ve lived here is shut down.

Bin 942 on Broadway is being transformed into Go Fish. La Taqueria, with some of the best tacos in town, has taken the jump and expanded to Broadway and Cambie. The Opsal Steel building has been disassembled completely (presumably to be re-assembled in a more spiffy state later on), while the first of the province’s social housing buildings, the Sorella, has opened up in what seems like three minutes since construction started.

The only things that remain eternal are the grinding debates on the same old topics that go on and on without change: TransLink funding, garbage disposal, the HST, complaints about both development and affordability in the city, the bike lanes, the wickedness of the opposing political party.

Ah yes, here I am in Vancouver after all. The landmarks may be slightly different, but the conversation is the same.

Premier Christy Clark’s government has so far avoided taking stands on controversial issues unless pushed, so I was surprised to see Environment Minister Terry Lake come out yesterday with an approval for Metro Vancouver’s garbage plan.

That plan includes a commitment to explore incineration as a big component of the plan, which has provoked a lot of debate among politicians and even various parts of the environmental community.

Not surprisingly, the announcement produced anguished responses from opponents and qualified satisfaction from those supporting the idea of incineration, as I note in my Globe story.

This is just the beginning of the debates, though. Metro directors will be battling this out in September to define exactly what it is that they’ll be asking companies to bid on, as they craft the request for proposals that will go out.

Toronto has decided to pull up its bike lane and move it over one street. I thought perhaps the same might happen here if results showed that business losses on Hornby and Dunsmuir were severe enough.

Looks like that won’t be the case. The reports out yesterday (which I summarize here) get business losses at about 10 per cent for Hornby businesses, four per cent for Dunsmuir. And the attitude seems to be that somehow engineering can do some fixes that will reduce those.

However, according to city polling, 64 per cent of you are fine with that, and a diehard minority of 28 per cent are opposed.

The two full city reports on same are here and here. There’s a much more detailed version of the Stantec findings also posted for those who want to mine the numbers.

The latest scuffle is over the naming of deputy city clerk Janice MacKenzie to be Chief Elections Officer, instead of having the City Clerk (in this case, Marg Coulson) as Chief Elections Officer, as is the tradition.

NPA and candidate Mike Klassen setting out their case in news releases here and there this morning; Jeff Lee’s blog post on same giving some additional background.

The thing that puzzles me is why the effort of specifically changing the title. In the past, it has typically been the deputy clerk who really runs the elections. Even though Syd Baxter was the city clerk for years and nominally the chief elections officer, it was first Paul Hancock and then Marg Coulson, the deputies, who were always the go-to people.

The civic election is less than six months away, which means no hiring or appointment or purchase of paper clips goes unscrutinized these days as the Non-Partisan Association fights to get back some ground in this election and Vision Vancouver fights to keep them at bay.

At school board, much kerfuffle about the hiring of former Vision volunteer Kurt Heinrich as the new communications guy, while at city hall, the revelation that John Furlong sits on the board of Rocky Mountaineer, whose chair is the head of the NPA’s fundraising efforts, has been making the rounds.

My story on what people have to say about whether Furlong is in a conflict or not here.

Someone’s ready for a fight to the death here, it sounds like. This just out from the mayor’s office.

Do We Want our Region to Become Los Angeles?

Let’s make one thing clear:  Metro Vancouver Mayors approved a two cent per litre gas tax increase and the money will not be used solely to pay for the Evergreen Line.

The $40 million generated annually will be used to fund a comprehensive, integrated, financially sustainable transportation network that will benefit virtually every single person living in Metro Vancouver, regardless of where they live and what mode of transportation they use.  The Evergreen Line is just one component of the plan.

The remaining funding for the plan will come from advertising, naming revenue at SkyTrain stations, road pricing and contributions from development.  A property tax increase hasn’t been approved and will only be considered if no other revenue options can be secured.

The regional plan includes:

• $20 million annually for Major Road Network improvement projects
• $6 million annually for cycling network infrastructure
• 200,000 additional transit hours for the South Fraser Region – 425,000 hours region-wide
• Hwy #1 RapidBus Service from Langley, through Surrey to the Lougheed SkyTrain station
• A New B-Line service from White Rock to Guildford Town Centre, plus a new bus route from White Rock to Langley serving the Surrey community of Grandview Heights
• SkyTrain station upgrades and Seabus improvements

The funding formula has been debated for over six years now, and it’s time to move forward.

Over the next two decades, almost a million people will be moving into Metro Vancouver.  This will add over 800,000 vehicles to our roads.  Do we want gridlock and smog?  Do we want our economy to be stuck in traffic?  Do we want our region to become Los Angeles?

In order to accommodate the population increase, we must implement an integrated transportation system and move forward with a long-term funding model that will serve our current needs and those of our children and grand children.

It’s been 17 years since Surrey has seen an expansion of rapid transit, despite the fact that our population has more than doubled.  Currently, our vast city is so underserved by transit that for most people it’s not a viable option.

We’re developing a plan to create light rail transit (LRT) to connect our town centres with the existing transit infrastructure and reduce the number of vehicles on our roads.  But, for the past ten years, the Evergreen Line has been designated as the next priority for the region.  So let’s be clear: Surrey and the other communities in the region can’t move forward with their transit projects until the Evergreen Line is built.

Let’s not turn this issue into a political football.  Let’s move forward as a region to create connected, productive and livable communities that our children can be proud of.

Sincerely,

Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts