NPA "Breach of Public Trust" School Trustee Switches Allegiances

Non-Partisan Association School Board trustee Eleanor Gregory has revealed that she is abandoning her own party's Mayor Sam Sullivan and supporting Vision mayoral candidate Gregor Robertson.

But is she doing Robertson a favor?

Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry allege that Gregory has a history of breach of public trust in concealing from parents the fact that there is an international boycott of Vancouver School Board diplomas.

The boycott was organized by COPP as a "last resort” after the VSB failed to seriously investigate documented evidence that fraud and human rights abuses had occurred under the NPA-dominated School Board in the lead up to the tightly contested Nov. 2002 election. According to COPP, tactics used by the NPA-dominated School Board included “political psychiatry” that could rival China and resulted in a woman being intimidated into dropping her plans to campaign against the NPA School Board in the election. The well documented tactics were used against the woman after she informed the VSB in writing that she would be campaigning in the election, then just weeks away, about their “duplicity” in the handling of bullying complaints. She had seen an NPA trustee on television assuring the public that bullying complaints were being taken seriously when, in fact, she and others who had independently lodged bullying complaints against a verbally and physically abusive teacher were being ignored, sent intimidating correspondence, and/or generally treated like they were the problem.

Blue-Scarf Housing "STANDS" Spread to 13 Vancouver Street Corners as Olympics Loom

Can’t people think of a color other than blue for a scarf? I thought the Blue Scarves were conservatives who meet at the Vancouver Public Library on Thursday evenings to discuss the threat to modernity by Islamo-fascism. But now people on the political Left are wearing blue scarves too, as they stand on Vancouver street corners to demand social housing.

Blue Scarf Housing “STANDS” are the latest action by the Citywide Housing Coalition, a group started by the Carnegie Community Action Project [CCAP] in 2007 to ensure that governments keep promises to make affordable housing a legacy of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Every Saturday people wearing blue scarves and holding blue banners meet for an hour between 1 and 2 p.m. on street corners in Vancouver. They are there to demand that City Council protect Vancouver renters from having their homes converted to condos and that federal and provincial governments restore programs that built permanent social housing for low and moderate income people. They also want welfare rates raised and barriers to getting on welfare removed. “We believe that these changes are the primary means of ending homelessness in our city and beyond”, Wendy Pederson, a full time paid CCAP organizer, wrote in the April 1^st Carnegie Newsletter.

The STANDS began on Feb. 23 on nine intersections and have now spread to thirteen intersections.

(Photo above: A mini house used as a prop for the STANDS sits outside the door of the CCAP office inside Carnegie Center.)

The idea for STANDS came from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo whose children were “disappeared” by the military from 1976 to 1983. “They stood every week in a city square wearing white scarves until the generals capitulated”, Pederson wrote. “The scarves became an international symbol for protests against unjust and inhumane governments.”

Street corners with stands so far are:

• Georgia & Burrard
• Burrard & West 4th Ave
• Arbutus & King Edward
• Edward & Main
• Main St. & 33rd Avenue
• Broadway & Commercial
• Commercial & 1st Ave. (this one may have moved)
• Heather & 6th Ave.
• Broadway & McDonald
• Cordova & Gore
• Oak & W 49th Ave.
• Sasamat & West 10th Ave.
• Burrard & Nelson
  

If you show up to stand with the social housing advocates on the street corner, you will get a blue scarf handed to you. If you show up to meet with the conservatives at the Vancouver Public Library, you have to bring your own scarf. That points to a fundamental difference in the outlook of the two Blue Scarf groups.

City Admits Screwing Up on Condo Project for Downtown Eastside

The City of Vancouver admits it screwed up. And today groups fighting gentrification in Vancouver in the lead up to the 2010 Winter Olympics fought back.

The Carnegie Community Action Project and other groups in the Citywide Housing Coaltion held a rally to express outrage that the City had evaded the legally required consultation process for a 7 story condominium development on the Downtown Eastside. Rick Michaels, the Director of Planning delegate for the City of Vancouver, has already apologized for what he calls an “inadvertent shortfall in the notification process for this application,” and an “incomplete notification process”, according to Wendy Pederson (in photo above with red loud speaker), a full time paid organizer with CCAP.

"The City of Vancouver may have been trying to sneak this proposal past us," Pederson said.

CCAP and the Citywide Housing Coalition, groups fighting loss of housing stock for low income people and pressuring governments to keep their promise to provide social housing as a legacy of the 2010 Winter Olympics, today held the consultation that they say the City of Vancouver was legally required to hold but didn’t. About 50 community members and housing advocates gathered today at the offices of Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users on East Hastings and marched to a vacant lot at 58 West Hastings Street owned by Concord Pacific, Canada’s largest developer. The proposed project is called “Greenwich” and contains 154 market housing units, from two-bedroom to studio units. No social housing or other community amenities are currently proposed to be located on the site.

“This project got a rubber stamp from the city, even though it doesn’t comply with the Downtown Eastside housing plan,” noted Pedersen. “How can the City approve this project without talking to the elected officials that set the plan, or the community that relies on that plan?”

Joyce Rock of the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House was equally disappointed in the approval, suggesting it would lead to displacement: “In what other neighbourhood in Vancouver would the City tolerate 32% of residents being at risk of displacement because of new development?” A meeting scheduled for today by the City to approve additional density for the site was cancelled after CCAP wrote to the planning department to express concern about the lack of notification that the project was moving ahead.



Taking a jab at the City’s lack of a consultation process for the Greenwich condo project, protesters jotted down answers to questions such as "What do we need on this site?” on three huge signs at the vacant lot where the proposed project is to be built. In the above photo, Jean Swanson, an organizer with the Carnegie Community Action Project, can be seen getting the process underway.

(In the center of the above photo, Citywide Housing Coalition leader Mel Lehan, wearing the red and black jacket, talks to a protester at the site of the proposed Pacific Concord condo development.)

Pederson reminded protesters at today’s rally that the City has also not given up their plan to build highrise towers on the Downtown Eastside. If they go ahead with that, she told the crowd, “we’re hooped!”

Bill's Confectionary Sold

Charles and Faye didn’t tell their long time customers that they were selling Bill’s Confectionary, the corner store at Carroll St. and Powell. That’s because you can lose customers when you sell a business and they didn’t want the “diehard customers” to leave, says a source who knows them personally.

It’s not that customers didn’t know Bill and Faye were leaving. It’s just that Charles told a few long time customers that he and Faye were going on a cruise. “Maybe you won’t want to come back after that cruise,” a customer joked. Charles just laughed.

Charles and Faye, a Chinese-Canadian couple, ran Bill’s confectionary for a couple of decades. Charles’ father, Bill, had run it before him when it was located across the street. The store was on the Downtown Eastside, across from the Gassy Jack statue where Gastown starts. So they had a real mix of customers. They had poor people, some of whom could get credit there and pay up on welfare cheque day. And they had better dressed customers dropping in from the bars, restaurants, and galleries in Gastown, or out walking the tiny designer dogs they lived with in the condos being built as the neighborhood is gentrified.

For a few months now other Chinese people, a couple of women and a man, have been supposedly substituting for Charles and Faye. One long time customer repeated asked if Charles and Faye were coming back. He recalls the Chinese man working the cash register assuring him, ""Yeah, yeah, they're coming back. They're on a cruise."

Lately customers have been getting some straight answers. One of the women working in the store confirmed this weekend that the business has been sold.

What became of Charles and Faye? They took a trip to South America to attend a family wedding. They also bought a house which Charles says he might flip. He is thinking of starting another business. He readily admits that he “misses” running the store.

I wonder how much Charles and Faye got for the store. I knew a guy who worked on security in Glory Foods next door, the one run by Koreans. He says the Korean woman there offered Charles a million dollars for his store and he just laughed.

Army and Navy Will Stay Open

There was a rumor on the Downtown Eastside a while back that the Army & Navy store was closing. Not true. We checked with a staff person and she said there are no plans to close the store.

The rumor may have originated with the sale of the parking lot used by the Army and Navy.

Volunteer of the Year Barred from Carnegie Center

Ada D. returned to Carnegie Community Center yesterday after being barred from this City of Vancouver building for two weeks.

Ada (pictured in bottom right of above photo), a middle-aged woman with long brown hair originally from Newfoundland, was barred when another kitchen volunteer, Dominick, alleged that he had seen her take some sugar home. If she stole sugar once whose to say she wouldn’t be stealing, as the song goes, “sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at supper time.”

Last year Ada got the Carnegie Volunteer of the Year award. Translation: she had put in hundreds of hours of labor in the Carnegie kitchen for 80 cents an hour in food vouchers. She once spent 12 hours in the Carnegie kitchen preparing a Thanksgiving dinner. CUPE members who work in the kitchen and assign work to volunteers would have pocketed well over $200 for those Thanksgiving hours.

Not only is Ada a hard worker, but in a neighborhood where people are often identified by what they don’t do, she is known as a person who does not use street drugs. You won’t see Ada smoking crack. I wonder if she could have worked that into her defense: “I steal but I do not inhale.”

When you are barred from Carnegie, you can’t just walk back into the building when your sentence is up. You have to go to the office of the Security boss, Skip, and act contrite. Skip was the guy who supervised the barring of homeless Bill Simpson from the Carnegie Learning Center, when he was accused of blogging about union members locking the poor out of services funded for them. But the word at Carnegie was that Ada would have no difficulty getting permission to re-enter the building because her name is linked to two magic words: dish washer. Carnegie is always short of dishwashers who will work for 80 cents an hour.

In the months before getting barred, Ada had been getting peeved about the fact that, even though she would do her scheduled dish washing shifts, she would be button-holed by staff to do another shift when she would drop by Carnegie to socialize. Ada didn’t always mind doing another shift of dish washing but, being a Newfoundlander, she was thinking for herself; she thought staff should give volunteers extra vouchers to compensate for grabbing them at the last minute to do a shift that wasn't theirs. She started saying this out loud to other volunteers. A long term Carnegie member commented that if she said that within earshot of CUPE members, it could cause her problems.

You nevah, nevah say the niggahs deserve mo’ whattamellun.

But Ada’s position in relation to Carnegie staff is getting stronger. “She’s getting her DB 2”, one member said under her breath. That means she’ll be getting the Disability welfare rate, a little over $900 a month, putting her on the top rung of the welfare ladder. Not only that, but she just got into subsidized housing. Her emerging relationship to Carnegie staff was best summed up by a Carnegie member who knows her: “She don’t have to suck hole to them anymore.”