While many of you were watching a couple of hockey teams face off on Tuesday night, there were two other teams facing off at city council over an issue that is key to what kind of city people think Vancouver is about: how much housing should be allowed downtown and how much of the downtown [...]

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Another council day, another smackdown of city staff.
On the whole, all the councillors tried to play nice and praise city staff yesterday for all their hard work on negotiating the buy-out of the Fortress loan that was announced yesterday. (For more details than I provided, read Rod Mickleburgh’s story in the Globe today here.)
But as [...]

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It’s hard to get a read on Vancouver’s homeless situation through either direct observation or statistics. Few of us monitor the streets at night to do a count and what we see in the daytime can often be deceiving. Lots of people who have homes are still out on the streets during the day. Even [...]

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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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It was quite the party scene in the Downtown Eastside today, as the Who’s Who of the neighbourhood and the province’s social-housing mafia gathered on Carrall Street to celebrate the opening of the new Pennsylvania Hotel with 44 housing units. Much oohing and ahing over the lovely new rooms, refurbished lobby and the restored ancient [...]

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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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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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It’s hard to believe some people chose to go to a hockey game tonight when they could have been sitting with all of us at the Vancouver Public Library talking about municipal policy. A loss for them of 90 minutes of action-packed excitement, but fun for the 300 or so of us there.
Okay, kidding aside, [...]

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Council
3746 Raymond Louie
3704 Heather Deal
3271 Tim Stevenson
3248 George Chow
2988 Andrea Reimer
2951 Geoff Meggs
2387 Kerry Jang
2240 Kashmir Dhaliwal
2223 David Eby
2034 Heather Harrison
1717 Catherine Evans
1217 Rey Umlas
1127 Ray Lam
1094 Demitri Douzenis
1031 Vaune Adams Kobler
724 Doug Bencze
SCHOOL BOARD
2969 Sharon Gregson
2177 Mike Lombardi
2053 Patti Bacchus
1962 Ken Clement
1954 Stepan Vdovine
1881 Narinder Chhina
1846 Helesia Luke
1574 Anastasia Mirras
PARK BOARD
2602 Sarah Blyth
2242 Constance [...]

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