Hammering the nails

“This increased uniformed police presence on the streets of District 1 [the downtown eastside] led to a significant decrease in trespassing, aggressive panhandling, and open drug use,” Vancouver Police Union president, and leading candidate for new Vancouver Police Chief, Tom Stamatakis, wrote in an op-ed piece for the Vancouver Sun, defending his force’s demand that City Council create another 65 new police positions. “This is the immediate impact that 33 new uniformed officers had in only one part of our city.”

This is the police union president’s big chance to introduce himself to the public, first made aware of his name when out-going Police Chief Jamie Graham announced recently he would not seek to renew his contract after a stormy and scandal-filled five years.

The cost of his demand for 65 new uniformed positions would come close to adding $15 million to the City budget over the next three years alone, by his estimate. And the biggest defence he can make for such an extravagant claim on the public purse is that the previous big jump in new positions created by City Council decree led to a “significant” decrease in trespassing, aggressive panhandling, and drug trades? Give us a break.

Most of the “trespassing” those new police have combated is otherwise known as “squatting” in vacant buildings by people forced into homelessness by unscrupulous property owners profiteering on the Olympic gold rush; the “aggressive panhandling” is an entirely new crime applicable to those beggars driven to particularly high levels of madness by gnawing poverty and no hope; and the open drug trade is, in actuality, a privatization of the closed mental hospitals and defunded pharmacy plans for the mentally ill.

Any city councillor who votes in favour of any new police positions has inadvertently been put on notice by the president of the police union, and likely next police chief, that they support more arrests of desperate homeless squatters, anxious legions of beggars, and those most left out in the cold by the withdrawal of necessary government services.

At $1,000 a week, it’s nice work if you can get it.

What’s the price, Price?

Gordon Price, who has remained active in local politics since ending a fifth term on City Council in 2002, might be angling to keep a few doors open for future considerations. In the February 13 to 19 issue of Business in Vancouver, Price penned a very sympathetic portrait of embattled NPA Mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan.

“Even ostensibly neutral articles about the mayor,” he writes, excluding The Republic right off the bat, “start with the assumption that he’s been a disappointment. And I can’t figure out why.”

Gee, it couldn’t it be the mayor’s cancelling of the long-in-the-making social housing component at Southeast False Creek, could it? Or his dismissal of all advisory committees, his pursuit of panhandlers, his $25 million boost to Olympic construction, or his let-them-eat-cake attitude toward the dispossessed? Nah! Instead, it’s “anyone who is criticizing the mayor for lack of vision, action, or originality isn’t paying attention or simply doesn’t like him.”

And the two big reasons why Sullivan, contrary to what everyone besides Price thinks, exhibits “both vision and risk”? The monumentally expensive, and quite useless, 311 phone system (which, Price says, going totally over the top here, “may, in an age of terrorism, be critical to our survival”), and his Ecodensity initiative. “EcoDensity” is just a run-of-the-mill old density initiative with the trendy “eco” glued to it, a trick Price falls head-over-heels for: “When the APA [American Planning Association] figures Ecodensity is news, it’s news,” he writes, with all the bluster and earnestness of an accountant reporting a new trigometric calculator on the market. Has the APA ever been in the news to anyone’s knowledge?

It may be a very opportune time to become a mayoral lickspittle; the rewards when you’re the only one could be enormous. “Buy low, sell high” is the mantra for success in both the market and in politics, and no one’s stock is lower these days than Sullivan’s. Who knows, the gambit could pay off and we could see Price back in one of the tall black leather chairs in Council chambers in December ’08.

Big surprise: Rich get richer!

Peter Ladner, in the same issue of Business in Vancouver (I, like everyone else, haven’t read the thing in years, so I was surprised to find two things of note in my rare perusal of this Board of Trade town crier), lays the blame for his NPA-controlled council’s total lack of action on the housing file on—who else?—the Feds.

“There’s a pervasive and pernicious force pushing people [p-p-puh-lease!] over the cliff of homelessness: no one is building rental housing anymore because private investors can’t make money on it.” After pointing out how the City of Vancouver can’t do anything about chronic low vacancy rates in the housing rental market, the remedy, Ladner says, is in Ottawa: “The federal government can change tax rules to give incentives to private landlords.”

Naturally.

Why is it that every problem, including poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and all else under the sun affecting the poorer people, always has as its only solution some variation of the rich people getting richer? There may be merit in Ladner’s observations of investment market conditions, no doubt, but when I got to that part of his argument that involved incentives to landlords, I audibly sighed. Of course, I thought, why did I think it would be any different? Landlords and investment property owners place the ads in his newspaper, buy the plates at his NPA party’s fundraisers, and pay the tee-off fees at his Friday golf matches, so of course he’s going to “solve” the pressing social problem of home availability by suggesting landlords get more money. It’s tiresome.

And predictable. No wonder no one reads Business in Vancouver, besides the ad buyers narcissistically checking themselves out. Read one issue, you’ve read them all.

Give Ladner credit for one unexpected thing, though: as city councillor, he opposed police requests for 65 new officers, and Vision Vancouver’s proposal for 35, by suggesting, and winning, 17. How about next time proposing police budgets be indexed to StatsCan indices on crime in the city?

Vote your own interests, they always do

The City of Vancouver published a highly revealing map (above) in early February showing the relative densities of different neighbourhoods in Vancouver. There is a virtual line dividing east and west, clear as black and white, with high density to the east of it, and low density to the west. The line follows Ontario street almost exactly, Ontario Street being “block zero” dividing the city between east and west.

The map matches to a startling degree the voting patterns in the last municipal election in 2005. White areas voted mostly for the right-of-centre candidate for mayor, and the dark areas voted mostly for the left-of-centre candidate for mayor. It would no doubt also very closely match a map, if we could find one, that showed where home-owners predominate and where home-renters predominate, and also where average family incomes go over $50,000 and where they are under $50,000.

And people say the east-west divide in Vancouver is a thing of the past!

Stop the presses!

An enterprising opposition finance critic might read the independent audit of the BC Rail deal, the part where the merit of moving $2 billion in un-used tax loss and depreciation credits to the buyer for $250 million could not be assessed because of lack of information provided by . . . Gary Collins, then-BC Minister of Finance and subject of police stake-outs during meetings with potential buyers at cozy downtown restaurants.