Dude, let’s Trash this Place

Vancouver city workers vote in favor of strike. Aww man, couldn’t they have waited for 2010? Remember the last garbage strike? Man that was super fun. Robson started to look like the Downtown Eastside, and the Downtown Eastside started to look like, well, the Downtown Eastside. Plus as a side bonus it could provide material for makeshift housing. Everybody wins!

A guy just got Stabbed down the Street! But there’s a boy in a well!

While Vancouver businessman Frank Giustra donates $100 million to anti-poverty charity…In South America.

Buddy can you spare a corporate bonus?

The 44-and-a-half million dollars set aside to reward executives with Vancouver’s Olympic organizers would be better spent on social housing. Oh come on, Furlong only makes 300,000 a year. He can barely afford his 1 bedroom apartment in East Van.

Sophisticated Urban Living at The Drake

Sam Sullivan congratulates himself as the The City buys The Drake from the Hells Angels. The fine print? “While the 20,000 sq. ft. site will eventually be redeveloped for social housing, the City will improve and re-open the 24 current rooms in the interim – most of which have not been occupied”. In other words we’re sticking them in an abandoned strip club until the Olympics are over, then we’re gonna tear it down and make condos

Putting the Dense into Density.

Mayor seeks to trademark ‘EcoDensity’ for himself. Apparently Sullivan’s aides talked him out of applying for the exclusive rights to the word Gentrification, suggesting the term might have negative connotations.

Better Call the Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth

Meanwhile, while flip-flopping on the issue of supervised safe-injection sites, Sullivan claims that, “There are people who claim that the reason Insite continues to be open is due in part to my efforts.” Yeah, and there are people who claim to have been cured of blindness by reading this very column. Of course, I hire these people to tell me this. I know, I know, I’m weird.

Sullivan is a Sohai

While Posters written in Chinese are circulating in Chinatown supporting a mayoralty run by NPA Coun. Peter Ladner in 2008. How do you say, “NPA, your time is up” in Cantonese?

Pack ‘em up, Ship ‘em out

While Provincial Housing Minister Rich Coleman touts new strategy for Downtown Eastside. Unfortunately his plan to ship the homeless into the interior isn’t knew. We did it with the Japanese during the Second World War. And it wasn’t too hot of an idea then either.

Cut and Run

Cambie Street merchants should hang on, says B.C. Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon. I’m sure that will go down real well with their creditors. ‘Just hang in there, the payments are coming. Interest? Fuggetaboutit, I’ll just be a couple of years, that’s when my customers will return. Mr. Falcon said so.

I’m in yr constitushuns killin yr lawz

The Hospital Employees’ Union says unionized health-care workers are still being laid off in B.C. as the result of Bill 29, despite the recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling that the law is unconstitutional. “Lisa the student government is meaningless. Your constitution is written on the back of a place mat. And not even a good one. It’s from a place called Doodles”.