Audrey Laferierre Watches Michael Geller Do a Back Flip

Photo: All Candidates meeting at Carnegie (left to right) Audrey Laferriere, R.H. Maxwell N Bur, Raj Hundal, Andrea Reimer, Michael Geller, Leanore Copeland

Creating shelters for Vancouver’s homeless population until permanent housing is built was a central theme of Monday’s All Candidates meeting at Carnegie Center in Vancouver’s low income Downtown Eastside neighborhood.

Getting Storyeum, a Gastown business that went belly up, turned into a shelter for the homeless is the prime reason Audrey Laferriere decided to run for Vancouver City Council as an Independent.

Wilf Reimer from the audience said he had decided to support Laferriere after emailing both mayoral candidates, Peter Lader and Gregor Robertson, to ask “why they didn’t support a shelter system” for the homeless while they work on permanent housing. “Audrey was the only one who seemed to have some sort of a germ of a concrete plan with Storyeum.”

Michael Geller of the NPA said he had opposed the shelter system because not only the Housing Department but people in the community had told him that what they wanted was permanent housing, not shelters. At this point Laferrierre shouted something at him that I didn’t catch and he responded in a placating tone, “Audrey, I was just about to say, ‘You’ve convinced me’.” He continued, ”She did convince me we should be looking at Storyeum as a shelter.” Geller cautioned Audrey not to be too quick to assume he was her enemy, that she just might find he could work with her as an “ally”.

But Lafrrierre’s real ally may prove to be Independent mayoral candidate, RH. Maxwell N Bur, who announced loudly, “If I’m sworn in as Mayor of Vancouver, you get the keys to Storyeum!”

Photo: (from left to right) Audrey Laferriere, RH. Maxwell N Bur, Raj Hundal, Andrea Reimer, Michael Geller, Leanore Copeland

Andrea Reimer of Vision said she also supported shelters as an interim solution, that her “first and highest priority is getting people off the streets.” She said more than once during the meeting that there isn’t “a” solution to most problems but multiple solutions.

Wilf Reimer — apparently no relation to Andrea – expressed amazement to the audience that neither the Vision or NPA mayoral candidate had shown up for this meeting. When he heard them debate at the Vancouver Public Library, ”Both said homelessness was “their #1 issue”, but they’re not here where homelessness is such a big issue.”

Rachel Davis Boycotts her Long Term Volunteer Position at Carnegie to Protest Ongoing "abuse of power" by City Management and Carnegie Board

Rachel Davis, a former Carnegie Board member and long time volunteer in the Carnegie Music Program, has tried everything from hiring a lawyer to giving radio interviews to get "abuse of power" by City management and the Board of Directors at Carnegie Centre to stop. It hasn't stopped. So she announced yesterday that she is boycotting her volunteer position until changes are made.

Davis outlined her reasons for boycotting her volunteer position in the following email sent to Carnegie management including Executive Director Ethel Whitty and Vancouver City Manager Judy Rogers; City Council including Mayor Sam Sullivan and Councillor Peter Ladner; Carnegie supervisory staff; Carnegie Board members including Secretary Rolph Auer, and media:

This is to inform you that I am boycotting my long-held position as a Volunteer Music Leader for the Carnegie Community Centre due to the following reasons:

1) Carnegie's City Staff employees failure to follow proper procedure in matters of Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy requests by Carnegie members. The Carnegie has been investigated for this before, and found wanting, but still the rules of FIPPA are not being complied with.

2) Carnegie's City Staff employees, namely the Executive Director, acting as tellers in the election of Carnegie board members, in contravention of the Carnegie constitution, and in obvious conflict of interest.

3) The failure of the Carnegie Community Centre Association Board of Directors to comply with the Carnegie constitution, and produce a teller's report at CCCA Board elections.

These last two failures in procedure have resulted in a call for a recount of Board of Director Election results due to the CCCA membership's mistrust of the proceedings. The recount was done in exactly the same manner as the first time, unfortunately, only further disregarding the membership's obvious desire for accountability, and thereby deepening the mistrust.

It is extremely distressing to me to feel I have to take this measure. I am a community volunteer, I have contributed to Carnegie since it's opening, and have always considered it a beacon of light in a dark place; but I having tried to remedy these problems with due process at Carnegie through many other means, and I find myself unable to continue to be officially involved in a volunteer program that contributes to a City-run establishment that systematically breaks the rule of law, land, and it's own constitution.

I have written emails, talked to the President of the Board of Directors and the Executive Director, held meetings, called the City, hired lawyers, filed FIPPA complaints, given radio interviews to CBC Radio One, and Co-op Radio, written articles, had articles written in the Sun and other publications, and many other members have also done many of these things as well, in an effort to resolve the situation of rampant disregard for the law of the CCCA Constitution and the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Our earnest attempts at communicating our need for basic human rights are met with platitudes such as "We've always done it this way", and the abuse of power goes on. These abuses are many and varied, and well documented at Downtown Eastside Enquirer ,but I bring forward these three specific examples because they are so egregious, and so directly connected with the City of Vancouver, therefore, I am hoping, they are easily resolved.

If City employees begin complying with the rules of FIPPA, and stop putting themselves in conflict of interest by being tellers in Board elections, and if the elections tellers report is made a part of the proceedings at Board elections as it should be, I would be overjoyed to take up my volunteer position again. I have always have taken pride and enjoyed making a contribution to the lives of the CCCA membership, but I sadly must boycott my volunteer services in an yet another, but not final, effort to end the abuses the CCCA membership and I have tried so hard to resolve in a myriad of other ways.

Sincerely,

Rachel Davis
Senior Member of the CCCA

Close But No Cigar

At a meeting at Carnegie Center on Vancouver’s low income Downtown Eastside on Thursday evening, Chair Margaret Prevost told Rachel Davis to “Shut up”. For many members present that about summed up what was behind this Special meeting to change Carnegie’s constitution: silencing Rachel Davis.

Davis and two others elected to the Board, William “Bill” Simpson and Sophia Friegang, had become thorns in the side of the hard line left-wingers on the Board who are in favor of free speech as long as it follows their script.

Simpson was completely off script. He was an outspoken critic of the Downtown Eastside poverty industry in which Carnegie Board members and staff tend to be immersed.

Although more politically aligned with the Carnegie Board than Simpson, Davis and Friegang became targets of overt hostility by the Board when they spoke out against the barring of Simpson from the Carnegie Center and Board meetings just two weeks after he was elected. Friegang argued that the Board was complicit in abuse of “human rights”. Definitely off script. She was ignored. She resigned.

Two down, one to go.

As Davis continued to sit on the Board, she became the target of tactics ranging from verbal abuse to a secretive meeting by Board members to discuss her advocacy on the Bill Simpson matter. She was sent a letter from the Board requesting her resignation. But she wouldn’t take that train to Siberia.

Shortly after Davis refused to resign, the Board called a Special meeting to pass a resolution to change the way Board members got elected. The timing left Carnegie members suspicious. “Why is this in front of us now?”, a man called out from the audience at the meeting.

If the resolution passed, it would do away with guerilla election tactics. Currently any member who hangs out amongst the low income Carnegie Center population can simply turn up on election night, get a pal to nominate them, give a three minute speech, and get elected if they’ve asked enough of their pals in the Center to show up to vote. The long term members of the 15 member Board, who rely on abysmally low election turnouts to re-elect one another year after year, are caught off guard.

Bill Simpson caught them off guard. He had been barred from the Carnegie Learning Center on the 3rd floor for allegedly blogging about Carnegie – that was a few months before he was barred from the entire Carnegie building – but on the day of the June 2007 election, he asked his acquaintances in the Centre, “What are you doing at 5 o’clock? Would you be willing to vote for me?” A troop of Carnegie members trailed him into the election and Holy Brazen Blogger, Batman! Bill Got Elected!

If the new resolution passed, there would be a gap of a month between the nomination of candidates and voting. Never again would the current Board, which has members such as Jeff Sommers who have sat on the Board for decades, be caught completely off guard.

At Thursday evening’s meeting, Board member Peter Fairchild spoke in favor of the resolution, saying that every year on the evening of the election, “A whole bunch of people wander into the room who have never been involved.” The proposed requirement that nominees wait a month before the election, he argued, would “give people time to consider whether they actually want to do it.” He insisted that the Board was not attempting to “restrict” participation.

“Would you close the door and lock it,” Board Chair, Margaret Prevost, sitting beside Fairchild, called out to the door man checking membership cards of people arriving late to vote.

Rachel Davis spoke against the resolution. The current system “encourages positivity” in campaigning, she said. “It’s only negative campaigning that this will make easier. . .It will give a time period in which to do it in, a whole month.”

Jeff Sommers spoke in favor of the resolution. He’s the Board member who last year spoke against the request by Davis and Friegang for a review of the barring of Simpson, arguing that everybody who felt they had been unfairly barred would want their cases reviewed. “If you want to talk about shutting down democracy,” Sommers said on Thursday evening, “it’s not letting people campaign. . . .We’re one of the few community centers that doesn’t allow campaigning.” But as Carnegie member Wilf Reimer has pointed out to members in the past, Carnegie is not funded as a community center; it is funded and supervised by the City’s Social Services Group.

Karl MacDonald said he could see both sides of the debate but his concern was this: “It could end up as a smear campaign against people who for one reason or another are not accepted…It could end up like Pink Floyd ‘Up Against the Wall’.”

Jean Swanson, an activist with the Carnegie Community Action Project who has been outspoken about the treatment of Vancouver’s homeless but has seemingly lost her tongue when it comes to the treatment of homeless Bill Simpson, spoke in favor of the resolution. “Listening to Karl made me think if we voted yes, we could have an All Candidates Meeting where people would get a chance to say what they’re all about and answer questions.”

Joan Morelli, an anti-poverty activist and 35-year resident of the Downtown Eastside opposed the resolution. “I think that this Board should do it’s best to be inclusive of everybody in the neighborhood. Making it easier for people to participate should be the rule. Now they’re told they have to come twice.”

A man with a grey beard who volunteers as a tutor in the Carnegie Learning Center, said, “If people want to run for the Board, they should be willing to come to two meetings.”

Board member Gena Thompson was concerned that members were accusing the Board of “taking their voice” with this resolution. “Frankly, I’m starting to get angry.”
But Peter Fairchild saw the glass half full: “I’ve never seen so many people in the room for a meeting.”

“Yes you have Peter!", yelled former Board member Michael Read from the audience. "When William Simpson packed the meeting!”

Apparently picking up on the distrust in the room, Fairchild and Whitty counted the ballots in front of the membership. Each ballot was held up for the membership – those with stellar eye sight — to see.

Despite the many people who spoke passionately against the resolution though, the majority of the 52 people who cast ballots voted in favor of it. But the resolution failed to pass. That’s because the bar is high for a change to the constitution; seventy-five per cent of voters must vote in favor.

When the result was announced, Jeff Sommers immediately piped up, “There’s enough support here that we can do it next time.”

“Who said you had the floor?”, called out Wilf Reimer who, along with Davis, had insisted throughout the meeting that Roberts Rules of Order be followed to curb people speaking out of turn and interjecting abusive comments. Sommers would eventually snipe, “Do you have to have a rule to take a piss?”

Davis says Fairchild later made a point of telling her that the resolution had failed to pass by just one vote.

(photo of Rachel Davis taken by Wilf Reimer)

Election tonight in 'little police state that could'

There will be an election this evening in the little police state that could. It comes after a year of assaults on democracy at Carnegie Centre through 'star chambers' hearings and secret interrogations to have bloggers barred, and even soliciting what amounts to favors from the Vancouver Police -- Constable Dave Hancock et al -- to intimidate bloggers exposing Carnegie practices.

The election for the Carnegie Board of Directors will change nothing. The same cluster of left wingers regularly get elected. Most people in this Downtown Eastside neighborhood don't show up at the election. One 35 year resident and activist who wished to remain anoymous -- you can get blacklisted from jobs and perks for expressing opinions in this 'company town' in which most people rely on government funding -- scoffed, "You can't change anything there!"

There will be no scrutineers to ensure fairness -- even though a few Downtown Eastside residents have stated that they would like to see them. Last year, when Carnegie member Bill Simpson spoke up at the Annual General Meeting and asked if there were scrutineers, Director Ethel Whitty -- who is paid $104,000 annually to enhance the life in Canada's poorest neighborhood -- completely ignored him. Then Stephen Lytton, who up until that time had been viewed by residents as the token native on the Carnegie Board, showed some backbone. He turned to Whitty and said, "The man asked a question". Whitty then curtly answered Simpson, "It's taken care of." Whatever that means.

Whitty would later be involved in 'taking care' of Simpson by barring him from computers at the Carnegie Learning Centre, accusing him -- wrongly -- of blogging.

There will be a major difference this year though. Margaret "Muggs" Sigurdson and her spouse, retired Vancouver Sun reporter Bob Sarti, will not be running. For at least a decade, Sigurdson has been either President or Vice President. Sarti, since retiring from the Sun roughly 5 years ago has regularly served on the Carnegie Board. There is a chance that these two lefties will make an appearance at the election at Carnegie though, looking relaxed and refreshed after their recent vacation in that other little police state that could, Cuba.

Despite having been a Vancouver Sun reporter for 5 years, Sarti had difficulty adjusting to the freedom the blogosphere offered Carnegie members. Within minutes, low income people arriving at the Learning Centre or other Carnegie facilities to find doors locked would be blogging, tattle taling to the taxpayer who was paying through the nose for these services. Witnesses watched Sarti on two occasions, yell at suspected blogger Bill Simpson in the hallway outside the Carnegie Learning Centre: "Tattletale Queen of the Carnegie! Tattletale Queen of the Carnegie!" It was time for Sarti to retire. And he and Sigurdson did, to Hornby Island.

If you would like to vote in the election for the Carnegie Centre Board of Directors, go to the first floor theatre in the Carnegie Centre at Main & Hastings. Register at 5 p.m. You have to have held a $1 membership for three weeks to qualify.

But if you're a blogger, watch your back.