Going, going, gone

At the sites of the old oil industry far away from the newer tar sands developments in the north of Alberta, the scale of current environmental destruction is often overlooked, but it, too, is staggering. In recent years, in search of more oil from sagging wells, new technology to allow sideways drilling has reinvigorated aging oil fields around Calgary and Edmonton. By drilling down only about 200 to 300 feet, then drilling sideways a few thousand or more feet, technicians have developed a technique to release billions of droplets of oil trapped in pockets of Swiss cheese-like coal beds: TNT.

The deep underground explosive waves shatter and pulverize the structure of the coal beds and allow oil and gas trapped in bubbles within to run out where it can then be sucked up the old well. This is exactly the kind of new technology talked about by oil companies that promise that much more oil can be coaxed out of older wells and fields that had been apparently running dry. This is among the new kinds of methods meant to stave off an imminent decline in global oil production.

The problem is, the underground blasts have also been shattering and pulverizing the structures of underground water aquifers and rivers. Only now is the damage apparent: farm wells that made possible family farms for over a century now produce water so contaminated it can catch fire. Grasslands of southern Alberta that have fed massive herds of cattle over the decades grow no more grass. The water is poison. Grain no longer grows either. The amount of land that used to produce grain and feed herds of cattle, and not incidentally used to feed and quench families, that has by now been poisoned is both huge and growing.

It may be that technicians have since learned how to also map underground water and can avoid in future blowing up the aquifers and breaking the river channels. We’ve heard nothing about solutions to the problem, if such solutions have been worked on and put into practice. But the damage that has already been done to the surface by what has been going on deep below is irreparable. You can never rebuild a shattered aquifer 300 feet below ground. The land that has been poisoned can never be brought back into production.

Double the fee, halve the number

While Vancouver City Council is busy doing nothing about the civic strike, perhaps it can choose to do nothing also about extravagant and counter-productive fee increases at public swimming pools, like the northeast sector’s only pool, New Brighton. Fees for kids and families were doubled this year, while the pool was open prior to the strike. But according to Republic sources, the revenue generated by fees at the pool have remained the same as last year. This can only mean that only half the kids and families are choosing to use the pool.

So the dramatic 100% fee increase has had no effect on revenues, while it has halved the number of people who get to enjoy the pool.

Who wanted this?

Fans of Olympic spending that shall bring the Eastside two new ice rinks in place of the two that are being torn down—at Trout Lake and at Kensington—should, as the saying goes, be careful what they wish for.

Among the charms of the old rinks, like the volunteer-run coffee counter, the cold, hard wooden benches, and the overall atmosphere of community, is the relatively ample and inexpensive ice-times provided by the Parks Board for families, women’s hockey, and parent-child stick-and-puck shinny.

The new rinks, you can be absolutely sure, will be designed with maximum revenue-generation in mind, and like other newer rinks around Metro Vancouver, will likely be operated by a private company like Canlan.

Gone will be the honest 50¢ cup of coffee pushed over the worn-out counter by Mabel, who asks in her rasping voice, “How are you, honey?” In her place will be a “team” of young barristas asking you myriad confusing questions (especially for six in the morning) about mocha chai latté double shot frappo-cappo-cinnamon on that? and then reaching for the security button when you balk at handing over $5 for the sludge.

Minor hockey will be looked after, but forget about $5 for a father-and-son bash-the-puck-around-for-an-hour Sunday, and forget about cheaper subsidized iced for women’s hockey. However, there will be plenty of ice time for top-dollar-paying pick-up hockey teams of downtown lawyers and brokers.

You don’t get no vacation

All in all, said a friend of mine, it looks like an attack on all things working class. Camping might also be the latest faddish pursuit of the comfortable, but it remains the only option for the working poor, who also, from time to time, need to get out of town and clear their heads.

Thus, the authorities have imposed huge new fees on campsites and parking in the hinterland, and have made sure to outlaw parking anywhere outside the paid lots. The result is the same as at New Brighton pool. Correspondents of the Republic report that camping sites have never been more available.

Gone may be the days when you had to book a season ahead to ensure you reserved a camping spot in a provincial campground. That’s good news for those who make the choice to pay all the extra fees. But the lack of business tells me a great many more have found they can’t. So just like at the new hockey rinks, where convenient time and space will open up for those who make more money (no doubt reducing the level of complaints, ’cause they’re the ones who complain the most), at the campgrounds, time and space has conveniently opened up as well, while the working class gets none.

They paved paradise

Victoria Park is, or was, famous for being the scene of endless and meandering games of Bocci played by retired working-class Italians. It also offered a wide open space for on-the-spur pick-up games of soccer for younger and still working kids and dads. Along one side there were also a couple of picnic tables where the indigent also were able to enjoy some respite from the hot street and enjoy a little social time. Plus, there was a public washroom, and anyone ever caught in the musical-chairs game of housing that Vancouver has become will know what a simple, enclosed washroom can mean to a day of desperation. All gone.

Crews showed up at the first crack of summer and have kept the park behind security fence the whole season long. They’ve totally torn the park apart and have been pouring tons of cement in the meantime. The result, we can only surmise, will be a pretty picture for neighbours of the park to look at. But as for a space for people confined in the too-small homes of the Eastside neighbourhood, the homes that come with no backyards, forget about using it. No more bocci, no more soccer, no more just wandering through a somewhat unconstructed and open space on your way home.

Prior to the Campbell regime in Victoria and the Sullivan regime on Cambie Street, a young working dad might have gotten out of the hot, stinking (thanks to the meat-rendering plant down the road) apartment to kick the ball around Victoria Park with his kid before taking the kid and his buddies down to New Brighton for a little swim, then maybe over to stick-and-puck to bang some pucks around, and next day take off for a little camping in the wilderness. No wonder it looks like an attack on the working class: no more Victoria Park, no more cheap family swims at New Brighton, no more cheap ice at the rink, and no more inexpensive camping up the coast. Stay home, stay home, stay home, say these regimes to the people who toil to fix the broken youth who drift down into the Downtown Eastside, fix the crumbling chimneys of the gentrified houses, and fix the broken Nishiki bike pulled down off the roof of the SUV.

Where’s the jam, he’s toast

Mayor Sam Sullivan is finished. BCTV News last weekend focused their news camera up close on a cute little girl’s face as she read her open letter to the Mayor: “Why did you wreck my whole summer, Mr Sullivan?”

Sullivan, new to the game of hot potato, has been saddled with the strike, now known widely as Sam’s Strike. George Puil, ex-councillor and chair of the board of TransLink during a strike, finished himself off in similar fashion to Sullivan, who famously quipped at the beginning of it that the strike is not a priority for him.

When they have the little children nailing your ass dead to rights, you’re done for, there is no response. Earth to Sam: from what I pick up on the street, no one’s cutting you slack for the wheelchair thing anymore. And no one’s underestimating you anymore either, but nor have they begun to overestimate you. They’ve simply stopped holding you in any estimation at all.

One man’s garbage

Two hundred hard-working city managers are doing their best to look after the most critical work left undone by the 6,000 striking civic workers. For instance, they’re out there everyday picking up the change in parking meters. But apparently picking up the garbage—now in heaps big enough to alert public authorities to the widespread risk to public health—isn’t as critical as all those quarters also lying around.

Appearances aren’t always deceiving

A source informs The Republic that the occupancy rate in all those new condo towers blocking the view along Coal Harbour is around 18%. Those who bought them are the offshore class who own similar prestige homes around the world to which they pay occasional visits as their elite whims dictate. They don’t bother with the dirty commerce of renting out their homes when they’re not using them.

Add up all the vacant homes in that one sector of the city alone. The number comes coincidentally close to the estimated number of true-to-life Vancouver citizens who are forced to live on the street due to lack of rentable homes.

It’s not a question of supply, it’s a question of distribution. Of course no one would suggest for a minute that the homeless be housed in the vacated condos of Coal Harbour. That would be an affront to entrenched and untouchable concepts of property rights. But we would have a quandary explaining ourselves to future anthropologists, who are going to find the strangely discordant phenomena of many unused living spaces alongside evidence of many people not living in spaces at all.