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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It feels wrong to cover civic politics in Vancouver these days without mentioning that someone somewhere, at least once an hour, claims to have inside information that city manager Judy Rogers is going to be canned by the incoming crew. Some of the rumours seem to have originated in the city works yard and then […]

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The Christmas party season kicked off last night with a bang. I was invited to, ran into or heard about six Christmas parties just in my own circle — everyone trying to get a jump on the main Christmas season, I guess. One of the more amusing double-events of the night was the B.C. Federation […]

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In my ongoing efforts to make sure everyone knows where everyone is on the chess board, I am pleased to inform you all that Ian Baillie is moving on from media-wrangling at the Vision campaign to being B.C. manager for the Bob Rae campaign for the Liberal leadership. This ought to help with the ongoing […]

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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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In what seems to be a determined effort by Vision Vancouver to reprise 2002 but do it better, the team has decided to have its inaugural ceremony at Bing Thom’s beautiful new Sunset Community Centre. For those with short memories, i.e. most of us, the winning COPE crew in 2002 decided to take government out […]

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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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This just in from the emails at city hall, messages from both city manager Judy Rogers and Estelle Lo about the chief financial officer’s resignation. From: Lo, Estelle To: Sullivan, Sam; Anton, Suzanne; Ball, Elizabeth; Cadman, David; Capri, Kim; Chow, George; Deal, Heather; Ladner, Peter; Lee, B.C.; Louie, Raymond; Stevenson, Tim Cc: Hurford, David Sent: […]

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