Stephen Rees’s blog

The following came to my inbox today from Mark Latham

I’m a semi-retired economist working on democratic media reform. Based on similar contests I’ve sponsored for UBC student elections, I’m now launching a “Vancouver Voters’ Guide Blogging Contest”. The idea is that voter-directed funding will encourage bloggers to create helpful guides to Vancouver municipal issues and electoral candidates.

Vancouverites are invited to vote on a real-time on-line ranking of blogs. To start it off, I browsed the web and found ten blogs (including yours) that cover Vancouver issues. The initial ranking at this point is mostly random; it will change soon based on votes coming in. Please let me know if you’d prefer not to have your blog included.

The ballot: www.votermedia.org/vancouver/vote

Contest info: www.votermedia.org/vancouver

UBC contest: www.votermedia.org/ubc

My blog on this project: http://votermedia.blogspot.com/

I had not thought that I would comment very much on City of Vancouver polling issues - but I do hope that Vancouver issues I have touched on will be significant in the election. I have posted quite a bit about the Burrard Bridge - an issue which I would have regarded as being sufficient of itself to get Sam Sullivan and Peter Ladner tossed on the grounds that they are apparently incapable of simple arithmetic. I have also castigated David Cadman at a COPE meeting on transportation for not saying anything about the Gateway - which given the dumping of lots more traffic into East Vancouver and the City’s supine acceptance of it, is another reason to vote for anyone but NPA. Not that I am am partisan of course. Then there is the housing issue and the Province’s current shameful treatment of tenants of Little Mountain. Of course the City takes no responsibility for housing. The there is the awful mess of the downtown eastside - which has been steadily getting worse and everyone must take the blame for. Cambie Street is not the City’s fault either - but they have not exactly covered themselves with glory there. And as far as I know no politician is claiming credit for the Carrall Street bike lane which is a small but significant step in the right direction. Does this qualify me for for a cash prize? Naaaaah

– It’s Dusk on Planet Earth

By Bill McKibben, Tomdispatch.com. Posted May 12, 2008.

Alternet has a trenchant piece for Americans. It applies to us too. Especially in the Greater Vancouver area.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

No we don’t burn coal to generate electricity here. Yet. The way that BC Hydro has been dismantled almost guarantees that some of our huge coal reserves will be used in this way soon. Of course it will be claimed to be clean coal - which as far as I am concerned is about as convincing as the claims made by those who want more nukes. Of course we are very happy to export our coal - and whatever it is used for, combustion is the only use that it will find.

But just look around around you - at the Dodge Ram Supercab with its massive engine - that takes a suburban commuter to work on his own, and might carry his golf clubs or a skill saw at weekends. At the gas leaf blowers. At the gas heaters on the patios. At the swimming pools with electric heaters that get their owners a review by the grow-op police. And our provincial government - which says it wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - is actually facilitating an increase in Vehicle Kilometres Travelled with massive road building projects either underway or planned. And tells us, with a straight face, that this will help reduce congestion and thus emissions.

And in the suburbs people who would like to stop driving and take transit find they cannot. There is just no service for them, since, as usual, the vast majority of spending is going to Vancouver - which already has the best transit service in the region. Langley will not get better transit service any time soon, but it will get a wider freeway. So it will not get Transit Oriented Development either, so it will remain locked in car dependancy. As will the new residents who move to Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge in response to the Golden Ears Bridge opening. The current policy is that transit will get to these communities over the Pitt River Bridge in some far distant future. So once again we can only expected more development designed for a car driving populace.

At the same time as all this is going on - and the Pitt River Bridge and the Golden Ears Bridge are under construction - Metro Vancouver continues to hold meetings on what it calls a “Sustainable Region Initiative” - with Gateway promoters on the platform. Orwell would be proud. Doublespeak lives.

Neither the province nor the municipal governments have any understanding of the urgency of this issue. We do not have the luxury of prevarication. We have already lost the pine trees and the salmon. Yes lousy management played a part in both, but so did denial of the effects of climate change. If the port expansion goes ahead its curtains for the sandpipers too. The SFPR will alter the hydology of Burns Bog - and once that has gone you cannot get it back.

The most worrying aspect of all this is that despite the protests, and the rocketing price of gas and food, our inability to deal with major social problems, our escalating health care costs and no realistic strategy to deal with any of this, the polls predict a third term for this government - which means as far as they are concerned they do not have to change. They think they can continue as they are because holding on to power is all that matters. The fact that the planet is becoming uninhabitable by humans is incidental. The fact that much of BC is suffering is of little concern. They and their friends are doing ok for now, and they can always slap another coat of greenwash on the agenda - they don’t actually have to mean it.

One of the truly silly ideas floating around the US election. McCain started it saying Americans should not have to pay gas tax in the summer. Hillary followed that up with the idea that the oilcos would be forced to pay the tax for their customers.

From this morning’s ABC “town hall” with Hillary Clinton, about the gas tax holiday:

STEPHANOPOULOS: “But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?”
CLINTON: “Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

We can’t get no respect

can we afford it?

B.C. has been hit by the sharpest wage decline in Canada. We have less purchasing power now than we did in 1981, figures from 2006 census show.

And the article looks at some of the reasons why that it so. But what it does not say of course is that much of the recent decline has been due to government policies. The attack on the support workers in healthcare, the continuing privatization of what were once secure public sector jobs. Taxation has been shifted from progressive to regressive - that is what happens when you cut income taxes for the well off but raise all the other fees and charges to pay for services.

Since this region is also the most expensive in terms of housing many households have to have multiple wage earners. Not just Mum and Dad working - and not unusually more than one job, or longer hours - but the kids cannot afford to leave home. Or people hit by adversity later in life having to move back into the family home.

Immigration is the other big headline story - and we have more of that then other places too. And immigrants are paid far less than Canadian born, and their education and qualifications are ignored to “protect” the interests of those already established. This is a huge drag on the economy, as we need the skills and knowledge of the engineers and surgeons who are running 7-11s and driving cabs.

Add rising food and fuel costs to this picture and you begin to understand why people having been feeling more and more under pressure. What is distinctly odd is that this does not seem to affect the government’s polling numbers very much, and they continue to behave as though their re-election next year is in the bag.

Richmond News

When Vancouver Airport’s Aeronautical Noise Management Committee was opened to the public in December, not one citizen showed up to complain about airport noise at the Dec. 12 meeting.

Doug Louth, who has plenty to complain about, isn’t a bit surprised.

“I wouldn’t go,” said Louth, who has been complaining about airport noise for eight years. “It was just too restrictive.”

When the committee meets — which it does quarterly — only one “selected citizen” gets to speak.

The delegate must apply 30 days ahead, must detail the exact nature of the complaint, must limit the presentation to a single issue and must sign a code of conduct.

He or she gets five minutes to speak, five minutes to listen, and then is “excused” once the committee has dealt with the complaint.

“I’m not surprised that no one showed up,” says Louth of the Dec. 12 meeting. “It was like a security check.”

Louth was thrilled Monday when city council decided to strike its own airport noise task force.

I don’t know why he should be. The City has absolutely no ability whatsoever to influence how the airport behaves. It is legally a federal body. The Airport Authority is in reality responsible to no-one. The feds just collect the rent.

If you wrote a fictional story and used a procedure like the one outlined above, people would laugh - but they would not believe that is how a modern corporation, concerned about its public image, would behave. But YVR does not have to give anyone a hearing - and it certainly will not do anything about anyone complaining. The rerouting of aircraft recently was done by NavCanada. And they showed a similar disdain for the public. The public complained - quite rightly - but nothing happened. NavCanada is no longer held accountable. As long as it makes money, that is enough.

As the story notes it is never clear who is responsible - YVR, NavCanada or Transport Canada - and the three agencies can keep any complaint shuttling between the three of them for an indefinite period until the complainant gives up.

And why does the City of Richmond think they will be treated any better?

Abuse of power like this deserves some sanction. But there isn’t any. There is no recourse. And this is going to become a common experience as more and more functions of public agencies get shunted off to “professional boards” and “crown corporations” like BC Ferries and the new super duper “ram the freeways” through corporation currently being debated to almost no coverage at all in Victoria.

On the opinion page this morning Ian Thomson, president of both the B.C. and the Alberta Biodiesel Associations, makes the case for the province’s plan for renewable fuels to comprise five per cent of all diesel and gasoline sold in B.C. by 2010.

He notes that elsewhere governments are having second thoughts about this type of commitment, mainly due to the undeniable crisis in food shortages and high prices. Mr Thompson says that their analysis is “simplistic”

global food price increases are the result of a complex mix of factors, including supply and demand, trade policy, tariffs, political instability, and global energy costs.

Which while true neatly avoids the explanation that demand for some crops, and for more land, to supply the demands for biofuels is one of the big changes recently. The link between corn prices and the demand for ethanol in the US as a fuel additive is directly linked to the high prices of corn products in Mexico. That is an old story. But still true. The wider impacts of the demand for palm oil and clearance of forests has also been around for a while. As has the calculation that some biofuels can take more energy to produce than they provide, and the consequences of current farming practice results in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

This is not to say that all biofuels are evil. They could be created from waste products. There is a lot of used frying oil out there that could be recycled this way. A lot of yellow grease that is currently exported as unfit for human consumption here - that probably ends up being eaten by very poor people in third world countries. I do not know if we are doing them any favours with that trade, but somebody is making a lot of money out of our care and other’s neglect of standards of cleanliness. Forest products could probably produce ethanol - but currently it is foodgrains that are used, not switch grass, straw or sawdust.

And even if he is right, which seems to me unlikely but we will let his case stand for the sake of argument, the needs of hungry humans should override those of the automotive business. That means right now we have to back off legislated biofuel mandates until we can get this market stabilised, and concentrate on getting people fed, not SUVs producing a little less ghg.

Because the other feature of biofuels is we are currently treating them as a way to carry on behaving as we have done. Just like the use of hybrid drives on huge trucks that are only single occupant passenger vehicles, and whose only freight hauling role is some bags of groceries, or some 2×4s for a rare home improvement project. We need above all to reduce the number of vehicle kilometres travelled as that is what is driving up the demand for fuel - despite improvements in vehicle efficiency and fuel standards. We keep building freeways and low density, unwalkable suburbs. Poor people around the world should not be expected to pay for our self indulgence or refusal to face facts.

Rafe Mair has a message of hope in today’s Tyee.

The environment is back in vogue and of course that has much to do with global warming and the fact that the public have finally woken up to the fact that bad things are happening. But it’s more than that. The demonstration last month of 1200 people at the Pitt Meadows Senior Secondary gym against the proposal to get power from the Pitt wasn’t just the same old lefties.

Nor was the one last fall in the East Delta Agricultural Hall protesting the South Fraser Perimeter Road and other proposed environmental rape.

The demonstrations a few weeks before against putting the Sea-to-Sky highway over the top of Eagleridge Bluffs had some regulars all right but a hell of a lot of protesters until then would rather have been caught in a house of ill-repute than at an environmental rally.

The revival of environmentalism has caught the Campbell government by surprise. They were used to the days when they — and other governments for that matter — could point to protesters and say “same old, same old” and get away with it. They saw nothing dangerous politically by telling falsehood after falsehood about Atlantic salmon fish farms. After all. who would believe all that nonsense about sea lice for God’s sake!

I hope he is right. It worries me that the NDP do not seem to on the same page. And that people have bought in to the idea that Gateway is going to mean more jobs. Which is almost certainly untrue, and a bit beside the point if the region cannot find enough people to fill the jobs it has open now. It is also true that the NDP is not getting anything like the money that Liberals are, that voter participation is declining and we have yet to elect a Green to the leg.

I think the BC Liberals are much shakier than they look. The problem that I see is the lack of a concerted push to turn them out next year. They seem to have weathered scandals far worse than those that wrecked the last NDP governments, and I do not think it is just because they have a friendlier media - though of course that doesn’t hurt either. But as usual the left is much happier fighting among themselves than turning up the pressure on an inept, big business controlled and complacent ruling party - which is mostly run by just one man.

And as an added bonus from reading this far here is Rick Mercer’s  Report with a message from the American oil industry

Miro Certenig, Vancouver Sun

It now appears the premier is listening to business and will slow down the implementation of CO2 reduction targets.

Well, of course. Campbell depends on contributions from businesses to run in 2009. And the biggest emitters are the biggest contributors.

Some notably generous backers of the Liberals last year included Brookfield Asset Management ($50,000), Elk Valley Coal Corp. ($56,000), EnCana ($56,000), Goldcorp ($78,700), Teck Cominco Ltd. ($68,180), Teck Cominco Metals ($50,000) and Telus ($52,580).

It is much more important to Campbell that he get himself and his party re-elected than anything else. And he obviously feels he owes his paymasters much more attention than anything as trivial as doing something even remotely effective at tackling one of the biggest issues facing humanity. Climate change does not endanger the planet. That will still be here and will slowly adapt. That process of adaptation of course does not take account of our desires - including those of wealthy industrialists. It is not the planet that is under threat - it is us, humans.

Of course, sensible people - of all walks of life - noting change around them, also try to adapt. Most of what they are trying to do has been well ahead of the business community - and therefore ahead of the government too. And there is not usually much willingness to listen to their opinions. After all they only provide votes - and those can be manipulated by all sorts of methods. Mostly lying. One exception was their recent spirited defence of a provincial park. Would that there were more such examples.

And, it is also worth noticing, some businesses are also adapting. They are the leaders - and they will still be in business long after the enterprises that survive only because they are propped up by subsidies and tax breaks have gone to the wall. There is usually a competitive advantage in being among the first to adapt to changing market conditions. Toyota has now overtaken GM - and for good reason.

Of course when the Godfathers summon you, and start making their offers you cannot refuse, it is a bit dangerous to suggest their operating methods may need to adjust to reflect changing times. Corporations behave in antisocial ways. Behaviour like that among individuals would be regarded as psychotic. But politicians like Campbell have been loosening the restraints on businesses, claiming that is good for us. Of course it isn’t. And any sensible measure will show that we have regressed in recent decades. Wealth has been made, but concentrated into very few hands. The social and environmental cost of this shift has been huge - and is generally ignored by the politicians.

The economy is a subsidiary of the environment - not the other way round. Environmental impact is important - ask any salmon fisherman. The people who insist on business as usual may make money in the short run but they are condemning all of us to a faster demise. And a politician who has the courage to make that the central plank of the 2009 campaign is likely to do rather better than one who is clearly in the pockets of the polluters.

Joel Zotkin in The Washington Independent

I have heard about Christopher B. Leinberger’s article in The Atlantic about the suburbs “The Next Slum?” quite a lot lately. The thesis is that finally the growth of the suburbs has been halted and the rising price of oil means that people are going to be moving into denser urban cores.

Zotkin takes a contrary view, and states

that urban centers — particularly those promoting dense condominium developments — are increasingly buckling under the same credit problems now affecting many housing developments on the suburban fringe. In some markets, condo sales, a strong indicator of urban fortunes, are dropping in price more quickly than single-family homes.

Much of his analysis is based on the census, which showed what happened in the ten years 1996 - 2006. In other words, before the oil price got really high, and before the sub prime collapse hit the mortgage market.

I get the impression that this debate is not really about what has happened or is happening but rather about what should happen. There are people who live downtown and like it there, just as there are people who want a garden and are happier turning their own compost heap,and weeding their peas, than walking to the new Urban Fare. When the debate gets really tiresome is when they both want to claim their leifestyle as somehow more virtuous than the other.

Very early in my university career we were taught to distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive statements (”is” versus “ought”). The main issue I see is not that we need to talk about new development - I think it is obvious that we need less energy consumption, and more walking and cycling. But we have suburbs and we ought not to be gleeful about their apparent decline (which may well be overstated) or self righteous about our own choices. What we need in urban areas is more choice - not less. And that is my prescription - and it is clearly not happening as fast as needed.

The choice of renting ought to be defended, but the changes to the landlord and tenant legislation made private sector transactions needlessly tilted towards the landlord’s interests. We should have more options for occupancy - different types of ownership - co-ops, social housing, co-housing. Not this Cartesian dualism of tenants and owners. The suburbs are going to house most of the people in this region for the foreseeable future. That is not a prescription, it is a realistic assessment of what is there now and how long it is going to remain as it is now. This means we need to come up with better solutions to mobility in low density areas and ways to retrofit neighbourhoods so that walking and cycling become possible - or even attractive for more than just recreation.

It is not an “either/or” issue. We do need more office space in town centres as much as we need to urbanise office parks. That means more than just allowing one eating place!

And affordability is an issue in both places. It seems that even though the volume of sales here is down, the prices are still climbing steeply. And the number of homeless increases. Which is part of the same problem.

The Toronto Star reprints something they credit to The Economist. Oddly enough I cannot find the original on the Economist web page.

It has some distinct echoes for us here. Once again Zev Yaroslavsky, the man who nearly stopped the subway with a ballot initiative, is talking about a neighborhood revolt against transit oriented development and “elegant density”. “Joel Kotkin, an urbanist at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., compares it to rewriting a DNA code.”

But there is not one mention of the transit system that created Los Angeles - the Pacific Electric - also known as “The Big Red Car”. In fact this has entered popular culture. Watch almost any black and white silent movie from Hollywood’s early days - most were shot outdoors and with no sets - and there will be a street scene with trolley or interurban car. (For the impatient the trolley footage starts a 6:52 - but it is worth watching the whole thing - trust me)

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (spoiler follows) was about the plot to build freeways and destroy rapid transit

Judge Doom: A few weeks ago I had the good providence to stumble upon a plan of the city council. A construction plan of epic proportions. We’re calling it a freeway.
Eddie Valiant: Freeway? What the hell’s a freeway?
Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.

---

Eddie Valiant: So that’s why you killed Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don’t get it.
Judge Doom: Of course not. You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

and the classic line

Eddie Valiant: That lame-brain freeway idea could only be cooked up by a toon.