Category Archives: vancouver

Fit City, Fat City, Dialogue in Vancouver

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Vanessa Timmer (who also recently finished her PhD defence – congatulations!) is helping the GVRD host a series of regional dialogues on sustainability in and around Vancouver. The next one happens to be this Wednesday in downtown Vancouver.

What is the cross road between healthy living, urban planning andregional development? Should be an interesting discussion.

Details, ripped right from the GVRD site, are as follows:

Fit City? Fat City? – Are we tipping the scales?
Wednesday, February 21, 2007, 11:30 – 2 pm (lunch from 11:30 am – 12:00 pm)
Wosk Centre for Dialogue, Simon Fraser University, 580 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC

Facilitator:

Rafe Mair – Bio

Panelists:

Roland Guasparini – Bio
Diane Clement – Bio
Doug Clement – Bio
Faye Wightman – Bio
Larry Frank – Bio

If you are interested in attending, contact:

Heather schoemaker, Manager, Corporate Relations, Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD)

Vancouver Afghan Mission Dialogue – February 19th

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For those interested in the events in Afghanistan and living in Vancouver, SFU looks like it will be putting on an interesting dialogue. I’m hoping to attend and wanted to let others know about it. (thank you Veronica K. for the heads up!)

Details:

The Vancouver Dialogues on Foreign Affairs will be hosting a dialogue on the “Comparative Perspectives on the War in Afghanistan.” The dialogue will be initiated by:

Mr. Martin Cronin – Consul General, United Kingdom
Mr. Hans Driesser – Consul General, Netherlands
Ms. Joni Scandola – Deputy Consul General, United States of America
Mr. Hans-Michael Schwandt – Consul General, Germany,
Dr. Haider Nizamani – Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia

And the facilitators will be:

Robert Anderson – Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, SFU
Gordon Longmuir – Vice President, Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Vancouver
Registration and refreshments will be available on the 19th from 5:00 pm onwards and the dialogue will begin at 5:15 pm.

Location:
SFU Vancouver, Harbour Centre,
Room 1420 Segal Room
515 West Hastings Street

Apparently, space is limited so one should RSVP with “syap@sfu”

too many good restaurants… must try all…

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If Vancouver has anything it is a plethora of good, affordable restaurants. For those who’ve never been to the city, it’s one of its charms… Having only just returned from a 10 year hiatus I’m doing my best to track down and check out the best places. This weekend I finally went to Vij’s, one of the city’s most celebrated hangouts.

The one thing you should know about Vij’s is that you can’t make a reservation, which means you should be prepared for an hour and half wait. But that’s okay, cause they have a great space where you can hang out, sip on drinks and eat the free appetizers that are floating around.

More importantly, it was worth the wait. The food was excellent but the best part is the warm atmosphere created, in large part, by the presence of the restaurant’s namesake and owner, Vikram, who runs around checking in on guests, offering advice and generally being a gracious host. Indeed, Vikram provided one of the evenings highlight moments. After being asked if he would open a sister restaurant in North Van he responded: ‘More is not necessarily better. At this size I can ensure the quality of my food. More importantly, I couldn’t call another location Vij’s. If I’d called my restaurant Taj Mahal or Indian Spice, then it would be okay if I wasn’t there. But since I named it Vij’s people know I will be here – ready to take care of them.’

Pretty much sums up the whole experience – while also maybe taking a little dig at Feenie’s?

[tags] restaurant review, Vij’s, vancouver [/tags]

Two steps (or should I say decades?) back on homelessness

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(Small note: For those less interested in Vancouver and looking for a national story check out my man Taylor’s take on Simpson’s Globe and Mail piece and why Iggy’s policy development process lead to such a strong outcome.)

As for me, I’m feeling frustrated about Mayor Sam Suillivan’s poll on Vancouverites municipal priorities. For anyone who hasn’t visited Vancouver in the last year there is no doubt that homelessness is the number one issue – an observation confirmed by the city’s residents. No big surprise, given the rising cost of housing and a sharply declining number of available low-cost rooms in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels (those most affordable to low-income residents).

The challenge for the mayor (beyond actually solving the problem) is that it is hard to take his concern seriously. We need only recall that, after taking office, his second act was to reduce the amount of social housing that would be part of the Olympic village development. Moreover, during the debate over Project Civil City he voted down a proposed amendment to include the Minister for Housing on the Mayor’s Civil City Leadership Council. If you were concerned about homelessness and were putting together a team to tackle it, it would seem sensible that you’d want to pull together the relevant stakeholders – especially those with access to resources beyond the meager ones available to the city.

Vancouver is now preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics without an effective homelessness strategy. Sadly, precedent does not look good. In the lead up to the 1986 World Exposition Vancouver managed a similar problem by simply expelling the homeless from the relevant areas. While the city was ‘clean’ for Expo ’86 the long term consequence was the radicalization of civic politics and damaged relations between city hall and the city’s most at-risk citizens. Combine this municipal approach with a Federal Government intent on treating drug addiction and homelessness as a legal and not a social challenge and you have the recipe for disaster. Be prepared for a new effort to ‘sanitize’ Vancouver – an effort that will almost certainly fray or destroy the social and support networks that help at risk communities and push the problem out to the surrounding communities of the GVRD.

[tags]Vancouver, Vancouver politics, Sam Suillivan, homelessness, social housing, 2010 Olympics[/tags]

My Faith in Humanity…

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… has been tested.

I love my city. I love the people here. Obviously I’m biased – but I think Vancouverites are among the friendliest people in the world. Sadly, this has been a rough week. Not because of the storms or excessive rain (we can tough that out). No, I’m talking about the frenzy a handful of my fellow citizens have worked themselves into over the issue of turbid water.

For those not in the know, the excessive rain has caused increased ‘turbidity’ (or sediment) in the water supply. This hasn’t made the water anymore dangerous but, to be safe, the local government has advised that people drink only boiled or bottled water. As this Sun article points out, city health officials are stressing that no harmful bacteria have been found and there are no reports of illnesses caused by the water.

So let’s be clear, for the household user, there is no water shortage (god knows that is hard to imagine in Vancouver). We still have virtually limitless water, it just needs to be boiled. Indeed, given the rain, putting a bucket outside would probably yield a fair amount of clean water in short order…

So it is crushing to read a story like this. Fistfights over bottled water? This would be at best childish, and worst sad, if it weren’t for the fact that Vancouver can expect to be hit by a major earthquake. Yes, it is only a handful of people, but if we react like this to what, at worst, is an inconvenience, how will we react when confronted with a real crisis?

I still have faith my city won’t turn into a bad post-apocalyptic American TV show… but I’m not longer confidently wandering around believing ‘it could never happen here.’