Adventures of B Channel – Vancouver Bureau

This week B Channel experimented with covering events outside Victoria by travelling to Vancouver City Hall. Actually, we’re not sure what our exact reasons for going over there were. For the most part we wanted to cover Vancouver Councillor Ellen Woodsworth’s motion that the city demand a timeline from the province on when it could see the money for supportive housing that they’d been told was ready to go.

Vancouver council seems to have a lot more meetings than Victoria. The motion that we went to cover got postponed from Tuesday to Thursday, as a 2010 Olympics related motion took up most of the Tuesday meeting.That in itself will bcome part of a larger story for B Channel. What happened was that anti-Olympic activists have been experiencing what they characterize as harrassment, which the 2010 Integrated Security Unit calls ‘making contact and opening dialogue’. So Councillor Woodsworth wanted to introduce a motion called the ‘Coventry Declaration’. Basically, she wanted city council to ask of the ISU that they commit to protecting people’s rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms during the Olympics.

Council heard from the head of the ISU, Bud Mercer, who is in charge of all security leading up to and during the olympigs. He held up anti-2010 images that he’d pulled off the internet, and announced that people were planning criminal protest for the games. The debate was about whether this gave them the right to stop people on the steps of city hall (as had happened) or visit them at home or at work to ask them questions. (Open dialogue, as the security forces call it.)

Mercer stated that he was just trying to open the dialogue on what is and isn’t legal in terms of protest. Olympic Resistance Network members in attendance later told media that they did not need to negotiate with the security forces for their rights to free speech. ORN members also spoke out about the ‘free speech zones’ that Mercer said security would provide. Even the mayor, during Thursday’s meeting, felt compelled to weigh in with “Vancouver IS a free speech zone.”

So this issue for the activists was that the ISU should be contacting the contact person for ORN (or their lawyer) if they have problems with ORN, and not be approaching individual members at home, work, and on the steps of city hall. At one point Mercer denying knowing that there was a lawyer he could contact, while at another point he acknowledged he did know about the lawyer.
So there was a lot of interesting debate and comments about a range of 2010 security issues. The mainstream media zeroed in on Mercer’s comments that criminal protests were being planned. The Province even ran a full page photo of the countdown clock on the front page with a big headline which read “Countdown to Mayhem.’

Thursday’s meeting included speakers from ORN, the BC Civil Liberties Association, and Pivot Legal. There were two other somewhat unrelated issues on the agenda, and PIVOT and the BCCLA spoke on those as well. (I’ll get to that)
At the end of all this, part of the declaration got passed. The preamble, with all the wherefores that explained the purpose of the declaration, was the part that didn’t pass. This was the part that mentioned that activists were being harrassed, which most councillors said they had no proof of. One even said he needed sworn affadavits, at which point ORN spokesperson Allisa Westergard-Thorp yelled out ‘We have them.” Councillor Woodsworth said that she was shocked that her collegues had not read the material she sent them a week ago, because the numbers and specifics and all the things that they claimed they needed to have proof of activist harrassment was right there to read. The other councillors ignored her, and passed a meaningless motion asking the cops to promise to be good and not violate human rights. Gee, wonder what they cops are going to say to that request. ‘No, we can’t promise not to violate the Charter.’ Of course they’re going to reaffirm their committment to the Charter. It’s all just meaningless words.

Anyway, then came the budget approval for the parking lots that the city runs. The entire debate over that was around the line item in the buget asking for $147,000 to install 40 to 45 devices that emit a horrible noise that scares homeless people and drug users out of parking lot stairwells. PIVOT and the BCCLA spoke wonderfully about how udderly evil and harmful these machines are, and raised a few issues that the parking lot boss didn’t know about. The city did not deny the request, but deferred it until the parking lot boss did his homework better.

Then came Woodsworth’s other motion, and after a bunch of silly debate, it got struck down, because city staff stood up and gave a report on their negotiations with the province, and that satisfied the other councillors that it was no use asking, and might even spoil the good working relationship they’ve deluded themselves that they have with the BC Liberals. B Channel is working on the story about this, because it’s quite revealing about the state of social housing in this province. It demostrates that even when the province announces it has $172 million for new homes, it stalls and bullshits about releasing the money, and everyone involved hides behind a thousand bureaucratic excuses. I have to watch the tape again, but it sounds like the province is moving towards getting ready to make preperations to create a timeline on when this money will be released to the city. A whole bunch of roundabout excuses that say nothing. Nobody could answer Woodsworth’s questions about how long it will take until we see these units. And so this is where it fits in with local Victoria news. The question we here in this city want to know is, how long does it take to build social housing? How long from announcement to shovel in the ground? No one knows. How long from shovel to ready to move in? Know one knows, and the BC government has city councils so cowed that they are afraid to ask.
All in all, this week’s trip was educational in how corruptly ineffective city councils are. Lots of hot air, very little action.