The province is hoping to get through the city’s rezoning process, complete with public hearings, for the downtown casino in the next eight months so that Paragon can start digging and, soon after, start paying its lease to the province to help pay for the roof. But city types are already sending warning shots across […]

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I have seen culinary street-food heaven and it is this: travelling street-food trucks.  Los Angeles has become a home for this new form of gastronomy, which has also become the site of a new form of fusion cuisine, the Asian taco.  I’d been hearing about this new thing for a while now — trucks roaming […]

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The city had its day in the media sun Tuesday, with a homeless count that seemed to be proving that having more shelters is keeping people off the street. The housing minister got his day today, with his Colemanesque gentle ultimatum that, if Vancouver wants to open more shelters than the province currently funds, it […]

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Toronto is celebrating six months of 311 service and bragging about their low wait times and popularity. Vancouver’s 311 appears to be equally popular in its early stages — it gets half as many calls as Toronto does in a city that is population-wise 1/5 the size, but average wait times are considerably longer, as […]

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When I started working the city-hall beat in 1994, I was plunged into furious debates about casinos. The Mike Harcourt NDP government was entertaining a proposal to have a big, destination casino on the waterfront behind Gastown. The NPA city council of the day took the public opposition to that and ran furiously with it, […]

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This just out from city hall today. Strikes me as a motion created to give the media something to gnaw on on a quiet Sunday besides endless blog circling around the Tsisserev mystery story. Looks like it promotes transparency, without giving away too much. Councillors’ expenses are, for the most part, completely boring and uninteresting. […]

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No, I’m not in Bologna or Surrey, as some speculated earlier. I’m in Los Angeles as I write, a city I have grown to be fascinated with because of the way it works and doesn’t in various ways. Lots of things to write about, but I’ll start with my visit to the Museum of Contemporary […]

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Here’s a news item that will cheer up some on this site: B.C. continues to lead the way, even in post-Games euphoria, in disapproving of hosting the Olympics.

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Well, now that we’ve had a chance to decompress, to re-accustom ourselves to bad bus service, heavy traffic, empty sidewalks, and winter rain, I thought this was a time to raise a glass of champagne to all those people who complained about how bad the Games were going to be. They predicted that thousands of […]

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For years before the Olympics arrived, we routinely saw commentators warning that when the media arrived here and saw the scene on the Downtown Eastside and the homelessness situation, there would be a firestorm of negative coverage. That never happened. There was the odd piece here and there in the bigger newspapers, but it never […]

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