March 12, 2010 - 7:35 am |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
It seems that yesterdays’ post on Paralympic snubs, which was sent out to a whole slew of local and national media outlets, has had an impact.
Notice the following pieces here, here and here, which seemed to have used CivicScene’s analysis of CTV’s alternative scheduling as the basis for their story.
Now comes word from a friend who caught CTV’s News at 11:30pm last night that there will now indeed by live coverage from the Paralympic Opening Ceremony, although a call to CTV National News in Toronto at 5:30am PST was met with a producer that said he had no idea nor any knowledge regarding sports coverage (odd in consideration of their official Olympic broadcaster status), nor have I been able to track down anything online to confirm this claim.
If anyone has any information, please shoot it over to civicscene at gmail dot com.
On a side note, Allen Garr from the Vancouver Courier also seems to agree with CivicScene’s take on the culpability of Sam Sullivan in the Olympic Village “scandal” over the inaccessibility of the balconies:
“Federal Paralympics ambassador and former mayor Sam Sullivan told the Courier it is a “scandal” that balconies in the Athletes Village are not wheelchair accessible. The real scandal is that Sullivan can get away with this. The decisions leading to the current balcony design, including a discussion over accessibility and a unanimously supported motion on the issue brought forward by council’s Disability Committee liaison Heather Deal all took place under Sullivan’s watch as mayor.”
March 10, 2010 - 1:21 pm |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
Paralympic Ambassador Sam Sullivan has a very short memory about his own record in office.
Today’s Vancouver Courier arrived on my doorstep with the following front page headline:
“Athletes Village balconies aren’t wheelchair accessible: Former mayor and Paralympic Games ambassador calls situation a ’scandal‘”
In consideration of the efforts of Sullivan to make Vancouver the most accessible jurisdiction in the world in advance of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, this is most definitely a scandal.
The problem for the current Paralympic Ambassador and former Mayor, however, is that responsibility for the scandal rests solely on his shoulders.
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January 2, 2010 - 6:30 pm |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
Take these and give me a call in 2011
Year-end reviews have piled up over the past week, particularly on the local scene. Instead of looking back, however, I’d rather give my top five political prescriptions for what the Vision Vancouver majority needs in the coming 12 months.
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September 23, 2009 - 10:30 am |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
When tough decisions were made for Vancouver’s 2009 operating budget this past spring, there was widespread dismay about cuts to arts funding. More specifically, the fact that the Cultural Plan Implementation was shelved for the time being was a sore point for the arts community. Here is Amir Ali Alibhai, executive director of the Alliance for Arts and Culture, the day before the interim operating budget was approved by City Council:
“This is the community’s plan. The arts community was extensively consulted and participated in helping create the plan. So that’s really important, I believe, for everyone to understand, because it’s not as if it was done without consultation or without community involvement.”
Councillor Suzanne Anton was of course involved in the pile-on, talking about how any cuts to the arts has larger societal implications:
“We’re putting all our resources into police and we’re taking away resources from culture and from parks, which is what helps people not to get involved with the police in the first place.”
But an internal document that CivicScene has received demonstrates that arts funding avoided the harshest of cuts, with the core of cultural services grants remaining intact.
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