Head over to the CBC coverage of the arrival of the Olympic torch on Canadian soil and check out the video entitled “Olympic torch relay kicks off” on the right hand side.
Wait for the clip of Stephen Harper’s speech, and take a look at Gregor’s expression. I know he must be jetlagged, but it is hilarious, if not telling.
I will get to the post on the moderation of Vancouver’s municipal political scene over the weekend. Happy Halloween!
A new approach that has middled Vancouver's political landscape is poised to dominate City Hall for years to come - if handled correctly, of course.
I am off to a string of meetings, so an abbreviated post this morning is what is being offered.
I want to reference some interesting reads to frame a future post:
First, check out the first link from this Google search – it is Kennedy Stewart’s interesting take on the COPE reign at City Hall entitled “The “COPE Interlude”: The (Predictable) Rise & Fall of Vancouver’s Radical Civic Left 2002-2005.” It provides a great analysis of why COPE and power don’t go so well together:
“The 2002 move to the centre brought electoral success, but centrist policy which infuriated COPE Classic sub-leaders to the point where they dismantled their party infrastructure and drove out their popular leader.”
On the other end of the spectrum is the NPA, which had become a political lazy and arrogant organization ruled by a sense of entitlement. Charlie Smith from the Georgia Straight provided a fantastic post-analysis of what the major points for the NPA’s overwhelming defeat were:
“The NPA has always operated on the premise that if it can just recruit enough good candidates and raise enough money, it can maintain control over the city.
Policies have never been an NPA strength. It preferred letting the bureaucrats run the show. That didn’t matter very much when the left was divided, had no traction in the first-generation Chinese immigrant community, and couldn’t raise any money.”
I will soon be delving into the appeal of the Vision Vancouver party (a commentary that might or might not show up later today), not from a partisan point of view, but rather from a pragmatic analysis of retail politics. Also check back over the coming days for a larger piece that I have written for a major daily newspaper on this exact topic.
And so the journey begins...
This is an image that makes me excited about what is to come, even though I am not what some might consider a “booster” by any stretch of the imagination.
But of course, as with most things associated with the Olympics, the divine is usually partnered with the ugly.
What an idiotic choice by the Greeks.
Expect a lot more of this “good news/bad news” formula to occur from now until the end of the Olympics. Then one half of the equation will disappear entirely, leaving only the bad to run wild in the post-Olympic era of British Columbia.
Geoff Meggs provides his thoughts on the issues regarding his motion on the Greater Vancouver Labour Relations Bureau.
This morning I conducted an interview with Councillor Geoff Meggs to seek out comments on his motion, which is slated to appear before Council next week.
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An article titled Vancouver Politics by Paul Tennant in The Vancouver Book (1976), describes the entry of TEAM onto the civic political scene in 1968. TEAM, wrote Tennant, “sought to be a moderate reform group appealing to persons of all political ideologies.”
On their left was COPE (the Committee of Progressive Electors), also formed in 1968, and on their right was the NPA (the Non-Partisan Association), which had been a power in city politics for nearly four decades, and which “held that the affairs of the city should be run by those with the necessary knowledge and experience, i.e., those with a professional-managerial background, in order to run the city in a business-like way.”
The reformers, on the other hand, “felt that civic decision-making should be open to the public, with leadership coming from a cross-section of the population, and rule going to the working class majority. This group was concerned about land use, they advocated city control, and preferred to structure politics around the neighborhood concept.”
“It was very diverse, and we got together by word of mouth. There were professors, business people, labor, lawyers and from all across the city. It was a coalescing of people around the idea we should do something.” – former City Councillor Setty Pendakur on the formation Vancouver’s reform movement and its political manifestation – TEAM – came into being in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
