Here’s my early file to the Globe on this. Stay tuned for more.

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And I’ll have a story on the Globe and Mail’s website shortly about my interviews with Gregor Robertson and Judy Rogers. Mayor and Council Members Announce New City Manager Mayor Gregor Robertson today announced that Dr. Penny Ballem will join the City of Vancouver as City Manager, taking over from Judy Rogers, who has served […]

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Links here to my Globe story on what’s up for the first week with the new Vision council (Olympic village and homelessness the big priorities), plus my Maureen Dowdish analysis of our desperate search for a datable mayor on my CTV blog

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I’m allowed to break the news this morning that Kevin Quinlan, the young man who was Vision’s mainstay staffer during the lean years and the researcher/reality-check operative during the campaign, is going to be the fourth staffer in the mayor’s office. Quinlan, who has a poli sci degree from UBC and was doing the urban […]

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The agenda for Monday’s meeting is up and the new council has put out its recommendations for who will sit on which boards and committees, which you can go through here if you’re that kind of detail-obsessed person. Interesting things of note: Gregor and the most senior members of the Vision team are going en […]

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It’s always so thrilling for us media types to find out who the new administration is going to bring in as support staff. The only thing that’s possibly more fun is looking at poll-by-poll data of elections going back 30 years. Anyway, Gregor Robertson’s team seems to be unusually reluctant to make any permanent appointments […]

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The wheels are starting to turn with Vision Vancouver’s big homelessness plan. As part of that, mayor-to-be Gregor Robertson, Councillor Raymond Louie and Housing Minister Rich Coleman had a meeting on the weekend to talk about what’s possible and what’s not. You can read my Globe story here.

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I’m hearing a lot of grumbling from media types about Gregor Robertson’s sudden invisibility. His handlers say that he’s in deep transition mode and unavailable. Critics point out that Barack Obama is in deep transition mode but manages to make a public appearance every day. This could become a sore point as the weeks go […]

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So little time, so many questions to answer for the incoming Vision team. As you can imagine, people inside and outside city hall are in a tizzy of wondering what that Vision team is going to do on any number of fronts. I couldn’t possibly go into all the permutations but here’s a brief rundown […]

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City staff hadn’t even finished counting the votes when I heard people wondering whether the Coalition of Progressive Electors, that longstanding traditional left party that Vision split away from, was now going to become the official opposition at city hall. That’s because Vision has enough councillors to carry any vote at city hall, so COPE […]

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