A neighbourhood like hers

Rebel rock musician Patti Smith, writing in the New York Times after learning she was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (excerpted): “Rock ’n roll drew me from my mother’s hand and led me to experience. In the end it was my neighbours who put everything in perspective. An approving nod from the old Italian woman who sells me pasta. A high-five from the postman. An embrace from the notary and his wife. And a shout from the sanitation man driving down my street: ‘Hey Patti, Hall of Fame. One for us!’ “I just smiled, and I noticed I was proud. One for the neighbourhood. My parents. My band. One for Fred [her late husband]. And anybody else who wants to come along.” Smith’s neighbourhood is in South New Jersey. Ours is in East Vancouver. We get maligned here for our protest marches and sneered at for seemingly saying “No” to everything. “Commercial Drive,” to those who haven’t chosen to live here, is synonymous with the loony left, lawlessness, and layabouts. Lately, it’s the massive expansion of Highway One the neighbourhood is mobilized to defeat, finding itself directly in the path of the doubled volume of cars to the east and the downtown district to the west they will all want to go to. Too many cars kill a neighbourhood, not to mention the effect they have on the global climate. Is it asking too much to wish to preserve the same kind of neighbourhood lefty rebel protest rocker Patti Smith writes so lovingly about? Who can read that tribute and not want what she has?

Where did that number come from?

Peter Ladner, rebel protest rocker/biker and NPA councillor, is down with the ’hood too. In his column in Business in Vancouver (March 13-19), he draws attention to the fact that the provincial government claims that congestion in the Lower Mainland costs the economy $1.5 billion, a number suspiciously repeated as a cost of congestion in municipalities around the world. “What is the business case for the provincial Ministry of Transportation’s Gateway project?” he asks. “Where does the $1.5 billion estimate come from?” It comes from Google, is the best he can surmise. It’s a good point. And it raises further suspicions about the fate of Gateway. Earlier in the month, fellow NPA councillor Suzanne Anton also drew attention to the weaknesses in the provincial initiative in an interview on CBC. That was before she was thrown off the TransLink Board by Minister of Transportation Kevin Falcon. How much political capital are the Liberals willing to burn to keep pushing Gateway? The GVRD voted against supporting it, TransLink had to be fired en masse because it refused to back it, and now the two leading lights in the Liberal’s natural allies in the province’s biggest city, Vancouver’s NPA, are on record undermining Gateway with their active opposition to it. If you were an industry CEO who has been working on Gateway the last number of years, how much comfort can you take from seeing Gateway, the largest spending item in the Liberals whole two terms, get one sentence in the speech from the throne, and a cool one at that? If I were in the trucking business, I’d want to see a firmly stated commitment by Premier Gordon Campbell to stay the course with Gateway, and pretty soon too. In lieu of such a statement, one can only guess how much longer Gateway has before it gets the gate.

Commercial Drive has a scandal at last!

As though made to order and delivered right on time, Commercial Drive has a new scandal. A provincial court judge ordered the owner of Marcello’s pizza restaurant to pay $1.17 million, mostly in overdue child support payments, to his estranged wife, who owns Lombardo’s pizza restaurant, just up the street, the place the two of them founded in better days. Overheard in a café between two older Italian fixtures on the street when news broke: “We used to spend $500 at his place [Marcello’s] regularly. No more. A man should look after his children. He was making lots of money. His wife is one thing, that’s nobody’s business. But his children? You look after your children.” When the locals stop going, even the outsiders begin to notice. Who wants to be seen breaking bread with a man who thinks nothing of his own kids? This street notices things like that. And those windows are so big, everyone can see who’s inside. Tsk tsk.

Mano a mano

Hey, Ken Thompson, as one newspaper publisher talking to another, I’m asking you to stop it with the anti-social, and unwelcome, advertising put out there by your big and bullying Globe and Mail corporation. The offending radio ad plays a light, happy, female voice, probably blonde in the conception of the ad’s producers, who says she doesn’t worry about bird flu ’cause she’s not a bird, likes Kyoto because those dragons are cool, and hates minority governments because they’re racist. There are ads that tell us we are stupid, and I’ve always found that that was a strange way to win a customer. But ads that invite us to point and laugh at the stupidity of other people is a whole other thing: it is encouraging anti-social behaviour. The ad isn’t funny, unless you find regular school-yard bullying funny. And it’s not unimportant: these ads form the background low level white noise of our lives, and they are put out there by our society’s leading, most powerful organizations. As parents we would not enjoy it if our children made fun of and laughed at a dim classmate. So, as a fellow publisher, Thompson, I don’t accept it from you. Smarten up. Don’t make me come over there and box your ears. And teach your son how to buy art, too. Aye Carumba!

Denialists

Lorne Gunter, National Post columnist, is following exactly the prophecy offered up by George Monbiot when he visited Vancouver two months ago, touring with his new book, Heat. At his talk, he said that soon everyone will acknowledge that global warming is happening, but once that occurs, the allies of big business will begin to say that nothing can be done about it, so don’t bother wrecking the economy while the environment is also being wrecked. As though on cue, Gunter, in his March 12 column, points to a hotter, brighter sun as the culprit for global warming, and proved his point by suggesting Jupiter, its moons, and even Pluto show signs of global warming, heavenly bodies well away from any man-made CO2. You’d expect this on those loony right-wing blogs, but in a Canadian national newspaper? Bill Wattenburg, an outlandish on-air bully at super-station KGO, broadcast out of San Francisco, has also recently stopped questioning whether global warming is happening, and also doesn’t question anymore the role of oil and coal consumption in that process, but suggests—in sometimes offensive language—that no economy can bear the strains of being weaned off of fossil fuels without a significant investment in the energy of choice for him, nuclear power plants. But of course! Don’t like the heat in the frying pan? Why, jump right into the fire then! Other commentators have suggested that hurting the economy while trying to tilt against the global warming windmill will only make matters worse because we won’t be able to afford to mitigate the worst effects of warming or to finance the search for the technological means of protecting us from those effects. That’s like advising a battered wife not to leave because then she won’t be able to afford to call the battered wives hotline. The only uncertain part of the science around climate change is regarding the economy: it is far from clear that even drastic measures to reduce energy use would hamper the economy. One would have thought the massive costs for North America of World War II would have been a severe drain on the economy, but the opposite had been the case. This is true also of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Also, the massively expensive US war in Iraq is registering in the business press, counter-intuitively, as a strong sustaining support for the US economy. A massive conversion of the global economy over to a lower-energy, sustainable model might just as likely boost as hurt the national economies of those countries that go green first. It takes a radical independent rag like this one to teach the business lobby about their own interests while their very own big corporate media is foaming at the mouth about Pluto warming and nuclear power plants in every backyard.

Conspiracy corner

There are those who say 9-11 can’t have been an inside job because all the scientists and engineers who have studied and reported on the odd events of that day can’t all be part of a massive conspiracy. But they should look at the size of conspiracy of scientists that National Post writers like Lorne Gunter, and so many others all over our mainstream press, claim to be uncovering behind reports like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What’s good for the goose is good for Gunter: if it’s acceptable to suggest a conspiracy of thousands of scientists hyping industrial causes of climate change, how come a conspiracy of hundreds of scientists lining up to support the official version of 9-11 is so easily and widely dismissed?

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.