Yearly Archives: 2010

Conservative Senator Talks Harm Reduction

How Vancouver's Open Data Community Helped Open Up the French CBC

For those uninterested in the story below and who just want the iCal feed of cultural events in Vancouver, click here.

Also, I had a piece on the Globe site yesterday, was in the air all day, but was told it hit #1 most viewed, which, if true, is nice. You can read it here.

A couple of weeks ago – at a party – I met someone working at the CBC who talked about how they were organizing a calendar of all the cultural events at the Olympics. Turns out the French CBC is placing a strong emphasis on the Cultural Olympiad that is taking place concurrently to the Olympics and they were gathering all the events they could find into a spread sheet.

I commented that CBC views and listeners – French and English – would probably find such a calendar useful and that it would quite interesting if the CBC shared it as an iCal feed so that anyone could download it into their computer’s calendar.

He agreed, but was unsure how to create such a feed. Admittedly, neither was I – but I did know some people who might…

So at Vancouver’s last Open Data Hackathon – kindly hosted by the City Archives and organized by Luke C – I asked around to see if anyone might be interested in converting the spreadsheet into an ical feed. Up stepped Jason M. who did a little trouble shooting, figured out how the spreadsheet needed to be reformatted and then figured out how to convert it.

So now, if you want, you can download a fairly comprehensive list of the cultural events taking place during the Olympics straight into the calendar on your iPhone, computer, google calendar, etc…

It’s got more events than a lot of the other calendars and includes concerts being played at Maison du Quebec, Saskachewan, Alberta, Ontario and Atlantic Canada House.

This is a bit of a shift for the CBC, the kind of shift that I think we need to be supportive of… a little more open, a little more sharing and a lot more useful. Most importantly it is a great example of how the idea of open data spreads – by being useful.

Some More Core-Periphary Maps

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Those who’ve been reading my blog for a long time may remember one of my more popular posts comparing the Firefox 3 Pledge Map (locations of downloads of Firefox 3 back in June 2008) versus Thomas Barnett’s Map (published in The Pentagon’s New Map – his blog here).

A little while back a friend shared with me a new map, called The Walled World, that she’d found over at The Raw Feed (a great site, BTW) which offers a similar perspective… but with clearly delineated walls that show who is being kept out of which parts of the world.

All three maps continue reasonate with me. The first offers us a stategic overlay. Which countries are powers/maintainers of the international system – which places are seeking to radical alter it, or cannot seem to become part of the core.

The second shows the virtual implications of that gap. Here, the gap between core and periphery is made starkly clear in technology use.

The final shows the physical manifestation of the gap. A stark reminder of the fences we build and the enormous sums of money and energy poured into keeping certain people out.

As a final note, I do think the third map is slightly misleading. As disturbing as it is, it is actually far, far too flattering to many traditional western powers as it continues to place them at the “centre.” In a world where the United States appears to be in decline this type of map makes China, Brazil, India and Russia (and even South Africa) look like non entities. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Canadian Foreign Policy: The War on Independent Thought

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Two stories this week highlight Canada’s rapidly decaying capacity to think, engage and act on foreign policy issues. The first was the Globe’s story Canadian Aid Groups Told to Keep Quiet on Policy Issues, the second is Paul Well’s detailed and devastating account of the implosion of Rights and Democracy, an NGO run by the Federal Government which has seen its entire staff revolt in the face of the political efforts by government to reset its policies.

Both stories hint at a common pattern – that through bullying, funding decisions, appointments and any other means at its disposal – the conservative government is seeking to ensure that any voice in Canada that engages international issues aligns itself with the government’s opinion. In short, this Conservative government is seeking to recentralize Canadian foreign policy. It is an effort that cannot succeed, but in which the attempt will devastate Canada’s influence in the world and negatively impact our capacity to act on the global stage.

Why is this?

Because in the 21st century a country’s foreign policy capacity – especially a small country like Canada – does not spring solely from the size of one’s military and the influence of one’s diplomats. Rather, influence springs from the capacity to tackle and address – increasingly complex – problems. Military might and diplomats can be deeply important but they are increasingly a smaller piece of the puzzle. The real question is, how does a state marshal all the resources and talents at its disposal and focus them on a problem.

In the 19th century the answer was easier. Military might and diplomats were the only tools and so control over these tools – the capacity of a single person (the PM) or group (cabinet) to focus the energy of the state on a problem – was the essence of international influence. But today this is no longer the case. Many of the critical relationships, expertise for addressing problems, volunteering capacity and even funding, lie beyond the control of the state. More importantly, public opinion has become an essential part of any effort. In this world, where the state is only one of many actors, and is one that is frequently looked upon with skepticism, how does one marshal this network or foreign policy ecosystem and attempt to focus it on a problem?

This is the great challenge facing government’s everywhere (especially those of smaller countries where resources outside of government are essential).

The conservative response – outlined above by the Globe and Paul Wells – describes an effort to assert control over these non-state actors and opinion shapers. To bully them into line and force them to not only cooperate with but mimic the government’s priorities.

This strategy will not work.

Over the short term the talent in Canada’s foreign policy network will simply balk. The best will leave for other countries which will seek to engage them on policy, not declare war on independent thought. Today we risk the great “hallowing out” of our foreign policy capacity (and thus international influence) not because the quality of our diplomats or military will decline, but because the quality of our NGO sector will decline.

Moreover, this sector’s international influence depends on independence. Other states and public opinion more generally will not respect Canadian organizations that are seen as merely puppets of the Canadian government. Indeed, expect these types of organizations to see their influence wain to a point where they become insignificant on the international stage. In short, there will be fewer Canadian voices and they will all carry less weight.

Finally however, the ecosystem will adjust. Already many Canadian organizations that work and engage in international issues find it cumbersome to work with Government. People I speak with often eschew CIDA grants since the reporting mechanisms they come with are often more expensive to implement than the value of the grant. Now that Government money is linked with political interference and meddling, an increasing number of organizations will avoid engaging the Canadian government altogether. The result? A NGO sector that is actively hostile – or at best indifferent – to the government and a diminished capacity to coordinate action, research and policy across the Canadian foreign policy ecosystem. In short, the Canadian government will have no more control over internationally focused resources, but it will have shrunk the country’s collective influence.

In a networked world you can’t control the network, you can only seek to influence it. This government’s actions are a case study in how to lose credibility and sacrifice capacity. If, however, they don’t want a Canada that engages in the world, perhaps, in their mind, it is all worth it.

Carbon Chaos – Celebrating the Launch of an iPhone App

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At the beginning of September Gerri Sinclair and I began scheming around me working with a group of her students at the Centre for Digital Media on a project. My initial idea didn’t pan out (more on that in another post) but the students pitched a new idea, one the maintained the original idea of a game that would be fun and that would carry an environmental message.

The result?

Carbon Chaos – an iPhone game designed and built to be fun while educating those who download it about the various advantages and activities of Translink – the transit authority here in the Greater Vancouver area.

And so, with a ton of pride in the students who worked really long hours to create this in a few short weeks here is some beautiful art work they created…

And here is what the game looks like in action…

In short order I hope to share what I learned from the experience and from the students who worked on this (lots of interesting lessons). Needless to say the students deserve infinite praise and I’m eternally grateful to have had the chance to work with them. Amazing, every last one of them. Big thank you’s should also go to their faculty adviser Patrick Pennfather. And finally I know everyone is grateful to TransLink, who sponsored this application and gave it a home. A forward looking organization TransLink, one thinking hard about how technology can transform it – first they opened up their google transit API to the public, then they launched a partnership with Four Square (making each station and a bus a location where you can check in) and of course, they were willing to engage some students on a game they built.

Never, in all my dreams growing up and playing games did I believe that I might one day be a video game producer. Fun, fun, fun. If you have an iPhone, hope you get a chance to download it and see what some emerging developers were able to code up.

Withholding FOI requests: In the Private Sector, that's fraud

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It was with enormous interest I read on the Globe’s website about a conservative Ministerial Aide “unrealeasing” a document requested by The Canadian Press through an Access to Information request (The Access to Information Act ensures that citizens can request information about the government’s activities).

A federal cabinet minister’s aide killed the release of a sensitive report requested under freedom-of-information in a case eerily similar to a notorious incident in the sponsorship scandal.

What I find fascinating is the neither the minister (now at Natural Resources Canada) or the aide have been asked to resign.

Let’s be abundantly clear, if this were the private sector and a CEO was caught deliberately withholding material information from a shareholder… that would constitute either fraud and/or a violation of whichever provincial securities laws he/she was bound by. Moreover, such a crime that could carry with it a prison sentence.

And yet here, in the most cavalier manner, one of the most basic trusts that ensure accountability in our system is violated with almost no repercussions.

The story does have its dark humour (and a embarrassingly feeble attempt at an excuse):

Mr. Paradis’s current communications director said Mr. Togneri’s intervention was to suggest the Access to Information section offer fewer pages to the requester without charge rather than the entire 137 pages for a fee of $27.40, which had already been paid.

“He went through and thought that a huge section of a very big report wasn’t relevant and that you should be given the option of paying to get it or get the (smaller) chapter” without charge, Margaux Stastny said in an interview. “No one can overrule Access officers.”

The options were never provided to the requester, however. Instead, the department simply sent the censored report and refunded the fee.

Yes, I too am always comforted to know that my government is thinking of me and trying to save me a few pennies by ensuring I don’t see information they know I need not waste my time on.

I, of course, have another solution for how the photo copying money could be saved. What about emailing a digital copy of the report? Of course Access to Information requests (called ATIP or FOI for those in the US) are always handed out in paper, just to ensure you can’t do anything too useful with them… oh and to help ensure that they are late in delivering them.

So while, in this case, the Minister’s staff has committed an enormous gaffe – one that should have (and yet probably won’t) political implications, it is also a window into a broader problem:

FOI = broken.

I belong to a generation that gets information in .3ms (length of a google search) if you take 80 days to get my request to me (and edit it/censor it), you are a bug I will route around. This isn’t just the end of accountability in government, this is the end of the relevancy of government.

Upcoming talks…

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A ton of speaking engagements have hit me in the last little bit. Here’s the most up to date list. I think they’ll be some more in the mix soon, but thought I’d throw these out there.

Panelist, Opening up Government Data (Title to be confirmed), Lac Carling 2010, Niagara on the Lake, June 16th, 2010.

Keynote, The Future of Open Government, MISA Annual Conference 2010, Niagara Falls, June 15th, 2010.

Panelist with Michael Geist, Challenges of Open Government in Canada, GOL Communications Victoria, May 28th, 2010.

Speaker, Open Data, Baseball and Government, Gov2.0 Expo Washington, DC, May 26th, 2010.

Panelist with Michael Geist, Challenges of Open Government in Canada, GOL Communications Ottawa, March 25th, 2010.

Panelists, What Guys are Doing to Get Women into Tech, SXSW, Austin TX, March 13, 2010.

Panelists, Social Business Design, Connect IT Conference, Ryerson Business Faculty, March 11th, 2010.

Speaker, Open Government in Canada, O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 International Online Conference, March 11th, 2010. (details to follow)

Panelist, Panel on Open Government, Centre for Law, Technology, and Society, University of Ottawa, March 5th, 2010 (details to come).

Speaker, Collaboration and Open in Science, Regenstrief Institute, Indiana University, Indianapolis, Feb 17th, 2010.

Surreal Moments in Journalism – Gotcha trumps substance

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A few weeks ago I think a journalism class at Ryerson had a term paper due about why main stream media has such a hard time engaging with social media. I say this since I think at least three different students from the University interview me on the subject. At the beginning of each interview they each told me that their piece might get published in the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

I really enjoyed my conversation with each of them – it is always great to have people ask you smart questions as it challenges you to think and rethink these issues. What I did find bizarre however was what happened next.

The other day a fact checker call me from Ryerson’s school of journalism.

She was nice and friendly and wanted to confirm that I had said certain things. Her questions were fairly vague and I was getting frustrated since I prefer not to be vague (When I’m getting quoted) and so was trying to tell her what I thought my precise language would have been (hey it’d been two or three 45 minute conversations several weeks early…). Finally, I just asked: “Can you just tell what the quote is?”

To which she responded: “No.”

I’m sure journalism students everywhere are about to jump on me… but I’ll confess I was a little surprised and, frankly, disappointed.

This isn’t some political scandal where if I contradict myself there is possibly evidence of some larger cover up. I’d been interviewed as a “subject matter expert” (we can debate the dubiousness of that title – I’m definitely open to challenge on that…) and so one would think that the goal would be to get a quote from me that explained, in the most lucid and helpful manner, the essence of my perspective or the issue I was raising. Substance and clarity would, I thought, have been the goal.

Apparently not.

Who knows what the quote is… (I think it relates to the fact that I believe many Canadian newspaper columnists actually hold their audience in contempt – they don’t actually want to engage with them – something I think is their Achilles heels and that distinguishes a new generation of columnists who are growing up blogging) but the process suggests me that what is really interesting to the review is being able to run with a quote I may or may not have said, because someone decided its juicy. Okay. But understand that this isn’t about getting closer to some understanding of the subject matter anymore, this is about getting a juicy quote.

So, I’ll confess this is all my fault. Lesson learned. I’ll be sure to explicitly stay off the record with journalism students from Ryerson call and will carefully construct any statement I fear might be on the record. Maybe the quotes great! But maybe not. I guess we’ll find out soon…

CBC: A Case Study in what happens when the Lawyers take over

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Like many other people, I’ve been following the virtual meltdown at the CBC over its new (i)copyright rules. For a great summary of the back and forth I strongly encourage you to check out Jesse Brown’s blog. In short the terms of use of the CBC seemed to suggest that no one was allowed to report/reprint excerpts of CBC pieces without the CBC express permission. This, as Cameron McMaster noted, actually runs counter to Canadian copyright law.

And yes, the CBC has been moving quickly and relatively transparently to address this matter and hopefully clearer rules – that are consistent with Canadian law – will emerge. That said, even as they try, the organization will still have a lot of work to do to persuade its readers it isn’t from Mars when it comes to understanding the internet. Consider this devastating line from the CBC’s spokeperson in response to the outcry.

You’ll also still be able to post links to CBC.ca content on blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter or other online media at no charge and will continue to offer free RSS stories for websites (found here).

Really? I’m still allowed to link to the CBC? How is this even under discussion? Who charges people to link to their site? How is that even possible?

Well, if you think that that is weird, it gets weirder. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find what what appears to have so far gone unnoticed in the current debate over the CBC’s bizarre terms of use. On the CBC’s Reuse and Permissions FAQ page the second question and answer reads as follows:

Can we link to your site?
We encourage people to link to us. However, we ask that you read our Terms of Use, which outline the conditions by which external sites may link to ours.

So what are the CBC’s terms of use to linking to their site? Well this is when the Lawyers really take over:

While CBC/Radio Canada encourages links to the Web site, it does not wish to be linked to or from any third-party web site which (i) contains, posts or transmits any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libellous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane or indecent information of any kind, including, without limitation, any content constituting or encouraging conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability or otherwise violate any local, state, provincial, national or international law, regulation which may be damaging or detrimental to the activities, operations, credibility or integrity of CBC/Radio Canada or which contains, posts or transmits any material or information of any kind which promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind against any group or individual, could be harmful to minors, harasses or advocates harassment of another person, provides material that exploits people under the age of 18 in a sexual or violent manner, provides instructional information about illegal activities, including, without limitation, the making or buying of illegal weapons; or (ii) contains, posts or transmits any information, software or other material which violates or infringes upon the rights of others, including material which is an invasion of privacy or publicity rights, or which is protected by copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights. CBC/Radio Canada reserves the right to prohibit or refuse to accept any link to the Web site, including, without limitation, any link which contains or makes available any content or information of the foregoing nature, at any time. You agree to remove any link you may have to the Web site upon the request of CBC/Radio Canada.

This sounds all legal and proper. And hey, I don’t want bigots or child molesters linking to my site either. But that doesn’t mean I can legally prevent them.

The CBC’s terms of use uses language that suggests they have the right to prevent you, or anyone from linking to their website. But from a practical, business strategy and legal perspective it is completely baffling.

In my mind, this is akin to the CBC claiming that it can prevent you from telling people their address or giving them directions to their buildings. Or, the CBC is claiming dominion over every website in the world and that they may dictate whether or not it can link to their site.

I have my suspicions that there is nothing in Canadian law to support the CBC’s position. If anyone knows of a law or decision that would support the CBC’s terms of use please do send me a note or comment below.

Otherwise, I hope the CBC will also edit this part of its Terms of Use and its Reuse and Permissions FAQ page. We need the organization to be in the 21st century.

My Vancouver – Remixing Gary Stephen Ross

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If you haven’t read Gary Stephen Ross’s article A Tale of Two Cities in the Walrus, go do it. It is brilliant. Probably the best reflection on Vancouver I’ve read in a long, long time. The piece resonated deeply in a personal way, not only hitting all the right themes about my home city but touching on what about it keeps pushing me away and pulling me back.

(Of course, if you are coming for the Olympics, this is a must read backgrounder.)

I’ve always wanted to write a long form piece on Open Vancouver/Closed Vancouver which ideas in Ross’s piece touch on. So with the lens of that project still in mind I’ve posted some of the piece’s best quotes below as well as some thoughts and the occasional mild remix:

The main reason I moved back was to be close to my family and to explore what I thought was a city on the verge of becoming a place for ideas. It hasn’t been disappointing.

Laugh at the clichés, but understand that leading-edge thinking elsewhere is often the norm here. From North America’s only supervised injection site to a police chief who openly supports the idea of making addiction a public health issue, not a criminal one; from UBC’s breakthroughs in sports medicine to the bold social experiment of the Woodward’s development, which combines public housing with high-end units; from inventors like Phil Nuytten, the father of the underwater Newtsuit, to Internet millionaires like Markus Frind (plentyoffish.com) and Stewart Butterfield (flickr.com); from D-Wave’s breakthrough in quantum computing to Saltworks Technologies’ cost-effective desalination system, Vancouver incubates far more than its share of striking new ideas.

I wasn’t sure of this when I first moved home… But this is a place where ideas get thought. Being part of that is fun. More happens here then people know.

Indeed, if the measure of an idea is how widely it’s disseminated and how passionately it’s embraced, this city is anything but the kayaking, navel-gazing, pot-smoking Lotus Land of popular imagination. It’s a hotbed of entrepreneurship and creativity. “Doesn’t anybody here work?” a visitor joked one October afternoon as we walked past a surprisingly active Kits Beach. Yes, people do work, all the time — just not in head offices, since we have very few. They launch start-ups, they freelance, they find Wi-Fi spots, they unfurl blueprints at Starbucks. They invent, imagine, concoct.

The challenge is that all those ideas don’t create the radiant energy that feeds more ideas. It is hard to feel what is happening in Vancouver. For whatever reason the energy dissipates rather that build and feed others. Is it that too much of it is forced to leave for bigger pastures? Maybe. But at the moment there is something about Vancouver that closes itself not only to outsiders, but to itself.

Ross picks up on this in a quote from Bob Rennie about the failure of Vancouver to leverage its energy and talent.

“‘We need the grand gesture: let’s hire a starchitect, let’s make a statement, let’s go for the splashiest exhibition.’ It grows out of a small-town mentality. We have people here who are royalty in the international art world: Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Roy Arden, Brian Jungen. Did you know that Rodney Graham has a major show in Basel this June? But oh no, we couldn’t possibly be good enough to stand on our own merits.”

This is why it sometimes feels like the ideas here go abroad or fade – we don’t incubate or get excited about them.

Part of that is the fault of the cities culture – it is a strangely closed placed. I grew up here but I’ll be the first to say it isn’t always easy meeting people in Vancouver, not like in Toronto (where I can’t stop meeting new people) or Halifax (where everybody is very friendly):

Amid the stereotypes, of course, obscured by them, Vancouverites live substantial, complicated, inaccessible lives. Newcomers say folks here are quick to engage you in a friendly chat but slow to invite you over for dinner. There may be a flaky, hippie vibe to the lineup at Trout Lake Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, but there is a seriousness of purpose as well, an act-on-it conviction that organic tomatoes from the Okanagan are in every way superior to industrial tomatoes from Mexico.

Serious? Maybe. Sometimes the line between seriousness and escapism gets pretty blurry. Many people come to Vancouver to get away – away from the east, away from the head office, away from relatives… away to strike out on their own. And that makes it a city, to a certain degree, of loners. Or at least a city of people who aren’t sure they want you to penetrate their dream.

But the other part of it has to do with the Vancouver’s history which thematically Ross has right…

“Partly it’s that idea of generational wealth that Will and Ariel Durant talk about in The Lessons of History,” says Tom Cooper of City in Focus. “Vancouver’s rich are still in acquisition mode. It’s the third and fourth generation that starts thinking about endowing a chair or funding the arts or charities. We don’t have Carnegies and Rockefellers here, because the wealthy families are still too busy making money to stop and wonder what to do with it.”

…but my feeling is the diagnosis is off (he’s far too nice). It’s not about acquisition. This is a city built with hardworking, sweaty, pioneering (in its day) but conservative money. By that I mean money generated from pulling things off or out of the mountain or ocean. There hasn’t historically been much innovation in mining or logging or fishing – these are relatively conservative industries. And so the money it created is often conservative in that it looks for surefire hits. Projects people know will work before hand. In short, in Vancouver, no one gets fired for flying in three tenors.

Maybe in a bigger city, with more industry and confidence, things would be different. And Ross is smart to point out how small Vancouver actually is.

With a population of about 600,000, it’s a quarter the size of Toronto proper. Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, and Ottawa have more citizens. Hell, Mississauga has more. Winnipeg has more. Vancouver’s American analogues are not Chicago and New York, but Charlotte, Memphis, El Paso. Include the metro area, and the population swells to 2.2 million, a third of metropolitan Toronto’s. If this city were an actor, it would acquit itself beautifully in a supporting role — Philip Seymour Hoffman before Capote. If it were a fighter, it would be a middleweight, albeit one so slick and well marketed that you think of it as belonging among the heavyweights — any of which would, in fact, clobber it.

To be fair, Vancouver is more dense than Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton (which is important) but it is also fractured by inlets and rivers. In Toronto probably a million people live within a 10 minute walk of the subway lines… that means a million people have quick access to one another – that’s a lot of connections that can be quickly made, a lot of groups that can easily gather. In Vancouver, it is tougher – although getting better. But Vancouver’s geography may be beautiful, but it is challenging to create a networked city in. Maybe this is why the city has so few of the trappings of a great city:

He rhymes off a list of shortcomings you won’t find in great cities: no downtown university with an adjoining student neighbourhood; no broad pedestrian promenade; no major civic square. A great city is a world unto itself, defying attempts to break it into its constituent elements. Berlin, Rome, New York: these are urban confabulations, memory vying with amnesia, civic magma bubbling and hardening under the weight of history. World-class city? It’s the world, not the city, that gets to decide. Penelope Chester, the daughter of a French publisher, studied in Paris and New York and Boston and travelled the planet before spending a year and a half in Vancouver working for an international NGO. Now based in Liberia, she liked Vancouver but noted that locals “have an exalted sense of their city’s standing in the world, without much experience of the world to support it.”

There is the escapism again. It’s as though the city is gun shy to really face the world, to welcome the harsh sting of criticism, especially when competing on things beyond its beauty. Unchecked the city’s conservative culture could turn it into a Pacific Northwest French Riviera – a play ground and escape for the world’s wealthy. I’m hoping we aim for some kind of green San Francisco/Portland hybrid. But that require competing with our brains. Which we can do, if we choose to. We just have to pick our spaces and align our brains with out values. And hey, when we do it things aren’t that bad:

By the most dependable benchmark we’ve devised — GHGs, or annual greenhouse gas emissions per capita — Vancouver (at 4.9 tonnes) is already the most eco-friendly city in North America, well ahead of New York (10.5 tonnes), Los Angeles (13 tonnes), Seattle (11.5 tonnes), and Toronto (11.6 tonnes). And in just about every reckoning of the world’s eco-friendly cities, Vancouver ranks up there with Reykjavik, Copenhagen, and Malmö.

But being green alone does not make for a great city. It requires a vision, an ability to weave together the different visions of what Vancouver could be, and, most of all, to acknowledge and talk to one another. Here Ross understands Vancouver like few other observers I’ve read. He’s right the Two Solitudes are different in Vancouver. While this city barely even knows its part of a national solitude (Indeed, it often barely knows its part of a country, – national identity isn’t disliked, people are quite found of and proud of being Canadian – its just more that its a vague afterthought) here the Solitudes that matter here are in the city, solitudes of neighbourhoods, wealth and ethnic communities…

You want drug addiction and wrenching, in-your-face psychosis the likes of which you’ll find nowhere else? Stroll through the Downtown Eastside, a twenty-square-block human zoo. Want to visit an Asian enclave that’s a cyberlike parallel universe? Check out the Aberdeen mall in Richmond, south of the city proper: two solitudes, Pacific variety.

Overcoming these solitudes is no insignificant challenge – and maybe the challenge for a city looking to its next step. Do its citizens want to tackle it? I don’t know. Vying to be a great city vs. staying in the velvet rut and settling for a really nice northern Charlotte. The former requires work, the latter… is effortless.

The great paradox of Vancouver is that as green and hippy as it is, it is also the most conservative city in Canada – not in how it votes, but it how it sees itself going forward. If the world tells you you are the best place on earth (which the UN or the Economist does almost every now) the natural question that emerges is… why change anything?

That’s the collective inertia that sometimes defines the place. So much individual talent, but collectively the energy, and the confidence, dissipates too quickly. Every once in a while it doesn’t… and that’s when the magic here really happens. My hope is that we can find a find a way to be like that all the time. That’s what I hope happens when we grow up.

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