Profile

CivicScene is a new voice on the Vancouver municipal bloggging scene that aspires to provide informative, balanced and interesting viewpoints on the most pressing issues in municipal politics and policymaking.

The blog will be managed by a team of progressive voices from across North America who will be able to bring forth new ideas and perspectives from a variety of cities, including Vancouver, San Francisco, Toronto, Portland, Ottawa and Chicago.

Jonathan Ross

Jonathan Ross

Jonathan is a communications consultant who has worked in Canadian politics for the past fourteen years.  An avid writer, Jonathan once garnered a healthy and influential national audience for his TDH Strategies online political commentaries, and has worked on a variety of federal, provincial and municipal campaigns across the country that are far too numerous to count.  He is a native born Vancouverite with a longing for many of the qualities of his beloved second hometown of Montreal.  Jonathan has just recently been married, does not own a car but is a regular user of public transit, and has happily just moved across the border into East Vancouver, where he and his new bride live in one of the most vibrant neighbourhoods in the city.

Thu Mar 18, 2010

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FACT OF THE DAY

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.”

Quote OF THE DAY

“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.

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