$10,000 from Edgewater Casino to be given to Vision/COPE Friends Hosting an Under-the-Table Gambling Operation for Chinese Men at Carnegie Centre

The City of Vancouver took $10,000 from a licensed gambling operation and now plans to give it to their political allies hosting an unlicensed gambling operation.

On Feb. 17, City staff recommended that $10,000 from the "social responsibility" fund, money collected from the Edgewater Casino, be given to Carnegie Centre. It is not news to City staff and management that Carnegie has for years been the site of a gambling operation catering to Chinese men.

"The Chinese guys who sit on the first floor and in the basement playing cards and board games, are they ALL gambling?", a Carnegie member asked a Chinese elder who hangs out with the gamblers. The elder nodded, "All of them. They are all on welfare and they are all gambling."

The elder was asked what they called the board game they play for hours in the basement, the one where they move around pieces that look like white hockey pucks. "That's Chinese chess", he said, explaining that the gamblers sitting on the first floor at Carnegie are playing poker and those sitting in the basement are playing Chinese chess.

Don't get me wrong, this elder wasn't ratting out his pals. He had been listening to a group of us talking about the City of Vancouver's planned expansion of the Edgewater Casino -- "bad idea", he said -- when the topic turned to the fact that the City has been hosting a gambling operation for years at Carnegie. It was obvious to the Chinese elder that we were aware of the gambling at Carnegie 365 days a year, but that our knowledge needed fine-tuning.

This Chinese elder has no interest in the 'poverty services' at Carnegie such as the cafeteria -- "I can cook cheaper at home" -- or the Learning Centre, and is drawn to the Centre solely by the social life surrounding the gambling.

Some of the gamblers at Carnegie are addicted, namely those on Disability welfare, the highest level of welfare which gives them $800 a month. They qualify for Disability, the elder said, because they have "problems", mostly mental health issues. They gamble at both Carnegie and the Edgewater Casino. They make their bigger bets at the Edgewater and their small bets at Carnegie.

The elder says that although there can be $5 or $10 bets at the gambling tables at Carnegie, most of the bets made there are under $5. And because the gamblers are fairly evenly matched, they each win a few games and lose a few, and by the end of an evening of gambling, they may owe as little as $2, or they may have broken even.

Gamblers at Carnegie don't pay after each game, but keep track of what's owed on a small piece of paper on the table. After hours of gambling, money is passed under the table.

These gamblers, according to another Chinese elder, live "miserable" lives, partially as a result of becoming indebted to a loan shark. When they borrow from the loan shark, "they have to pay back double."

Carnegie used to provide in-house loan shark services, under former director Michael Clague. (Clague, who told a member that he had come to Carnegie to top up his pension, was awarded the Order of Canada for his work there and has now loaned his name to the 'Vancouver Not Vegas' campaign to stop the expansion of the Edgewater Casino.) W. Myles, an SFU graduate and volunteer tutor at the Carnegie Learning Centre, repeatedly complained to Clague, both verbally and in writing, that a security guard, Paul H., a City employee and CUPE member, was loan sharking. One of her students, Danny, was seriously in debt to this loan shark. She was frustrated by Clague's apparent disinterest in her complaint. Several bloggers, including myself, knew Danny too; he was a heavy smoker who was definitely relying on loan shark services to keep himself in tobacco. At the end of each month he would owe most of his welfare cheque to the loan shark before he had even cashed it.

"How come security guards like Ted Chaing who speak Chinese don't anything [about the gambling]?", a Chinese elder was asked. Chaing afterall spends hours standing at his security post at the front lobby reception desk -- where the loan shark used to stand -- just a few feet from the gambling tables, and he speaks Chinese. The elder said security doesn't catch them because people are gambling for about six hours, but spending only one minute exchanging money. "Compare six hours to one minute", he said.

An elder pointed out too that even if security sees one patron handing $5 to another, the patron can simply say that he had borrowed that money and was paying it back. Even if security thinks it's a gambling payment, "They can't prove it."

Since when though did Carnegie security need proof? They regularly bar people without proof, without due process. There are records of people being barred for months or years without proof. A person can even be barred if they anger the wrong people by getting elected to the Board of Directors. This blog has been devoted to covering this epidemic of baseless barrings.

The gambling operation at Carnegie contradicts the City's public relations spiel about eliminating activities in the Centre that could tempt people who "struggle" with addictions. There are Caucasian people at Carnegie who struggle with gambling addictions. A guy who wears a Jed Clampet style, old floppy hat, and and smokes on the patio just metres away from the gambling tables, used to regularly lose his entire welfare cheque in one night at the Edgewater.

The Carnegie pr spiel includes a claim about how they attempt to make the building a comfortable environment for women and children. Staff and management did nothing to make a three year old boy feel comfortable when his father was fixated on the gambling in the basement. Every evening for at least a year, the father would bring the boy, who spoke only Chinese, to the Carnegie basement where he would stand idle for at least four hours, maybe as many as six, waiting for the gambling to end. The guards would go down to the basement at 10 p.m. and close the gambling down; (they allow the poker on the first floor to go until 11 p.m.) On two occasions, I saw women who used the Centre, not staff, briefly occupying the boy with picture books. The boy was well dressed and fed, just idle, sometimes peering through the window of the Seniors' Lounge looking at the large television screen. (He wasn't allowed inside because he wasn't forty.) A middle-aged Chinese woman who frequents the Centre -- the only Chinese woman who I would say hangs out there -- eventually asked the boy in Chinese where his mother was. He said she had died.

Emotional abandonment of children is a routine part of a gambling addiction. I saw a documentary about gambling in Los Vegas, where they highlighted this type of neglect. They showed children wandering around the lobby of a casino waiting for hours for their parents. They reported that a newborn infant had been left for 12 hours in a casino childcare centre while the parents lost themselves in gambling. At least a childcare centre is organized to provide stimulation, for older children anyway, unlike Carnegie which does nothing to offset the effects of the gambling. Maybe the $10,000 social responsibility grant could be used to address that "community services" gap.

That boy may still be playing the waiting game at Carnegie every night. I don't know. Since Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty ordered the much-in-demand public computers removed from the basement, most of the people I would go down there to chat with stopped showing up, so I did too. More privacy for the gamblers.

The fact that Carnegie hosts a gambling operation is not a big problem for most people who go to Carnegie, including myself. But the City's priorities do irk some computer users. City management at Carnegie takes the position that they really don't have much room for public access computers, a service people line up for at Carnegie. Their Computer Room is tiny, tucked at the back of the third floor next to the washrooms, so close in fact that computer-users can hear people farting and peeing in the men's washroom. The room has no windows to the outside world and is so narrow that you cannot walk past computer-users without bumping their chairs, which causes friction between people. Yet one of the most spacious and pleasant areas in the Centre, with a row of tall, old windows, is the first floor sitting room where the gambling operation has run unchecked for years. It's right under the noses of security and just a few yards from the office of security boss, Skip Everall.

Why does the City of Vancouver continue to play host to a gaming operation? Because they're playing the diversity game. There's a lot of money riding on it. Part of Carnegie's funding schtick is that they encourage cultural diversity and harmony. They have hustled grants for such programs as native "cultural sharing" in the theater once a week, where the program's native leader's idea of cultural sharing was banging his white co-leader.

The value of a congregation of Chinese faces immediately visible to anybody walking in the front door of Carnegie, can't be underestimated. Politicians with media in tow come to look around. (Former Premier Glen Clarke, who incidentally faced resistance over his plan for slot machines, toured Carnegie.) When funders see the swarm of Chinese faces sitting at the tables, they're thinking, 'multicultural paradise'. Carnegie members are thinking, 'Edgewater Light'.

The Naked City

We told you so. Lies are in David McLellan's comfort zone. We warned you in January when McLellan, the City's General Manager of Community Services, was appointed by City Hall as media spokesperson on the departure of Deputy Chief License Inspector, Carlene Robbins. Robbins' exited City Hall shortly after a fire at a flophouse in East Van killed three men.

I can still see in my mind's eye, the clip of McLellan telling the media that Robbins' departure was not related to the flophouse fire. McLellan said he had been in a meeting with Robbins and she had suddenly up and left, turning in her building security pass before leaving the building.

Now Robbins has filed suit in BC Supreme court suggesting that McLellan knew more than he was admitting. Robbins claimed that after the flophouse fire at City Hall, she was removed from the job she had held for 12 years, that she was effectively fired and lost her $105,000 salary. That story was broken last night by CKNW, so it is old news.

What is also old news, at least to Downtown Eastsiders, is the environment Robbins described the City as being motivated to create for someone they viewed as a political liability. Robbins' claimed in her suit that under Mayor Robertson's regime, an environment of "hostility, embarrassment, and humiliation" was created for her.

Downtown Eastsiders have been using those exact words for years to describe the way they are treated when the City decides they are a political liability. A targeted individual is subjected on a regular basis to overt hostility, embarrassment, and humiliation, until they leave and don't come back. It's not only the big things that can drive a person out the door, like being verbally or physically abused in a highly public manner, chased around the building, libeled in secretive "security" reports; it's the small things too. Like if a targeted individual goes to the front reception desk where membership cards are sold and renewed annually, the receptionist, Kim, may huff and puff to express her exasperation at having to answer a mere question (for twenty something dollars an hour). The targeted individual then has a choice: absorb the abuse or risk having security called to write them up in the City's security database. Enough of these episodes and most people leave and don't come back. (A guy from Iran used to play chess at Carnegie and he told us that he was once in a cue at a government office in Iran and had an argument with another person in the cue. When it was his turn at the wicket, the government worker asked him his name and he realized that it would not be healthy to give his name as a security report would probably be written about the argument.)

One security guard, Ty, when angrily barring a woman who says she had never seen him before in her life, made comments revealing that he was being incited by Penny Ballem and Mayor Robertson to get dissidents out of the building.

T. Kwan is a Carnegie member who recently encountered an environment of hostility, embarrassment, and humiliation, after complaining to his MLA Jenny Kwan about unfair treatment by City management at Carnegie. Kwan, who is still dealing with the effects of a nervous breakdown he suffered at 9 years old when his mother died, told his MLA that he had been barred from City services at Carnegie for months on the basis, as told to him by security boss Skip Everall, that he had "a big mouth". When his MLA arranged for Carnegie management to allow him back into the building, he got the impression that Everall was gunning for him. Everall found an excuse to bar him a second time. Kwan has decided never to return.

There are eight million stories in the naked City. Robbins' is just one of them.

After Showing that Lies are Within his Comfort Zone, David McLellan is Appointed Media Spokesperson by City on Carlene Robbins Affair

If Mayor Gregor Robertson wanted the community led to believe that what looks like the firing of Deputy Chief License Inspector Carlene Robbins was not a firing, it would be convenient to assign the task to David McLellan. McLellan has demonstrated that lies are within his comfort zone, lies so persistent that police have been asked to conduct a fraud investigation.

McLellan is the City's General Manager of Community Services, a job in which he oversees Carnegie Centre where he has continued to allow fraudulent "security" reports about critics of City staff to be filed in the City security database, prompting a criminal complaint. He has also allowed Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty to keep her job -- Carnegie members fear her contract has been renewed -- despite the fact that she has repeatedly being caught lying to the media (lies which have been extensively covered on this blog), and she has deceptively used her role as a City bureaucrat to fundraise for the political organization, CCAP, an arm of COPE.

McLellan has apparently learned from his predecessor, Jacquie Forbes-Roberts, who "resigned" (Downtown Eastside residents believe she was fired) after signing a letter linking her to the barring of an elected official from Carnegie based on manufactured evidence, a barring that continues under McLellan. McLellan simply evades communication with victims. Today was the first time victims heard his voice. He was on the radio.

The City has assigned McLellan the task of talking to the media about the sudden departure of Robbins from her job. The timing of the departure has raised questions, as it came after calls for an independent inquiry into the deaths of three men living in an East Van house where bylaw infractions were rampant. In an at times lackadaisical voice tone, McLellan, who is paid a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year, took the line during his CKNW radio interview that the departure of Robbins' was a resignation, not a firing.

If Robbins resigned, what about City staff saying, according to citycaucus.com, that Robbins' had been given an ultimatum: quit within a week or be fired. And what about Robbins retaining a lawyer, something that even McLellan admitted that he had heard, according to City Caucus. CKNW radio reported that Robbins had called her departure after 38 years of service, a "constructive dismissal", a phrase that is used when an employer makes an employee's work life so intolerable that she has little choice but to resign. McLellan, though, told CKNW that there had been no changes to Robbins' workplace situation.

It sounded to me from the radio interview -- I just heard a clip -- that McLellan was lying by omission. He said the fire had been caused by a faulty electrical cord, not a bylaw infraction, so there would have been no basis for firing Robbins. McLellan seemed to be concealing the fact that the City inspectors had written a report prior to the fire, a report since made public in which the heavy reliance on electrical cords in the house was identified as a safety hazard. The inspector wanted this risk remedied through the installation of more electrical outlets by the owner of the house. Sounds like a bylaw infraction to me. This safety concern is public knowledge, and surely would have been known to McLellan since he was the media spokesperson on the case.

The inspector's report had apparently not been ignored by Carlene Robbins. She and the Chief Building bureaucrat had been in regular communication with the owner of the flophouse. That's more communication than McLellan has ever had with victims of Carnegie abuses, even though there is evidence linking Carnegie barrings (and sexual exploitation) of clients with deaths.

Why isn't McLellan being fired?

Update: Robbins has since spoken to the Courier newspaper and indicated that she did not leave the City on the best of terms. "What I'm saying is that I am currently in a dispute with the city and I'm trying to resolve it privately."

Jim Sinclair Conceals his own Record of Benefiting from Slave Labour Practices, while Calling for a Review of Khaira Enterprises' Record

Talk about the pot calling the kettle dirty. Jim Sinclair, president of the BC Federation of Labour, this morning asked the BC government to set up an independent review of unfair labour practices experienced by tree planters working for Khaira Enterprises, and to enforce labour standards. Sinclair was responding to the case of workers who say they were treated like "slaves" while working at a tree planting camp near Golden, BC. Sinclair didn't mention the fact that he has personally profited from treating workers like slaves.

Sinclair and the BC Fed have for years ensured that CUPE Local 116, which staffed their executive office exclusively with non-union secretaries, was not held accountable for slave labour conditions endured by these women. CUPE would allegedly run the non-union secretaries into the ground with double and triple workloads, more often than not denying them benefits, and firing them after they spoke up about working conditions. One secretary, Kim, got fired when she spoke up about ongoing verbal abuse by the Vice-President, Paul. Verbal abuse was one of the issues raised in the Khaira case. But Sinclair has never been interested in this abuse, as he continues to accept financing from CUPE Local 116.

Not only has Sinclair ignored complaints about unfair working conditions at CUPE Local 116, he has participated in them. Police records show that Sinclair allowed a written request that he curb abuse of secretaries at CUPE Local 116 to be passed off to police as, "Workplace Harassment". At least one of the secretaries received a call from police on behalf of union brass ordering her to shut up about working conditions.

Sinclair and the BC Fed ensured that CUPE was an equal opportunity intimidator though. With Sinclair's knowledge, CUPE Local 116 also called the police on a male union member who spoke up about some allegedly creative accounting at the union office. The man, a steamfitter, at one point found a cheque for $1,000 slipped under his door, but he continued to talk to other union members about his concerns. That's when CUPE resorted to political psychiatry of the type used against dissidents in China. They falsely portrayed the steamfitter as crazy and got him fired. The Local 116 Vice-President who portrayed him as crazy was the same official who had been verbally abusing the secretary until he fired her, claiming that she had breached his privacy by discussing the abuse with another CUPE official. Jim Sinclair seems to be fine with destroying a man's life when he questions his union, but he supports a human rights complaint against Khaira Enterprises.

The workers who say they were abused at the tree-planting camp have now been awarded $228,000 in back wages and the employer, Khaira Enterprises of Surrey, has been fined, $3,500 by the BC Employment Standards Branch. Secretaries inside CUPE could only wish for that. One fired secretary, Kim, was required by CUPE President John Geppert to sign a document agreeing to muzzle herself about her firing or he would withhold $5,000 in overtime pay owed to her by CUPE. Another secretary, Ann, had to retain a lawyer to take CUPE to court in the hopes of merely getting a pension she had been promised during her 12 years of service.

A shop steward at CUPE Local 116, Ann S. said, after two secretaries were fired (a third would soon quit due to health problems from overwork), "We don't make very good employers, do we."

Sinclair pointed out today that there is a definite incentive for an employer to resort to unfair labour practices as even when fines are levied, they are low. "That's not a punishment or a deterrent, that's a reward. What it says to the employer is `Fly at it'." That's exactly Sinclair has been saying to CUPE Local 116.

Emergency at Brian Adams' Studio

Two fire trucks showed up at Brian Adams music studio today at about 5:4o p.m. Adams' studio is at Columbia and Powell St, on the same block as the fire station. One truck left soon after arriving; the other stayed for about 20 minutes. Fire trucks can arrive for anything from fire to medical emergencies. I guess whatever happened, even if it cut like a knife, it feels alright.

We'll never know what happened though, as people who work at the high-security studio have a reputation for never mixing with Downtown Eastsiders.

A few years back, Adams was on his rooftop patio when a woman went out onto her 4th floor balcony across the street. Adams saw her and went back inside, slamming the door as he went. She says she hadn't gone out there to watch him. She wasn't a fan of Adams. She was a fan of Enrique Eglesias.

On another occasion, a neighbour saw Adams with a floppy hat pulled down over his ears, dashing out the door of his studio into a waiting Yellow cab. She figured he was determined not to be seen. She looked around and there was nobody on the sidewalks except her. And she's not a fan.

Adams held a Junos party at this studio a year or two ago. I think the Junos should give an award for the Canadian songwriting using the most cliches. Adams wouldn't win though. He would have tough competition from Shania Twain who wants to"wake up every morning to your sweet face."

Thanks to the Downtown Eastsider who sent us the photo.

Carnegie Staff Thumb Noses at Jenny Kwan

What Jenny Kwan did, Carnegie management has undone.

Last November, Jenny Kwan, MLA for Vancouver East, got a call from a Carnegie member, also named Kwan, who had been unjustly barred from the Carnegie for four months. Jenny said she would help him. He believes she had one of her staff call Carnegie, as his barring was lifted and he wasn't required to go through the usual meeting with Security Coordinator Skip Everall. When Kwan attempted to talk to him, Everall said, "I don't want to talk to you."

Anyone who has ever reported Carnegie corruption to the outside world knows that Carnegie staff retaliate. Kwan said he noticed a young security guard glaring at him (he didn't know that the guard is reportedly the son of Everall.) Then Everall got the opening he needed. "I was feeling good it was New Year's day," says Kwan, who explains that he was joking with some old Chinese guys who sit in the Carnegie lobby and made a sex joke. He made the joke in Chinese and they were laughing, and then he translated it into English. Everall instantly gave orders to security guard Ted Chaing to bar Kwan for a month.

Chaing issued the barring. But Kwan has no hard feelings toward Chaing. "He had to do it; that's his boss; he would have been fired." The exact reason Kwan was given for the barring was that Everall considered him "loud" and "corrupt". Carnegie is an adult centre; you don't see kids around there much, so who is going to be corrupted by Kwan?

Kwan's plan to begin going to the Carnegie Learning Centre this month to improve his English literacy, a plan that he had already run by Learning Centre teacher Lucy Alderson, has now been nixed by Everall. One less student in a learning centre that is already clinically dead.

The barring of Kwan would have been rubber-stamped by Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty and Assistant Director Dan Tetrault. All barrings are rubber-stamped by them.

Funny, Everall, Whitty, and Tetrault didn't see the need for such an extreme response last year when a 50 year old male staffer was having sex with a teenage female client.