As anyone who reads this blog even passingly knows, I love markets and street stuff in cities. So I’ve been watching with interest to see how the city’s car-free Sundays, aka Summer Spaces program, is going.
I went down to Commercial Drive yesterday, where they had their first non-car-free day of the summer (Main also scheduled [...]

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I had a story in the Globe this morning about the Vision Vancouver council’s move to promoting open-source government, which is already generating quite a buzz in certain nerdy info-tech circles to judge by my Google alerts. Ironically, the Globe had a glitch that prevented several stories in the B.C. edition from getting posted to [...]

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One of the aims of the city’s plan for becoming the Most Greenest City, though it wasn’t spelled out anywhere, was not to moralize about how everyone should be a better environmental person. To that end, they focused on incentives and opportunities rather than scolding and penalties, as I note in my Globe story here.

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It looked like it was going to ho-hum day at city council, with councillors Suzanne Anton and Raymond Louie continuing their energetic pillow fighting over the the budget, the Olympic village, the kinds of candies given out for free in the mayor’s office, and so on. But, instead, at the end of the budget presentation, [...]

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I feel bad that I’m not on an advisory committee to the mayor. Everyone else in town seems to be. First, there was the homelessness action team, a high-powered group that meets Sunday afternoons to figure out how to get 1,500 people out of shelters and off the streets ASAP. Then, there was the developers’ [...]

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I really think there should have been a sports commentator at today’s first meeting of the new Vision-controlled council. Or several really, to handle the various rounds that ensued as council proceeded through the many motions put forward to kickstart the Vision agenda.
We could have started with one of those hushed-voice golf types for the [...]

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As I’ve written in years past, there are two big “leftie” parties in Vancouver that have a certain gravitational pull on the social scene here. The first one, usually the first weekend in December, is organized by one group and tends to bring out a few more union/standard NDP types.
The other is organized by the [...]

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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 of [...]

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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 masse [...]

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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 to [...]

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