- RJ McDougal, BC Real Estate, 1911

Last year, the average price of a detached home in Vancouver passed $887,000, triggering groans from locals, and renewed worries about overseas property speculation pricing the average homebuyer out of the market. With mean house prices rising by 10-15% per year, average prices that, when compared with income, now exceed those in New York and London, and Vancouver bearing the distinction of being one of the three least-affordable cities on the planet, real estate, speculation, and affordability are topics on the lips of activists, politicians and locals all over town.

So how did it get this way? What changed? When did overseas ownership take over the market? How did Vancouver go from being a city where one could reasonably expect to purchase a single-family home, to the most expensive city in the country?

The reality is, nothing’s changed. Contrary to the cozy little myths about inflated land values and foreign ownership started in the 80s by mainland China, the factors that fuel the city’s vibrant real estate market are actually little different than they were 100 years ago. In fact, if it weren’t for the global property market, there may never have been a Vancouver in the first place. The only difference is, back then, the speculation that transformed the tiny logging village of Granville into a bustling metropolis was coming from entirely different places: the United States and Europe.

The Early Years

James Quiney's Real Estate Office, circa 1920. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives

In 1887, only a year after incorporation, Vancouver had 12 grocery stores and 16 real estate firms. The city’s first mayor, Malcolm McLean, was a real estate agent. But, in the late 1870s, before the arrival of the CPR, land in what is now downtown Vancouver sold for approximately $1.00 an acre. Previous to that, the West End itself was granted to  Englishmen Samuel Brighouse, John Morton and William Hailstone for a total of 116 pounds (a sum thought to be so exorbitant that it earned them the nickname “The Three Greenhorns”). However, by 1886, with the announcement that Vancouver would be the home of the CPR’s coveted Western Terminus, property values skyrocketed, and suddenly a lot near Granville and Dunsmuir was selling for $400. By 1893, a lot in the same area sold for $1,100, and, by 1900, an adjoining lot went for roughly $4,250. Incredibly, by 1912, – at a time when wages were roughly 50 cents an hour, and a tailored suit cost less than $40 – a lot in the very same area was worth $725,000. Property speculation was so rampant that, when the first CPR land auction took place in 1886, (the railway was granted large tracts of land in exchange for extending their Western Terminus) Vancouver CEO Harry Abbott realized with dismay that speculators “had seized upon all the best sites without any intention of putting up buildings.” By 1889, proceeds from the sale of granted land in Vancouver had made the CPR more money than in all other company towns across the country, combined.

“Better chances for investment were never offered,” reads an 1870s advertisement in The West Shore, out of Portland, Oregon. “Lots that can now be bought for a few hundred dollars will beyond a doubt be worth as many thousands within a year or two. Investment of only a few hundred dollars will yet return fortunes to those that have the foresight to realize the future in store for this place.”

Growth and Crisis

By 1912,  the market was an orgy of borrowing, spending, and inflation, a place where real estate fever had even hit those who could least afford it; according to a 1912 survey conducted by the Ministerial Union of British Columbia (entitled “The Crisis in BC”), during a single week in October, more than 40% of the land-purchase applications received were from working-class people. Vancouver had become a place where, according to novelist Bertrand Sinclair, the common man would “go without lunch to make payments on plots of land in distant suburbs.”

Construction, circa 1953. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives

In fact, so great was the influence of the real estate industry on the development of Vancouver that it influenced the names of many well-known streets.

“During that land boom at the turn of the century, American speculators bought large tracts of land in the area of Ninth Avenue and Westminster Road,” Anne Broadfoot explains, in her history of the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board. “To promote sales, they decided to upgrade street names, so in 1909, Westminster Road became Main Street, and ninth [sic] Avenue became Broadway – familiar names found in many major centres around the world, so bound to appeal to the cosmopolite. News reports of the day show that it worked, because all the land sold quickly.”

However, the prewar boom was not to last. Between 1913 and 1915, following the U.S. stock market collapse, and resultant worldwide depression, Vancouver’s real estate bubble burst for the first (and possibly only) time; suddenly, commercial rents declined by 50%, and ordinary working people, no longer able to meet their obligations, defaulted on their loans. The city of South Vancouver went into receivership. The market was decimated. In fact, there is one recorded instance of a corner lot on Cambie and Broadway being listed for $90,000, and eventually selling for less than $8,000.

Even though the Depression took longer to affect Vancouver’s real estate market than it did the rest of the province, construction slowed to a virtual standstill. This, combined with the sudden influx of unemployed men and women seeking refuge in its neighbourhoods ensured that, by the time servicemen were returning from overseas after the Second World War, the city was being affected by a severe housing shortage. Even the creation of the Vancouver Housing Registry (started during the Depression with the intention of encouraging homeowners to rent empty rooms to prospective tenants) couldn’t completely solve the problem, and, faced with little other choice, people began to crowd into existing buildings. The crisis eased only slightly throughout the 1950s (fuelled by the continued demand for single-family homes) and, through it all, prices continued to rise.

“It may be, also, that to achieve a truly low-cost home in this high-priced time we will have to spread the repayments over a far longer period than the terms accepted today,” complains a Vancouver Sun editorial from 1958. “Housing costs are high, but we can’t afford to throw up our hands and say we can’t afford to build many more houses until costs come down again. In a city growing as fast as ours this would be the counsel of stupidity and despair. We must have more homes and we must have them at prices people can afford to pay.”

The Condo Boom

Though housing price increases in Vancouver continued to outpace the national market by a substantial margin (in 1967 alone, according to property assessments, the value of lots for single-family dwellings increased by 25-35%), there was one crucial factor that would change the face of city real estate forever: apartment living. Before 1966, it literally wasn’t possible to own your own apartment; you either owned the entire building, or you rented from someone who did. Apartment buildings, viewed as a terribly downmarket option, were exclusively rented, usually only a few stories high, and were generally built outside of the downtown core. It was only with the enactment of the Strata Titles Act in 1966 that it became possible for British Columbia’s apartment owners to subdivide their properties into individual units for sale, thus allowing for multiple owners. Today, 99% of the downtown population lives in apartment buildings. However, even in the 60s, downtown highrise living was still considered a revolutionary idea, one which would take time to catch on, and would require massive changes to existing zoning bylaws.

Plans for Apartment Development, circa 1960s. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Public Library

“Downtown zoning should be changed and great apartment towers should rise above stores,” a 1966 article in the Province suggests. “If thousands of people had their homes downtown, they would both extend the daily ‘life’ of the city and reduce its traffic problems.”

In 1958, 75% of all housing starts were declared as single-family dwellings. By the mid-1960s, apartment construction outnumbered house construction by 2 to 1. Suddenly condominium living was so popular that apartment owners began rushing to convert their rental stock into 99-year leases and selling them to buyers. However, it wasn’t long before speculators got involved in this lucrative new market. In fact, the problem became so pronounced that, following a report made to council, the city of North Vancouver requested a provincial ban on any such sales, and both Vancouver and Burnaby put a moratorium on all rental-lease conversions. The report, prepared by a North Vancouver land agent, estimated that close to 25% of all condo sales in the city were being made to speculators. The report details one incident of a suite purchased in May of 1973 for $38,500 and sold for $42,000 later the same day.

Though Vancouver enacted a lease conversion freeze in 1973, and provincial programs such as MURB (the Multiple Unit Residential Building program) were enacted in hopes of encouraging developers to construct purpose-built rentals, cries about the city’s lack of affordable housing remained on people’s lips. Accusations of developers abusing MURB are evident in many of the papers of the day, as in the case of the False Creek developments in the 1980s – with word of developers building condos for tax breaks, and then selling the units to wealthy speculators.

Map showing the history of Urban Development in Vancouver, circa 1963. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Public Library

“Many of the suites are expected to be rented out by investors,” reports a Vancouver Sun article from 1982, regarding the development. “A $100 million False Creek apartment project will soon become a refuge for many of the city’s wealthy – and a renter’s rights spokesman calls it ‘typical’ of lower mainland development.”

“There’s no shortage of expensive apartments,” comments Tom Lalonde, of the Greater Vancouver Renters’ Association, in an interview with the paper. “Developers have used the MURB program as an example of affordable housing, (but) MURB has never given anybody affordable housing.”

Even Pennyfarthing Development spokesman Ian McBean admits, when interviewed, that “the project falls well short of the False Creek apartment goal of one-third high income, one-third medium income, and one-third lower income, but added: ‘Construction costs and land costs are extremely costly. It would be economically impossible to do that.’”

Land of Destiny

“Like the European Union, Vancouver is crumbling, not along ethnic lines, but among the owns and owns-not,” an article in this week’s edition of the Vancouver Courier reads. “Globalization, in the form of foreign investment, may help chase an entire generation of native-born residents from the city and deny other immigrants a chance at home ownership. Remedies are scarce. But returning property to people who live, work and raise families here seems like a good start.”

There’s no debating that Vancouver is the most expensive city in the country. And, it’s possible to argue that that part of its value is the result of speculative investment. However, contrary to the views expressed by newspapers such as the Courier (Mark Hasiuk’s article asserts that “it began in the 1980s, when waves of Hong Kong residents including members of the business elite, wary of communist China’s pending takeover, poured across the Pacific, gobbling up property with converted HKDs”), this isn’t a recent phenomenon. People from all over the world have been investing in Vancouver for more than 130 years. In fact, Vancouver was a real estate investment before it was even incorporated as a city. The factors that draw investors today are no different than those that brought the European settlers of the 1870s; simply, that Vancouver is a desirable place to live. As the first few generations of Vancouverites bought, sold, swapped, and developed, and realized the desirability of their new city’s climate, location, and resource wealth, the land took on incredible value unbelievably quickly.

And we’ve been bitching about it ever since.

“We live in the land of destiny,” RJ McDougal wrote, in 1911. “In the land of wealth where, though gold is not idly picked off the rocks or from the pavements in the streets, it is just as surely gained from the platted acres and twenty-footers around us. One day an artisan may put the scanty savings of a lifetime into a tiny holding out among the evergreens, and on the morrow almost, he is building city blocks from the proceeds thereof.”

Her laugh is a pleasant, high-pitched hiccup, like the pop of a soap-bubble. When going into details, her voice betrays a vague, youthful discomfort. But, when discussing her eighteen-month stint as a Vancouver-based phone-sex operator, (fittingly enough, over the phone) the writer and aspiring filmmaker is surprisingly frank, exposing a grounded attitude toward sexuality that contrasts with her vocal quality in a way that verges on uncomfortable – especially when she gets to the parts about pedophiles, reptile fetishes, and men who have an insatiable urge to compare their penises to McDonald’s french fries. For a little over a year, Christi (who has since retired from the business) was one of a dying breed, part of a vast, decentralized network of independent contractors, voices speaking from the darkness all across North America, most working from home to satisfy the increasingly specialized needs of an ever-shrinking list of clients.

“It was about 95% weird stuff,” Christi says of her former career. “The thing is, if you just want to have regular, vanilla phone-sex, you can probably find that somewhere for free on the internet. It’s a lot harder to find someone willing to indulge your dinosaur fantasy. That, you have to pay for.”

Unsurprisingly, since the proliferation of the internet and the advent of the webcam, the phone-sex industry has seen a substantial decline worldwide; once the only option for anonymous, long-distance erotic services, it now plays host to a number of what could be euphemistically called “niche” markets – requests too bizarre, improbable or criminal to be achieved through live video streaming.

“The vast majority of the big companies, they go to independent contractors (as in women who work from home),” Christi explains. “They don’t go through a call centre. Even the call centres work off of a website that is used mostly by independent phone-sex operators. It’s called Niteflirt.com, and you can set up a line for free.”

There’s virtually no way to tell how many phone-sex operators work and live in the city of Vancouver. The city issues no business licenses specific to the profession, and the decentralized nature of an industry that now, ironically, gets most of its clientele from the internet, as well as Niteflirt’s commitment to anonymity for both caller and operator, makes it impossible to track. Even finding Christi was maddeningly difficult. In the end, it was only possible thanks to her maintaining a Twitter feed under the moniker of “Night Operator”, oftentimes updating it as she was taking calls, reporting on some of her stranger customer interactions; the feed gained some widespread popularity only days after she set it up.

Unusually for a phone-sex operator, Christi began her career at a call-centre: a small, second-floor office buried deep within a mini-mall somewhere in Burnaby, with little inside but a few desks, phones, and some computer equipment, and no other sounds beyond the gurgle of a coffee-maker and the occasional click of the keyboard.

“I was hired because, apparently, I sound twelve on the phone,” she recalls, her voice rich with sarcasm. “I went to the interview and had the worst interview of all time, because I thought it would be funny, and then got hired anyway.”

As the sole employee working the night shift, Christi was responsible for answering calls to nearly 200 separate phone numbers – everything from Ebony Princesses, to Retired Hookers, to Fat Girls and the Pregnancy Line (“If these guys bothered to read reviews,” her Twitter feed jokes, “they would realize that I’ve been pregnant for well over a year”) to the Ignore Line, where, as the name suggests, callers get off on the idea of paying to be dismissed.

“I think my favourite call was from this guy who was super into small-penis humiliation,” she recalls. “That was a really popular line. His thing was that he wanted to be forced to drive to McDonald’s to buy french fries to compare his penis to. And, I didn’t know what to do, so I told him to wear a dress. I don’t know where he found the dress, but he definitely did drive, and I figured out where he was based on the radio station, because he’d left the radio on, and I told him that he had to buy a Kid’s Meal instead of a regular meal, and he did. Then, he bought the Kid’s Meal with a girl’s toy, and it was one of those Barbies – and, keep in mind, he’s just gone through the McDonald’s drive-thru in a dress to buy french fries to compare his penis to in the parking lot – but when I told him to put the Barbie on the dashboard, so it would look like it was looking at him, he told me that was too embarrassing. I thought it was funny that the Barbie was the catalyst. It was okay if a real live person saw him, but the Barbie? That was too much.”

And this isn’t the first time a penis fixation comes up amongst stories of Christi’s callers either. Other client requests included the aforementioned dinosaur fantasy, men with a fetish for married women, and, in one instance, a 70-year-old man with an unusual desire for penile enlargement.

“For four-and-a-half hours, [he] wanted to role-play the process of buying penis-enlargement pills over the phone,” she laughs. “We were on the phone the entire time, and then he would be like: ‘And now I’m hanging up, and now I’m calling you back and giving you my testimonial.’ The amount that he ‘grew’ from the pills changed every single time.”

Despite the popularity of some of the lines, the Burnaby call centre showed signs of unsustainability. The pay was $12 per hour. The operators earned no additional commission, even if tips were paid by grateful clients. During the day-shift, two operators worked side by side, while the third had custody of a small, private room in the back. And, as Christi describes, by the time she arrived, the business was already taking desperate steps to cut costs.

“The boss also was a phone-sex operator,” she explains. “He would just pretend to be a girl on the phone, in his little office. It was a terrible [impersonation], but often guys aren’t paying attention; as long as you’re saying what they want to hear, they don’t really care if you’re a dude, I guess.”

Then, less than two months into her employment, Christi’s boss vanished without paying his employees.

“It wasn’t as bad a situation for me as it was for the other girls who worked there,” she explains. “I was the only white girl who worked in the office. I was the only one who had gone to college. One of them had three kids, and was still working part-time at McDonald’s so she could get food for her kids at the discounted price; not paying them was really, really messed up.”

So, Christi went independent, setting up her own accounts, and taking over clients from girls leaving the business.

“I definitely made less once I went independent,” she muses, “but I was taking a lot fewer calls. Because, instead of 200 lines coming to me, I had 30-40. They were usually cheaper, because, the lower the cost of the line, the more frequently people will call [...] A lot of girls who decide they don’t want to do phone-sex anymore will have already built up a clientele,” she explains, “so they’ll either give other girls their [Niteflirt] account, or they’ll sell them. And, I knew some girls who had accounts that already had built-in people. And ratings. Because, on the website, you can rate on a 1-5 system, so if you have higher ratings, you’ll get more calls, and can charge more.”

However, by this time, certain dark realities had already become apparent. The fact is, in a business driven so far underground by market pressures and technological advances, phone-sex operators are servicing an ever-shrinking clientele, and, even to the most grounded and liberal of contractors, the desires of those remaining customers are often uncomfortable, unsavoury or downright horrific.

“The first call I ever took was, to date, the worst one I ever took,” Christi explains. “It was from a dude who chose the ad because it reminded him of his seven-year-old daughter. I had to sit there for 20 minutes. It was my first call ever, and I was still in the office, and our boss had told us: ‘No hanging up, no matter what,’ and so, after the call, I went into his office, and said: ‘What do I do in that situation?’ and he said: ‘Well, you act seven.’”

According to Christi, pedophile fetishes were among the most common: by her estimation, every second call or so. “As soon as I started working on my own, I just started hanging up as soon as that sort of thing came up,” she explains. “There were some people who would want the same thing every week, and there were some people who were escalating. And, you can tell ‘Oh, this isn’t going to end well.’ Sooner or later, they’re not going to want to just talk about it on the phone. And there’s nothing you can do because it’s a totally anonymous system.”

After roughly 18 months (many of the later ones only part-time), and for a number of reasons, Christi decided to end her association with the phone-sex world. She expresses no regrets for her time spent in the industry and, in fact, encourages others to try it as a means of earning extra money. She has logged her experiences online, told her family and friends, and even taken calls with friends in the room.

“I was surprised,” she laughs. “No one seemed upset when I told people that was what I did. Most people were like: ‘Oh! I didn’t know that was still a thing! That’s awesome.’”

So, is the phone-sex business truly a thing of the past, an industry nearing extinction? Or will it be carried by the small but enthusiastic community that continues to support it, in spite of the thousands of other options, interactive and otherwise?

“There’s always going to be an audience for phone-sex,” Christi points out, “because there are things where it’s physically impossible for people to act that stuff out in real life, like the dinosaur thing. If they see that on a webcam, they’re going to be able to tell: ‘That’s not a real dinosaur!’”

Either way, you’ll never look at french fries the same way again.

The original 30-day experiment was now nearly two months behind me. So far, it had taught me vegan food was perfectly edible. Sure, there was less tearing and gnawing at things, which the carnivorous beast inside me missed, but meals were generally nutritious and tasted good enough. Some were even delicious. I felt great and had lost some 10 pounds. I was still trying to stick to a mostly vegan diet, but was finding myself breaking (strict, alienating, unreasonable?) rules here and there. Environmental and land use questions around meat-eating still lingered, but for now I was battling ethical dilemmas and an unhealthy preoccupation with suffering and death.

“Is that bacon? None for me, thanks,” I said to no one in particular over lunch.

“Why not?” asked a friend of mine while strumming some chords on a guitar.

“It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not. Bacon is delicious,” the man deadpanned, egging me on.

“Yah, but don’t you feel like an asshole killing and eating animals when you don’t have to, given so many cheap and plentiful plant food options?”

“No.”

“Do you think the grocer sells avocados?”

“Oh sure. They’re right next to the arugula,” barked the musician with a big sarcastic grin.

And so it went.

The dock at Malcolm Lake. Image Credit: Al Boyarski

If I had to blame anyone for my growing social isolation–eating now joined reading and writing as a mostly solitary pursuit–it would be Australian humanist, philosopher and long-time vegetarian Peter Singer. His writing on utilitarianism, particularly his 1979 book Practical Ethics, influenced me more than all the piety of hardcore vegans and blood and cellophane of activists preaching the Meat Is Murder sermon.

In the book, Singer doesn’t think humans should get carte blanche to slaughter everything in sight out of hunger or boredom simply because we’re at the top of the food chain. He doesn’t even assume, contrary to most, that human lives are inherently worth any more than those of monkeys or pigs or even rats, based on a moral principle he calls the “equal consideration of interests.”

Singer’s argument, put simply, is that all sentient beings (those capable of experiencing pleasure and pain) have basic interests. And if we want to consider those interests equally–equality being a good thing in the same way racism and sexism are bad things–we should extend equality to animals.

“If animals count in their own right, our use of animals for food becomes questionable–especially when animal flesh is a luxury rather than a necessity,” Singer writes in Practical Ethics.

“Eskimos living in an environment where they must kill animals for food or starve might be justified in claiming that their interest in survival overrides that of the animals they kill. Most of us cannot defend our diet in this way.”

So, getting down to bacon… if avoidance of death and suffering is one of the key interests to be considered, then how can you, dear conscientious eater, justify eating a BLT for seven greasy minutes of masticating pleasure? Singer says you can’t. You’d need to be a damn fast talker to successfully argue your interest in bacon (and its benefit of taste) trumps a pig’s interest to avoid suffering and death (death being as large a cost as they come, since it also extinguishes all future interests).

This is the kind of stuff I was thinking about out on the lake when I should have been fishing. My fellow anglers were growing sick of my homilies. The worms bled slime, dirt and guts when we pinched them to pieces and threaded them onto barbed hooks. I dirtied the pages of Practical Ethics with their insides, hoping for some insight. At one point a neighbour’s kid, looking to be helpful, ran up with a frog he had caught and jammed a hook through its eye socket, helpfully baiting my friend’s rod.

“For the big bass,” said the little sadist through a proud smile before running off.

That was the worst part, the baiting. After that, it was all shiny lures and worms soaring through the air, floating still as if forgotten, then hooked on something heavy, the rod thrashing and bending into beautiful parabolas. One memorable and furious tug-o-war was cut short by roaring laughter when the angler, reeling in an impossibly taut line and licking his lips in anticipation, instead towed the boat to an unseen snag and into a mass of weeds.

Despite the entertainment, I was losing my mind. Animals were being made into everything from adhesives and air filters to vitamins and wallpaper, and nobody seemed to give a shit except Peter and me! For everyone else, ignorance was bliss.

Meanwhile, I didn’t know what to eat. Existential questions swam through my head: Do buffalo dream of another day on the pasture? Can chickens ever feel fulfilled? Do fish feel pain? What happens to race horses that don’t run fast enough? Do cows ever volunteer to become steak outside the pages of comedy novels?

Alexandra Reid heard of my growing madness and offered to help. We had studied biology together at UBC a decade earlier. I’ve always remembered her as a bookworm, animal lover and meat eater. And whereas in my heart I knew I wasn’t going to be a biologist even as I shook the dean’s hand on convocation day, Reid fell in love with academia like she did with her pet animals. Her current home includes two cats, assorted fish, 20 non-venomous snakes, 25 turtles and a pet crow she found as a baby–the crow was meant to be a temporary lodger until it fledged, but it learned to talk instead of fly, so she kept it.

Reid tore into a doctorate in veterinary medicine and, hungry for more, is now working on a PhD in comparative pathology at the University of Guelph. I got her on the phone in Guelph and she blew my baby vegan mind:

“I’ve never been a vegetarian or vegan,” she told me plainly.

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t save animal lives, so what’s the point?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. She laughed a confident laugh and took a deep breath. As a meat-eating veterinarian, she had defended this point before.

“If you’re not eating animals, they still suffer in the wild. I’ve looked at carcasses of hundreds of wild animals and they often die horribly and they die in a lot of pain. I’ve seen birds that are unable to fly starve to death; I’ve seen deer that are walking on a maggoty leg until they just can’t go anymore.”

“Gross.”

The author, trying to stay afloat in a sea of ethical dilemmas. Image Credit: Al Boyarski

“Domestic animals only exist because we utilize them. Otherwise there would be no beef cattle, there would be no domestic poultry, there would be no domestic pigs. And wild animals only exist so we can utilize them. If people didn’t want to hunt ducks, there wouldn’t be as much wetland conservation as there is. If people didn’t want to sport fish, there wouldn’t be the improvements in water quality there have been. If people don’t want to hunt deer they don’t conserve forest land. So if we don’t have a reason to use animals, I don’t think people will ever conserve them or care about their welfare.”

“OK, but would eating a vegan diet at least save the wild animals?”

“Look at what agriculture does: it removes enormous tracts of land, it removes habitat for hundreds if not thousands of species across the world. They tend to be smaller animals, animals people don’t really give a shit about. People get really upset about pigs because they’re friendly and intelligent and personable, but frogs die in droves around the world for soy and corn and no one really does anything because it’s inconvenient. [Agriculture] kills off the insect biodiversity we need to sustain the food system as we understand it. You remove habitat from migratory birds as well as pollinating species and you remove habitats for bats.”

“Damn.”

“Maybe you’re not directly eating those animals, but you’re killing them none the same. And that’s just a problem with agriculture as we have it set up right now.”

With that, she had to go; her partner was pulling sausages off the grill for dinner.

That conversation happened weeks after my brush with madness in cottage country, so it wasn’t much help to me as I sat there on the lake, the only one in the boat with a bag of books. The sun had set and the light was fading. I stared at the last page of food authority Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. After pages of praising the virtues of eating mostly plants, here was Rule 64: “Don’t be afraid to break the rules once in a while.” (I later learned Singer called himself a “flexible vegan” in a 2006 interview with Mother Jones and said ethical eating wasn’t really about strict laws, but about being conscientious whenever possible and accepting that sometimes “there are going to be compromises.”)

Then the fish started biting.

Back on shore, three of us stood over two fat pickerel splashing in a plastic pail next to a bonfire. Nobody moved for a long time. Then one of my friends, the bacon-loving guitarist from earlier, handed me an ax head. It was cold and heavy. I felt my breathing quicken and my pulse pound in my ears. I reached in and grabbed the slippery pickerel with both hands, squeezing it tight. I felt its sharp gills sweeping my palm, hard and cold and heavy. A beautiful, aggressive beast, even out of water. I laid it down on a stone and bashed it with the blunt end of the ax head.

Then I beheaded and cleaned it and then baked it in lemon, salt and pepper on a big iron pan I threw straight into the fire. When the fish was golden and crispy, I dived in, tearing out the spine of the roasted carcass, then scraping the meat off the charred skin with my bared teeth. We ate in silence, chasing each juicy bite with bread and beer. There was nothing left to say.

Illustration: Jamie Bizness

Banner Images by Jesse Donaldson

The Vancouver of 1886 was an uncultured place, an industry town with a frontier sensibility; saloons operated 24 hours per day, the city’s first brothel had opened the same year as its first elementary school, and, as ample photographic evidence suggests, local children were regularly encouraged to spend their playtime with bears. The largest employer in the area was the Hastings Mill, and the city – a rude assemblage of shacks and businesses built along a single, thin strip of road – was populated by loggers, prospectors, saloonkeepers, and families from surprisingly diverse backgrounds. However, thanks to some behind-the-scenes maneuvering by a quiet syndicate of landowners, the CPR was convinced to extend their western rail terminus from the proposed site at Port Moody, triggering explosive growth within the tiny townsite of Granville (as it was then called), and, in the process, making everyone in the syndicate fantastically rich.

Vancouver was incorporated on April 6, 1886, and elections were scheduled to take place less than a month later. A notice was nailed to the trunk of the Maple Tree outside the home of Jonathan Miller – also the city’s courthouse, jail, and customhouse, with political hopefuls encouraged to submit their names. The election was, at first glance, an incredibly one-sided competition; on one side: Richard Alexander, city pioneer, entrepreneur, manager of the Hastings Mill, and one of the men who had delivered the original Incorporation Petition to Victoria. On the other, Malcolm MacLean, a real estate agent who had lost his fortune in a Winnipeg Real Estate bust, and who had lived in Vancouver for less than three months. Alexander had a lofty social position, and excellent connections. MacLean couldn’t even afford to run a campaign. At first, Alexander’s ascent to the mayoralty seemed certain, due in large part to the fact that he was the only candidate intending to run. But Alexander had grown out-of-touch and pompous during his time running Hastings Mill, and, in the weeks prior to the election, his employees, frustrated by exceedingly long hours and poor treatment, set out to challenge his candidacy.

“The loggers were sore on Alexander—not a little bit either,” recalls city pioneer and early constable J.T. Abray, in conversation with archivist J.S. Mathews. “Well, as they were going to run Richard Alexander for mayor, I thought we ought to have someone to oppose him; the arrangements had all been made for him to run for mayor. So I saw Angus Fraser, and Simon, his brother; both these men were loggers, and the loggers did not have much use for Alexander; very little use. So the two Frasers and myself went around to Abbott Street. The three of us went around to Abbott Street where MacLean had a little real estate office, and interviewed him. I made him acquainted with the two Frasers and they shook hands, and I asked him if he would run for mayor.”

“MacLean said, ‘Why, I have no dollars for an election.’”

“I replied, ‘We have a few dollars; if you’ll make up your mind to come out.’”

After some consideration, MacLean (known as “Squire” due to his kindly countenance and prematurely white hair) agreed to run,  and in the weeks to follow, emerged as a legitimate contender for the mayoralty. At the same time, Alexander’s woes were on the rise when, days before the election, Hastings Mill employees went on strike, demanding an 8 hour workday. Alexander, apparently oblivious to the effect of his actions, refused, and threatened to replace the striking labourers with Asian and First Nations workers.

“The men would have none of it,” city pioneer and strike mediator W.H. Gallagher recalls, “and when we went to Mr. Alexander for our second interview, and gave him the men’s answer, he replied that he would just engage a few extra Indians and Chinamen, and it was then that he made the remark, ‘Canadians are only North American Chinamen anyway.’”

Malcolm MacLean

This remark would prove to be catastrophic for Alexander; his rivals, mindful of the anti-asian sentiment that permeated Vancouver at the time, began the political mudslinging almost immediately, and it wasn’t long before the mill-owner’s exasperated remark was well-known all over town.

“You see those opposed to Alexander had nothing ‘on him,’” Captain Jackman insists, “so they had to get something to use as election propaganda; there hadn’t been any Council, so there hadn’t been any ‘misdeeds’; nothing to quarrel about; nothing to hold an investigation on; so they were short on election propaganda; so they worked up the ‘North American Chinaman,’ and the election was fought on that.”

By the time election day arrived, tensions were high. Despite the “North American Chinamen” scandal, the question of who was to become Vancouver’s first mayor was far from answered, and both camps were prepared to do whatever they could to emerge victorious. Adding to the tension was the utter disorganization of it all; there was no voters list. No registration. No way to know if anybody had voted twice. And, as many early citizens would later note, both sides took full advantage.

“Did you ever hear how we got the first vote here?” J.T. Abray asks Mathews, in a 1936 interview. “Everybody who had a lease had a vote; well, everybody that had a lease of $5.[...] I had a restaurant on Columbia Street, where the old City Hotel was. Upstairs I had thirteen boarders—remember, thirteen roomers upstairs. Then I had a shack on Hastings Street, next to the present Woods Hotel—right between it and the present City Hall; it was only one room, but I made it into four leases; so with the four leases in the shack and thirteen roomers at the restaurant I had seventeen leases, and a lease entitled you to a vote. It did not matter who you were; you could not let a day like that pass without voting.”

“One man had a lease to a portion of a building on Cordova Street,” recalls another city pioneer, “and came down to vote with the lease in his hand and voted on it. Mr. MacLean’s committee persuaded him to leave the lease with them; it was drawn up in the usual form with a space for the name, and I think fifty men must have voted on that lease. After one man had voted, the next voter’s name was written on a slip of paper and pasted in the space on the lease where the name appeared, and so continued until there was a tier of slips, and they were removed, and a fresh start was made.”

Midway through the day, a ship arrived from Victoria with a band on board, bearing banners supporting Alexander, and playing “Hail to the Chief”. However, shortly afterward, events began to turn ugly at the voting station, with the arrival of Alexander’s mill employees.

R.H. Alexander

“Soon after that the Hastings Sawmill people collected together their Chinese employees and sent them up to vote,” W.H. Gallagher recalls. “It was perfectly legitimate, they were bona fide residents; there was no law against it; there was nothing you could say why they could not vote; it was open voting too, and mighty little qualification necessary; no voters list. The Chinamen—and their pigtails—came on up Hastings Road, lined on both sides with bushes, came on up in twos and threes, some on the road, some on the two-plank sidewalk. Then someone shouted, ‘Here’s the Chinamen,’ and that started it. There were a lot of navvies around Granville for election day; rough customers from the railroad gangs and bush fellers from the C.P.R. clearing, and they shouted at the approaching Chinamen, and began to move towards them. Then one or two of the Chinamen decided, I suppose, that they did not like the look of things, and that they did not want to vote anyhow, and turned around; then one or two more came to a standstill, the rest came on up, until there was a little crowd of them, standing, and the white men advancing towards them. The white men shouted at the Chinamen and the Chinamen turned tail and ran.”

By the end of the day, 499 citizens (all of them white men – women had not yet been granted the franchise) had cast their ballots, and MacLean, the underdog, stood victorious by only 17 votes. Alexander’s supporters screamed their outrage, and MacLean’s camp jubilantly paraded him around town in a rented vehicle, before retiring to the Sunnyside Hotel to make their respective speeches.

“MacLean spoke first,” recalls pioneer George Schetky, “and made some nice remarks, thanked them, and spoke the usual post-election pleasantries. He was well received, and stood back. Then Alexander appeared, and said bluffly and bluntly, ‘Well, I am defeated; it was a case of might against right.’ Then you should have heard the boos.”

The win was viewed as a decisive victory for the “new” Vancouver, a triumph over the colonial interests that had shaped early Granville townsite, and a step forward for the common people (though, the fact that MacLean, and much of the first council was heavily associated with the CPR seems to have been largely ignored). MacLean went on to serve two terms as Mayor, declining a salary (even after losing his entire fortune a second time in the fire of 1886) and, despite his lack of experience, left the city with all manner of infrastructure and amenities, including sidewalks, bridges, a waterworks system, electric lights, and a fire department (though the fire engine would not arrive in time to save the city from burning to the ground). Embittered, Alexander never again ran for Mayor. However, he remained active on the city’s economic and political landscape, being elected to city council in the election of 1887, and later chairing the campaign to elect his friend David Oppenheimer to the mayoralty. He helped establish the Vancouver Board of Trade, and later held the unusual honour of being appointed Peruvian Consul to Vancouver. Both MacLean and Alexander lived the remainder of their lives in the city they had, in their own ways, helped to build. Alexander died in Seattle in 1915, visiting a son. MacLean died at the age of 50, in 1895, only weeks after being appointed stipendary magistrate for Vancouver. His obituary in the Vancouver Daily World described him as “a warm-hearted, liberal-minded gentleman, and possessed magnetic qualities that compelled affection.”

It’s the first time I’ve evoked a hostile response from the man. I make mental note of the scene, to be described later: bathed in the orange glow of the alley lights, November mist falling around us, the infamous Cletus tugging at the end of his leash, Lamarche’s eyes are ablaze, but his expression is cold.

“I haven’t seen you like this before,” I tell him. “Why is that? Help me understand.”

“You’re giving legs to something I purposely didn’t want to give legs to, and now you’re coming back trying to revive this thing again. I have no interest in that, so if you have anything else, cool. If not, I’m going to go get ready for this debate.”

It will later occur to me that Lamarche views me as a vulture, circling the scandal that’s overshadowed his campaign, looking to fill my belly with the death of his candidacy. Given our original agreement and the unfortunate evolution of this series, I might think the same, but the truth is there’s simply nothing else to write about. At this point, following the Lamarche campaign and writing an inspirational story about municipal politics would be like writing a biography of Charlie Manson and only mentioning the music.

Embedded, I dreamed of an exposé of democracy’s tender, naughty bits. With the young, buccaneering Lamarche I thought this might even be possible, so keen was he to talk about running a different kind of campaign, of being a different kind of candidate. His narrative, as it’s referred to in politics, is heavy on youthful differentiators: skateboarding, renting – the tech-savvy social media king. It all pointed to a romantic story, full of underdog potential. But as the days passed, so too did the prospects of writing the tale I had envisioned: dark horse candidate squeaks into City Hall following daring, open campaign.

Those are my thoughts, standing silently face to face behind Jason’s apartment, the stink of my questions and his evasiveness weighing heavy on the both of us. “Okay then,” I finally shrug, “I’m sure we’ll be in touch.” He offers an unconvincing nod before walking back to his building, leaving me to wander the damp alley, contemplating the significance of his stonewalling and the future of this series.

Lamarche at the Residents Association of Mount Pleasant debate

My aim, as with every story, is to tell the truth. But with this assignment, more than any other, I’m utterly confounded as to what that might be. One of the few things I can say with absolute confidence is that municipal politics have chewed me up and spat me out.

Here’s what else I know:

To win in Vancouver requires a heroic effort, involving a team of dedicated volunteers; a contingent of professional strategists, managers and communications experts; months of tireless and mind-numbing pavement-pounding, sign-posting, hand-shaking, baby-kissing, telephoning, debating, scheduling and coordination; and of course, a party with a couple million dollars in the war chest doesn’t hurt.

Independents don’t stand a chance.

Vancouverites vote for a party, a mayor, then councilors – in that order. The more engaged among us may toss a few votes to a rival party to balance out power, but even then, most voters have no idea what separates individual candidates, short of their party affiliation.

The power of the machines aside, all civic campaigns focus on one unsexy task: voter identification. Central office stores the names of the hands shaken and babies kissed by individual candidates in a massive database. Bored-looking volunteers (and candidates themselves) sit in plastic lawn chairs in rooms full of endlessly-dialing computers waiting for a human voice in their headsets. Will you be voting November 19? Can we count on your support? Can we put a sign on your lawn? Do you need a ride to the polling station?

In municipal politics, where the winners and losers are separated by a thousand votes, the “ground game”, as it’s called, is the foundation of any successful campaign. Identify your supporters and get them into the ballot box. It’s no secret, and there’s nothing flashy about it.

But at this task is where the simplicity ends. Far less obvious, and far more interesting, is that blurry line between fact and fiction – spontaneity and cold calculation, truths and half-truths – always lingering in the public’s mind during a candidate’s bizarre quest to rule. Some might call it strategy; others, the bloodsport of politics.

It probably says more about me than Lamarche that I struggled to accept that every act, opinion and manoeuvre was precisely as it seemed. He never admitted to anything approaching strategy. According to him, every word was the truth and every motive pure. Cynical fuck that I am, and without a baseline from which to judge, this left me suspicious of everything – even more so once I had established contacts who I determined spoke frankly and honestly, even if only off the record.

Poor Lamarche, however, was always on the record, and the more he pronounced of his guileless campaign strategy, the less I believed it. Surely our boy was in possession of at least some of the wit and cunning required to win in this cruel arena? Surely he was not ignorant to the techniques that would ultimately prove his downfall?

Cue the Puppy Presser. A slick media moment if I’d ever seen one – Lamarche’s black lab Cletus decked out in a t-shirt and “Vote Lamarche” button, goaded to “speak” for the cameras if he supported his master’s plan to ban the retail sale of dogs. In spite of my relentless prodding, Lamarche held firm to the claim that the press conference was not a calculating attempt to grab headlines, but rather an honest reflection of his desire to help animals.

Regardless of his claims, my analysis of the event was cruel and sarcastic; I hated what I wrote, but it was what I saw.

Lamarche reviewing notes at his "Puppy Presser"

With the “different campaign” promised by Lamarche failing to materialize, I was ready to end this pitiful series, rather than write another negative installment, when suddenly the first arrow of the campaign was slung, and it landed in our boy’s camp:

The Date Matrix.

I’ll admit, I read the headlines with a sick sort of glee. Policy, door-knocking and spot-rezoning debates are intensely boring, I’ve found, whereas a good old fashioned scandal is something we can all get behind. And get behind it we did. Running first at 11.40 pm, CTV’s shocking exclusive on Lamarche’s online rating system for ex-girlfriends, including a category evaluating (gasp!) their sexual performance, ran as their lead story the next morning, and featured a surprised Lamarche confronted on camera with a printout of the now-infamous blog post. That afternoon, it ballooned from a small, local story, carried by a single media property, into a national headline, with Lamarche following along on his smartphone while trying to concentrate on his job as a TD small business banker. I could only imagine the horror of seeing a minor transgression from my online past dragged up and aired out on the national news…or worse, turned into a joke.

I felt for the man, and thought the media’s pounce cheap and opportunistic.

Inside the NPA there were immediate calls to cut Lamarche loose, but by the end of the day the panic had given way to a kind of novelty. You better hope they spell your name right, son, ‘cause that’s more name recognition than all the street signs and our entire advertising budget could get you.

Needless to say, I looked forward to our conversation that night. With plans to meet at English Bay and take Cletus for a walk, I was surprised to find Lamarche’s black lab replaced by his smart and personable girlfriend. I interpreted it as a sign that he was finally opening up to me, and that I might still get that cutting insider’s story I had envisioned. Over dinner the three of us discussed the “attack”, as Lamarche called it, and speculated on its effect: had all that outrage from his opponents actually backfired, giving his campaign a shot in the arm instead? Our boy was loose and glowing, exuding the confidence of a man who’s been fired at without result.

He was in the finest form I’d so far witnessed, and I left the restaurant optimistic about the future of this series.

But on the walk home something about the sudden introduction of the girlfriend began to nag at me. I could put her in the story, she said, so long as I didn’t reveal her name. She even had a nice quote for me: “What was my reaction [to the Date Matrix]? Well, I had already seen it a long time ago – he had showed it to me. You know, it’s this satirical comment, it’s just this witty kinda way of economizing something that’s not normally economized.”

I struggled to imagine Lamarche one day pulling up this lame joke from his internet past and showing it to the missus. And a quote from a female – better yet, his girlfriend – declaring the whole thing to be a harmless joke, played rather well, didn’t it?

Had I just been Hillary Clintoned?

There was little time for reflection – CTV wasn’t done with our boy yet. And this go ‘round their revelations wouldn’t be so easily shrugged aside.

Four years ago, a user by the name of “downtown j” posted a number of crude and childish definitions on the site UrbanDictionary.com. “Downtown j”, CTV claimed, was a name used by Jason Lamarche. What’s more, the “downtown j” on Urban Dictionary wrote that he moved from Ottawa to Vancouver, participated in the Vancouver Zombie Walk, and made numerous mentions of skateboarding. CTV noted the similarities to our boy. The links were indeed curious, but by no means conclusive, and Lamarche immediately denied the connection. But then, shortly thereafter, he came forward with a bizarre claim that he had received an email from a former neighbour who admitted to using his computer and making the posts. Oh, and one more thing: the neighbour refused to talk to the media.

Regardless of whether it was true, the whole thing defied credulity, and Lamarche manned his flimsy barricade against a furious onslaught of media, declaring the whole thing a Vision smear campaign and publicly naming the staffers he deemed responsible.

Then, he disappeared.

Lamarche speaking to reporters at the NPA platform announcement

I waited for him at the West End candidates debate – perhaps the most significant event of his campaign, held in his very own neighbourhood. He had often told me that the West End was key to victory, but he stayed home rather than confront another assault by the media, who turned the NPA platform announcement earlier that day into the Jason Lamarche show.

Next was the NPA’s showcase fundraiser dinner, which he also neglected to attend.

He stopped returning my calls and ignored my text messages. His Twitter account went silent. His Facebook page disappeared. The irony of our boy – the new breed of candidate, the Social Media King – undone by the very device that he claimed as his competitive advantage, was not lost on me. Nor was the significance of his silence.

I plied my contacts, both inside the NPA and out. By all accounts the Lamarche campaign was over, even with nearly two weeks to go. The team I had been introduced to as his core campaigners were no longer at work, and most predicted that Jason would finish last in the party, with one source suggesting anyone finishing below him will have accomplished something very shocking indeed.

When I finally meet Jason again, bathed in the orange glow of the alley lights, Cletus on his leash, the blaze in his eyes, he’s no longer the same human being – a humbled version of the energetic and opinionated young man I met months ago, evidenced by his refusal to cross a quiet sidestreet before the signal has changed, citing his fear that someone might see and report it to the media.

When I make the obligatory demand for an interview with the mystery neighbour it becomes clear that our relationship has now officially soured, and it’s with a strange sense of guilt that I take leave of him.

“If you have anything else, cool. If not, I’m going to go get ready for this debate.”

A week or so later, I coax him into one last telephone call with the following text message: “Dude, I’m not going to slam you with less than a week to go. Help me out here.”

Late on the Sunday night before the elections I ask him how he feels about my coverage.

“I think you wrote a story that wasn’t very well read and then you changed the angle…”

I assure him that my intention was not to generate reads, but rather to offer insight, and I re-state my difficulty in separating the truth from the “truth” in politics. The realization that, after weeks in the trenches, having spoken to dozens of people both on and off the record, after hearing from campaign managers, reputation managers, politicians and staffers, that, when it comes to municipal politics, I still don’t have any idea what’s real and what isn’t.

In response, he relates to me a story about an old friend:

“I had a friend who worked for the government in comms [communications] and he always used to tell me: ‘Dude, you’ve got no message.’” The implication being that Lamarche is precisely as he appears.

And for the first time it occurs to me that, here at the end, there are two possibilities with Jason Lamarche. The first is that he’s been playing me the entire time, that his honest insistence about Puppy Pressers and altruistic politics was nothing more than an economy-sized bag of bullshit. But the second, and perhaps more horrifying, possibility is that maybe Jason Lamarche really did stick to the truth this entire campaign – oblivious to the potential outcome. Maybe he torpedoed his entire campaign with that unbelievable yarn about his neighbour using his computer because it was the truth; maybe he really was totally naïve to the cynicism that a press release about puppies might generate. And maybe I’ve become part of that machine I loathe so much, serving up cruel commentary on a human being guilty of nothing more than a desire to make his city a better place.

I ask him if, in spite of it all, he thinks he’s still got a chance.

“If five of us get in, I’ll think you’ll see me in there,” he says.

And with this, I’m less certain than ever about when I’m being spun.

Lamarche "main streeting" on Granville

Follow the evolving story here.

According to a key Occupy organizer, protesters are in negotiations with the city to move to a warehouse following the shut down order issued by Mayor Gregor Robertson.

James “Facilitator,” (who would not give his last name) has been with the movement since its inception. He was responsible for negotiating free power from the city during Occupy’s first weekend, and said he’s been having back-channel negotiations with the city’s deputy managers throughout the occupation.

“The vehicle is not us being here, it’s the vehicle of awareness,” James said. “I’ve put it forth to the City that, if they can find us a spot, like an empty warehouse or something where we can put everything like the press committee and even the food we can still feed people if we need to, but move the vehicle away from here.”

Councillor Andrea Reimer confirmed negotiations have been going on since day one of the protest, and that moving the camp indoors is currently on the table.

“We’ve been talking with people from the movement since day one, the deputy city manager has been the lead on it,” Reimer said. According to Reimer, Deputy City Manager Sadhu Johnston has been in talks with James and other organizers from the movement to find a place that is “more suitable” for its needs.

“[The Art Gallery grounds] is not an ideal space,” Reimer said. “If they had somewhere with concrete, that drained a little better, that would be a better space for such a thing. I know that that discussion has been going on. Facilitating the movement itself would probably best be done from an indoor space where they could have things like offices.”

James said negotiations are taking place around finding a space where the movement’s committees can continue to meet and move forward on their agendas, and potentially become a political entity themselves.

“One thing this could morph into is a political possibility. We have one candidate in this election, and we could have had more if we’d been on the ball about it… we can get involved in the community in multiple parallels and be active, and actually make a difference,” James said.

Photo Credit: Jesse Winter

Suresh Fernando works with a number of Occupy Vancouver committees. He agrees it is important for Occupy Vancouver to continue working with the community.

“I’m going to propose a health and safety strategy that will have two principal elements,” Fernando said.

“One is the restructuring of tent city, the other is associated things we can do…for example engaging other organizations, councilors, InSite and so on.”

Fernando said there is a growing rift between the people living in tent city and the organizers running the general assemblies, a fact also confirmed by Reimer.

Reimer said the city’s Tenant Assistance Program has been conducting daily inspections of the tent city. Those inspections have revealed a clear distinction between Occupy Vancouver the movement, and Occupy Vancouver the tent city, which has a growing population of homeless in need residents, as identified by Tenant Assistance Program Coordinator Judy Graves.

“[The overdoses] really brought home for me that we don’t have a clue exactly what’s going on in the tent city,” Fernando said.

“It’s clear to me that they don’t participate in the general assemblies. They’re so focused on their immediate survival …they are a part of our constituency because they’re the people that most need us to serve them.”

The protesters at the Vancouver Art Gallery have been providing services to community members since the beginning of the occupation.

According to general assembly facilitator Dan Richardson, the Food Not Bombs tent at the VAG has been feeding up to 2,000 people per day with as little as $50.

“We’re providing services that the city isn’t,” Richardson claimed in an interview last week.

Continuing those services is at the heart of James’ planning. He said he returned Sunday morning from a farm in Chilliwack with hundreds of pounds of donated produce that he hopes to begin distributing to other aid organizations in the city.

“We’re going to give it out to food kitchens ‘cause we can’t eat it all,” James said. The distribution might happen through Quest food exchange, which supplies a lot of the Downtown East Side food kitchens, or the organizers might do it personally by just showing up and saying “here’s some food.”

In the mean time, James and Fernando said there is a plan in place to deal with the tent city issues raised by the two overdoses. They will likely begin removing individual tents and replacing them with 16-foot-diameter domes that people can use as common sleeping areas to watch over each other.

“Gregor [Robertson] said at the press conference that health and safety is first priority. I agree with him,” Fernando said.

“Hopefully, if you’re sleeping in a dome you won’t be passed out by yourself in a tent that no one can see. We’re not trying to abdicate responsibility. We realize this happened on our turf and that we can obviously do more, or try to do more to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”

Banner Image Credit: Jesse Winter

As if the t-shirt isn’t enough, the damn dog’s wearing a Lamarche for Council button too. Oh Cletus, you’re less pet than puppet, I think, steering a wide berth around his handlers. The whole scene is enough to make me swear off politics forever, but I fight the urge to cancel this series and soldier on, perhaps vaguely aware that I’m about to witness the stuff of municipal political legend.

The invitation slipped into my inbox innocuously enough:

Hey Matt,

Can you come to this?

I’d been pleading for meaningful engagement for weeks – stuck in the back seat when I had clearly called shotgun – and so took the summons as a positive development. But opening the attachment, I grew despondent once more:

NPA candidate calls for ban of dog sales in pet stores.
Jason Lamarche says ban would protect dogs and combat puppy mills.

Yes, that’s how it all started: the genesis of what I’ll refer to as the notorious Jason Lamarche “Puppy Presser”, a political manoeuvre so daring in its cowardice, so bold in its trifling, that I immediately discounted it as crap. Of course his first press release would be about puppies, I thought. Mine would be too. But what happens if the media perceives it as a blatant publicity stunt, Mr Lamarche? Or worse, what if the voters do?

The armchair strategist inside me was skeptical, but the human being was downright disillusioned – already mourning over what was sure to be an awkward moment when 11am rolled by and not a single news outfit showed up for our rookie’s first ever solo press conference.

Thoroughly expecting a disaster, I’m greeted by a goddamn media circus instead. CTV, Global, Sun Media. Metro. 24 Hours. The Province. And in the middle, our boy Lamarche, mingling nervously, a ream of papers in hand, photogenic mutt Cletus sniffing at the grass beside him. A moment or two of stately handshaking and he leads the dog to their position in front of the cameras.

I begin snapping half-hearted photos, clearly not understanding the gravity of the event.

“Hello everybody, my name is Jason Lamarche, and I want to ban the retail sale of dogs in Vancouver,” he says, plainly. “If elected to City Council on November 19th I will put a motion forward to do so.” His voice trembles slightly.

“This will promote adoption from animal shelters and combat puppy mills. While Vancouver only has a small number of retail stores that sell dogs, this policy… This ban is often a costly program… Wait, let me me rephrase that.”

On this last point he stops and restarts while the press waits dutifully. My mood grows ever more somber. The poor lad, he’s staked his entire political campaign on this – this issue of puppy mills – and each time he stutters in the unforgiving eyes of the television cameras, during what will surely be his first and last press conference, I imagine his popularity sliding and the relevance of this series fading further into oblivion.

Wrapping up his speech, he asks the group if there are any questions.

“Do you know how many pet stores there are in Vancouver that sell dogs?” inquires a reporter with The Province.

“There are a very small number in the city of Vancouver,” he replies. “This ban again is about promoting the adoption of animals through shelters and by combating puppy mills, and breaking the link between puppy mills and retail stores.”

A reporter behind the Sun Media camera pipes up with what I fear to be the death blow:

“Jason, is there any information out of Richmond or Toronto that getting rid of dogs out of pet stores is actually working, in terms of cutting down puppy mills?”

Richmond, we learned during Lamarche’s speech, passed a ban a year ago, with Toronto following suit shortly thereafter.

“Well, for example,” Lamarche replies, “this is about breaking the link between pet shops and puppy mills.”

I die a little inside.

“Clearly, if you prevent the retail sale of dogs at the retail level you’re breaking that link between them,” he continues. “I imagine the puppy mills are still operating but the City of Vancouver or any other city that adopts this bylaw will break that relationship between retail stores and puppy mills.”

I’m baffled. The reporter’s question was thoughtful and specific, but, either through an act of nerves or spectacular cunning, Lamarche skipped it right by, answering a question sure, but not the one that was asked. And this is how it continues for the remainder of the conference: a reporter asks a question and Lamarche replies that he wants to break the link between retail stores and puppy mills.

“Have you talked to any pet store owners that sell dogs in Vancouver?”

“I have not heard from the pet store owners – no one has contacted me about this – but this ban is about promoting adoption from shelters and breaking that link between them and puppy mills. “

“What research has this been based on?”

“This is really about personal passions and issues we connect with. As a dog owner, I’m very concerned about the safety and treatment of animals and now that I’m running for City Council, I’m actually in a position where I can advance a cause I strongly believe in, which is protecting the safety and treatment of animals.”

“And how does this do that?”

“This does that by breaking the link between puppy mills and retail stores…”

Deciding there’s no point in listening further, I turn to the CTV reporter beside me.

“Is it typical for this many people to come out to one of these?” I half-whisper.

“It depends on the issue,” he replies. “He’s picked a good one. Everyone loves dogs.”

“Forgive the pun, but isn’t this a little ‘fluffy’?”

“Oh yeah, it’s soft, but everyone cares about animals. Watch television news.”

“Four legs good?” I ask, repeating the unofficial mantra of the trade.

“Four legs good”, a journalist overhearing our conversation agrees.

By now, the cameras have stopped rolling and Lamarche seems more at ease, talking casually with the gathered reporters.

“They say every politician has a pet project,” he says, “and this one’s mine.”

Everyone groans.

Growing bolder, Lamarche drops to one knee. He adjusts Cletus so that he’s facing the cameras and asks the dog:

“Do you want to ban the sale of dogs in retail stores? Speak if you do. Speak! Speak! Speak if you do!”

The camera operators scramble to get it all in frame.

But the best is yet to come: prodded for some b-roll to stitch together the stories for the evening news, Jason and Cletus find themselves frolicking together in the dog park, running with playful abandon towards the cameras, retreating to their starting point and then doing it again. And again. And again…

To me, the whole thing is a disaster, but it’s elation in the Lamarche camp as we head out for coffee to debrief.

“I honestly didn’t think anyone would show up,” Lamarche says, unable to conceal his glee. “I didn’t think any media was going to show up, and when I got there, there was no one. And then I saw a car from The Province driving around and I was like, ‘The Province, really?’ and then I walked down the street to just go over my notes and kinda collect myself and by the time I got back all these cameras had setup and I was kinda like: ‘uh, interesting.’”

But something about his coyness doesn’t sit right with me. Lamarche is no stranger to video – producing hours of skateboard films and, later on, an online political show called the Liberal Minute (which he’s taken down for the duration of this campaign). The dog, the t-shirt, the running shots – what came across as hokey and contrived in the moment turned into a piece of media magic. Images and video of Lamarche and Cletus mid-frolic make their way onto most of the major TV news outlets, and reach as far as Montreal in print. What’s more, the resulting coverage was overwhelmingly positive and bore little resemblance to the awkward and lumpy press conference I had witnessed. Edited down to tiny soundbites and bounding puppies, our boy came across as confident and polished.

Sitting down for coffee a week later I press him on what I now consider a heroic act of media manipulation:

“Lamarche, of all the things happening in this city – and there are many that we should be excited about – the thing that you decide to go to the public with is dog sales.”

He nods.

“And there’s not even a single store in the city selling dogs.”

“I didn’t know that at the time,” is his quick, if bashful reply. “The information I had, through an editor at a widely-read pet magazine, was that there was actually a pet store still doing it. They had stopped doing it in the spring of this year. So in my mind, this was still going on.”

He leans forward.

“The flip side of that – actually the unintended happy consequence – with no shops selling dogs it’s the perfect time to ban it, because you’re not making any economic impact on any store, and you’re also saying that Vancouver is now going to permanently close that link between retail stores and puppy mills.”

Again with that damn soundbite… And as our conversation continues, me pressing him ever harder, he grows ever more adamant that the issue was chosen not for its saleability, but because it’s something he’s truly passionate about. He’s a co-founder of the West End Dog Show, he reminds me, proudly. Cletus, he points out, is an adopted animal. And when Richmond passed its ban last year, Lamarche created a Facebook page within days of the announcement calling for similar action here in Vancouver.

While I’ll never fully shake my cynical assessment of his motivations, I have to hand it to the boy: on municipal terms the Lamarche team just hit a home run – a triumph by the mundane standards of civic politics, where simple name recognition is the biggest hurdle to overcome. As Vancouverites enter the ballot boxes November 19 and scan a list of hundreds of names they’ve never heard, I can’t help but wonder if their eyes will linger on that box next to Lamarche, Jason.

But if name recognition is the game, then the loathed “Puppy Presser” is nothing compared to the media shit-storm that will be swirling around Jason a few weeks later.

Read Part One

Banner Image: Francois Saikaly

So ends today’s live coverage of #OccupyVancouver. Thanks to everyone who followed along on Twitter and elsewhere. If you’ve got any questions you’d like to see answered please add them in the comments below or email editors@thedependent.ca.

We’ll be firing back up bright and early tomorrow, and if there are any major developments this evening we’ll have them posted here.

9:28PM PST

Gary Lachance addresses the crowd at #OV (Photo Credit: Jesse Winter)

Our Derek Bedry corners Gary Lachance, one of the last speakers to go on before the general assembly, for a discussion on the power of the Decentralized Danceparty:

The Dependent: So what’s a decentralized sound system?

Gary Lachance: We’re trying to get the word out about what we’ve created and have it spread through the Occupy Movement worldwide and hopefully be able to facilitate better, faster communication for everyone there.

TD: How does it work?

GL: Take a portable radio FM transmitter, and input into that is a microphone and an iPod and you send out an FM radio signal or the music and the voice to an infinite number of boomboxes or walkmans depending on the FM radio, and you have a portable decentralized sound system that can go anywhere.

TD: So is it kind of like taking the iTrip and making it bigger?

GL: Yup.

TD: So what are these apparatus on your body?

GL: This is a 1989 original Nintendo power glove, and it’s rigged up to control the iPod. And this is a tie. And this is the antenna from the transmitter in my backpack.

TD: How far does it reach?

GL: Just a couple blocks.

TD: And how about the clothes?

b: Right now we’re in the midst of our “Strictly Business” tour, and we’re doing a tour across North America doing decentralized dance parties all over. We just got back from a five-city tour of Western Canada. (To assistant) My hair alright? We did Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Calgary and Victoria. There were about 3500 people in Calgary and it’s just spread from word of mouth.

TD: So you guys gonna give us a dance party tonight?

GL: Only if there’s a consensus.

8:08PM PST

The scheduled general assembly has begun, with the crowd still figuring out the best way to communicate amongst the several hundred that have remained at the Art Gallery after dark. It’s clear that it will take some time to get used to the systems of group communication employed by the Occupy facilitators.

An audio example of group discussion using the “human mic”: human-mic.mp3

7:26PM PST

The start of the 7:00PM general assembly is delayed, following consensus that those who had signed up to speak should be granted the opportunity.

6:04PM PST

Our Derek Bedry interviews Chris Shaw, a professor at UBC specializing in neurological disorders, and member of the #OccupyVancouver medical committee.

Shaw discusses the possibility of violence, his idea of the best outcomes, and his impressions on the effectiveness of the movement.

Listen to the whole interview: chris-shaw.mp3

5:58PM PST

City and senior Vancouver Art Gallery staff confirm that sometime this morning, power was granted to the Occupy Vancouver protest for the functioning of the PA. Earlier reports from protest organizers and attendees indicated the City had left power on the Art Gallery grounds off, and their amplification system was powered by a generator.

“The City spoke with the organizers and extended power to them for operation of the public address system,” explains Wendy Stewart, spokesperson for the City of Vancouver. “It was early this morning.”

According to Stewart, water has also been provided and the relationship between protest organizers and the City is “very collegial.”

5:22PM PST

Groups have begun to split off in preparation for the 7.00PM general assembly. The Press Releases/Media Team began their meeting in the shadow of the Art Gallery steps, with a dozen people using the “human microphone” to begin the discussion, fighting with the music pumping from the PA.

“I propose…”

“(I propose…)”

“That we move this meeting to a quiet place…”

Around the corner and the General Assembly team begins their discussion as well, the strains of classical music playing from the gallery cafe at the top of the steps. Here, the speakers are not followed by the echo of the general assembly. A young man named Ethan holds the floor:

“I’m visiting from Occupy Los Angeles,” he begins, “and this is the fifth #occupy I’ve been to,” which draws cheers from the two-dozen standing and seated around him.

“A lot of people are here just because they want to see what’s going on, just because there’s a large crowd,” he says, suggesting that the group needs to inform people about what’s going on.

“A lot of people are here to learn,” he says.

4:53PM PST

Crowd has thinned out noticeably as the temperature begins to chill. The smell of marijuana is in the air. Organizer reminds folks about the 7PM general assembly.

“We are the revolution, and we are free!” a young woman reads into the microphone from her notebook.

A few in the crowd dressed in black and wearing Guy Fawkes masks.

“We are the 99%”.

“We are the 99%,” the crowd responds.

“Revolution.”

“Revolution,” they echo.

“You guys are amazing,” the cheerleader announces and the music starts pumping again.

“See you guys tomorrow?” the young woman in front of me asks her friends.

Yep. And the crowd thins out once more…

3.57PM PST

Our Luke Brocki writes:

Shit’s about to get loud on the Howe side of the VAG. You’ve heard of drum circles, but a drum set circle?

“I feel drum circles create a real positive energy vortex that brings awareness to the movement in a non-violent way. When you’ve got drummers drumming and people dancing, it brings a real positive energy, ” says Clay Edger, one of the drummers, “it’s gonna get funky.”

3.14PM PST

Luke Brocki tracks down VPD spokesperson Constable Jana McGuinness.

“It seems really positive and we haven’t had any incidents of note today at all,” McGuinness says, “and we’ve probably got crowds – they peaked around four, maybe five thousand.”

“No arrests. So far, very good. Really positive, people are having that opportunity to express their views.”

Listen to the whole interview: jana-mcguinness.mp3

3.02PM PST

Photo Credit: Luke Brocki

Editor’s note: VPD spokesperson Const. Jana McGuinness says the fire department is in charge of managing safety hazards on the protest site, not the police: “The Fire Department’s actually doing the control here for anything that’s dangerous in terms of combustibles”.

Luke Brocki reports:

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a mess tent! Bags of onions, boxes of mangoes and avocados. They’re planning to be here as long as the protesters remain. The big problem right now is the cops shutting down their propane burner, so they’re serving up cold soups, but looking for partnerships with local businesses… So far no one has agreed to help.

“We’re accepting food donations if there is anyone else that wants to drop them off and we’ll make sure they end up in someone’s belly,” explains Brian, of Food Not Bombs.

“We want to keep it going as long as people are here to eat – we want to feed the movement.”

Listen to the whole interview: food-not-bombs.mp3

2.31PM PST

Photo Credit: Luke Brocki

Our Luke Brocki interviews Tom A, over at the media tent, discussing the leaderless organization of the committee and the logistics of their operation. “We’ve got a generator, and that’s supplying us with power, and we’ve also got some solar panels we’re trying to setup right now. Originally the Vancouver Art Gallery was going to give us power but somebody wrote a very nasty letter on behalf of the group, even though it was just somebody’s personal opinion, and they decided not to give us any power.”

“It’s not organized at all. What happens is, somebody notices a demand for whatever, just like the extension cord that was just donated to us and they go, hey, here you go, problem solved… The wireless internet was donated by someone who was not part of any of the pre-planning meetings. We realize that we all have the same common goal, and we just collaborate together to get it done.”

Listen to the whole interview: media-tent.mp3

1.40PM PST

The first march of #OccupyVancouver has got underway, with thousands of protesters making their way down Hornby Street towards the water before turning around and coming back up Howe. Chants heard include:

“Hungry? Eat the rich,” called out by two children, “We are the 99%”, and “People are more important”.

Those not on the march are currently dancing to hip hop beats pumped by a DJ from the Art Gallery steps. A young man with a red headband has just taken the mic, stopping the music, and declared that the Occupy Movement has made the front page of the Globe and Mail. “And we are not protesters, we’re a movement,” he tells the cheering crowd.

“We’re living in an age of instant communication, so call your friends and get them down here!” declares another man, seizing the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, according to what I’ve just been told we are 5,000 people! This is the city of Greenpeace. This is where this whole thing started through Adbusters magazine. Call your friends!”

12.26PM PST

Photo Credit: Matt Chambers

A police officer standing on Hornby street wears a large, square backpack with a microphone protruding from it. I ask him what the device is and he informs me it’s a microphone of sorts. Spotting “LRAD” printed on a control panel on the side of the device, I ask him if it’s the fabled and highly-contentious sonic weapon. He informs me that it’s not, and that LRAD is the marker of a number of acoustic amplification systems.

12.07PM PST

Photo Credit: Derek Bedry

Our Derek Bedry speaks with Ace Porter, 25, long-time activist and mother of a 7-month old girl. Porter conceived the “Kid Zone”, a safe area cordoned off by ribbons and flags where children are ostensibly safe and protected amongst the protest. “We need a place where families can come and make it their own,” Porter says, “and feel that they’re a part of the movement.” According to Porter, because the movement’s issues apply to families, this type of space is necessary. She says the kids zone will be supported by donations and volunteer work, and Porter hopes to keep it running for the duration of the protest.

11.44AM PST

Just chased an unrelated protest regarding animal rights around Robson Street. Upon return the crowd has swelled considerably at the Art Gallery. Two officers wandering the perimeter offered an “educated guess” of 2,500 people. Moderators still sorting out procedures, two hours in.

11.09AM PST

The “mic check” echoes have gotten noticeably quieter as the setup of language translators approaches 15 minutes. “Okay, we’re going to get back on track,” a female voice calls into the microphone.

“We’re going to talk about consensus. Participants can agree or disagree with a proposal in the following ways when a group is testing for consensus:

“Agreement: I support the proposal and am willing to help implement it.

“Reservations: I have reservations about the proposal but if the vast majority support it I am willing to let it pass.

“Standing Aside: I cannot support this proposal and will not help implement it but do not want to stop the group or block the proposal.”

“Get to the point!” A young man yells, as clarification is sought on the hand symbol for standing aside. Resolved, the organizers begin speaking again:

“Block: I have a fundamental disagreement with the proposal that must be addressed and has not been resolved. A block always stops a proposal from being agreed upon. It expresses an objection. You cannot live with that proposal. It means, I object, here is why, and I may not be able to continue participating.

“The general assembly will be striving for 100% consensus, meaning not many reservations, and no one is blocking.” Moderators ask people to raise their hands to respond to any questions. “Do we agree upon this?”

Jazz hands wash through the crowd.

10.31AM PST

Organizers announce that a generator has arrived and someone speaks up on the PA. “You need a microphone and I’ve got one right here!” The crowd cheers. Over the mic an organizer suggests the PA be used in conjunction with the human mic. Protestors show their approval with jazz hands, the sign language symbol for applause.

10.17AM PST

Photo Credit: Jesse Winter

#OccupyVancouver officially underway. Organizers, without a working public address system, call out to the crowd, “mic check”. The crowd echoes it back and the call is repeated until the volume grows to the desired level as everyone figures it out. Committee meetings will commence in five minutes, an organizer informs the group. A minute later the organizers speak again, explaining the way the “mic check” works. Rather than applause, the now-infamous jazz handsmake their second appearance.

9.57AM PST

Organizers report that the City just shut off the power for the public address system. According to one of the protest organizers, “the movement did not acquiesce to a meeting with them [the city],” says James “Facilitator”, who declined to give his full name. James, who claims to be the founder of the Vancouver Zeitgeist chapter, is hopeful the City will call him back and indicate the power will be turned back on.

9.07AM PST

Police have started arriving but the mood is appreciably light. A group of officers stands chuckling amongst the gathering protestors and media, now numbering about 150. Angel D, 22, says officers showed up last night between midnight and 2am and offered her and her friends blankets. “They just approached us and asked us if we were okay. They were really nice about it. There’s going to be a lot of people here who come unprepared.”

8.38AM PST

Photo Credit: Matt Chambers

Good morning and welcome to The Dependent Magazine’s live blog coverage of the Occupy Vancouver protests. Around 7.00am protestors began arriving at the north lawn of the Vancouver Art Gallery, erecting a few small tents. Portable toilets have been setup and some of the mainstream press has arrived. A lot of sleepy faces and early risers sitting in their camp chairs smoking cigarettes. A lot of smiles, too.

When it comes to eating, I’m with comedian Louis C.K. Before this study began, every meal was a meaty battle of attrition, followed by an uncomfortable ceasefire and finally a toilet visit to sign a treaty I knew I would only respect until the next barbecue. But that gluttonous status quo was forever left behind when I quit eating animals, in part because vegetables are boring in isolation and in part because every act of eating, previously automatic, was suddenly complicated by thoughts and feelings.

At first glance, there was nothing to eat anywhere. That awful shock took me right on June 1st, mere hours after I had gifted all my leftover meat, fish and dairy to a friend. I leaned into the near empty fridge and stared across a wasteland of condiments and limp vegetables in various stages of decomposition. Outside, the garden offered little help: a bit of salad greens, a few peas and an endless supply of sage. Lettuce sandwich? That wasn’t going to do for a man raised in a house where lard was king and every salad’s foundation was a wet mix of potatoes, eggs and mayonnaise.

Thus, driven by a strange, uncomfortable pulling and twisting at the base of my gut (I later Googled and self-diagnosed it as hunger) and running from taunts of friends and colleagues convinced I had taken leave of my senses, I went foraging through the neighbourhood. I spent the next week scouring store shelves for meat alternatives, determined to replicate with plants alone the familiar geography of dinner plates piled high with pieces of things that once had beating hearts.

Image Credit: Liam Hanham

I was surprised at what I found, usually in a forgotten back corner of the grocery store, in that strange disputed zone that’s no longer the produce aisle (but not yet the frozen food section). Curious, I filled my basket with soy-based sausages, wheat gluten burgers, legume- and nut-based pâtés, bags of dried textured vegetable protein (TVP), tofu of all shapes and sizes, and strange ethnic fermented soy creations.

Trouble was, the magic quickly faded in the kitchen. Faux bacon burned and shrunk instead of crackling and sizzling. Tofurky sausages left the grill limp and grey, unrecognizable to someone expecting the juicy crunch of a kielbasa. Most of these meat wannabes were either too bland or too salty and all of them processed, packaged and stamped with ingredient labels that read like the glossary of an organic chemistry textbook. This was not the way to go.

It took another few days to realize veteran vegans probably didn’t eat daily doses of Oreo cookies and Lay’s potato chips, but after about a week of stumbling around and getting fat, I found a comfortable routine. I mashed avocados and horseradish into excellent butter substitutes and ground hemp hearts and water into passable coffee creamers. I soaked massive bowls of seeds and nuts and blended them into “cheese”. Of course I missed meat. It’s naïve to think 30 days of veganism would erase 30 years of carnivory, but I found ways to battle hunger with all the bounty ancestral humans celebrated as edible, before modern eaters pushed it aside to make room for mounds of meat: green leafy things, fruit, grains, nuts, legumes. Oh and vegetables. Mountains and rainbows of vegetables.

All in all, I lost about 10 pounds through the month of June, despite taking pains to overeat and avoid exercise as much as I would in months prior. Maybe it’s because plants are less fatty and less caloric than animals. Or maybe it’s because–aside from a select few restaurants and snack purveyors–Vancouver is a vegan food desert. Or maybe because the vegan potlucks I attended were melancholy affairs where time-honoured traditions of using your teeth to rip grilled meat off bones were replaced with talk of factory farming and peak oil, cruelty and compassion, activism and patchouli… Still, the occasional sad dinner aside, I felt great, lost weight, saved a pile of money and had fun experimenting with random ingredients I never would have considered cooking before this little challenge.

Image Credit: Liam Hanham

But the health triumphs are only half the story; the good times were not to last. I’m not sure if all the carnivores got together and decided to pepper my meat-free days with snide remarks, passive-aggressive attitudes and a sudden lack of generosity in the area of dinner invitations, but whatever happened, I was suddenly on the outside of all the jokes and pleasantries. My vegan merriment even seemed to offend people. Some were sad. Others, disappointed. Others yet, just plain angry.

“Did you hear? Luke went vegan! He must have forgotten we’re on the top of the food chain! Look at me wiggling these opposable thumbs! Let’s see a pig do that!”

“I don’t know how he does it! Doesn’t he miss the taste?”

“Let’s go eat meat in front of him and call him a pussy!”

At first, I tried using popular health arguments to stave off my attackers: I told them of vegan triathletes and ultimate fighters, even mentioned former U.S. president, barbecue aficionado and quadruple bypass survivor Bill Clinton, who recently took up veganism so he could stay alive in light of a bum ticker, but it was no use. I had to adapt my social strategy. So, in the same way I would sometimes fake cigarette breaks to get five minutes of fresh air, I started lying about the meals I took in public and I must say I recommend it:

“Oh, you’re vegan?” asked a mouth beneath a set of furrowed eyebrows.

“Fuck that! Are you kidding? I love meat… Unfortunately I’m allergic.”

Bam. Back in the circle. The sneers directed at me while I dined on vegetables would always soften after that. I guess people still respect a good allergy. Plus not being able to eat animals somehow proved less threatening than choosing not to eat them. At least some of them. Because as the month wore on, I grew increasingly confused about this top-of-the-food-chain stuff.

For example, earlier this year, when a Whistler sled dog tour operator killed some 100 dogs during a post-Olympic tourism slump, activists went bananas, reporters led stories with “bloody” this and “massacre” that and the BC SPCA later recommended the man accused of the killings be criminally charged with causing unnecessary pain and suffering to these cute and smart and affectionate and innocent animals. Worst of all, nobody laughed when I joked that burying the dogs was a terrible waste of (fresh, local, wildish) meat at a time when unrelenting food inflation made every other trip to the grocery store a scandal fit for British tabloids. (Three-dollar avocados? Fuck you, Safeway.)

Then, one day in September, a slow news day perked up so fast there wasn’t even time to fake a smoke break. News was breaking! A baby beluga had died at the Vancouver Aquarium.

“Oh no! How horrible!” was the stock response, even from mouths eating meaty McDonalds’ breakfasts in the newsroom.

“Poor Tiqa!” said the chewing mouths.

Soon enough aquarium staff had released a statement about how its animal team and volunteers were deeply saddened by the loss of the three-year-old calf. But all I could think of was: how much did it weigh and what happened to the body? After a dozen emails back and forth with two lovely (if confused) PR officials, I finally learned Tiqa weighed about 1,100 pounds and that her body was incinerated after the Ministry of Environment folks performed the necropsy and sliced off what they needed for further study. Once again, the thought of eating Tiqa, despite my most creative recipe and wine pairing ideas, delighted no one.

But this was the same year I wrote about butchers and chefs seeking ever more adventurous cuts of meat to feed bored gourmands. In Ontario, Canada’s largest rib festival drew massive crowds, served hundreds of thousands of pounds of meat and gave out awards for best sauces and pig rigs. Not to be outgunned, Calgary then hosted Baconfest Canada. “Bacon is our national meat and its salty sweet goodness is reason enough to dedicate an entire day to it,” argued organizers on the event’s website.

And if I learned anything from the increasingly shocking activist protests (aside from the fact that fake blood and cellophane don’t turn me off as much as society wants them to), it’s that pigs might be as smart, affectionate and capable of feeling pain as dogs and whales. So why the inconsistent treatment? How do we decide which species we bond and form memories with and which we kill and chop into bite-sized morsels?

Hal Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University specializing in human-animal relations, recently penned a timely book titled Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. In it, he argued that the only constant in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency, with some decisions led by logic and reasoning and others fueled by arbitrary emotional attachment.

“How can 60 percent of Americans believe simultaneously that animals have the right to live and that people have the right to eat them?” asks Herzog.

I don’t know how Canadian numbers compare, but #myveganjune taught me my own arbitrary ethical and environmental positions definitely warrant further examination.

Stay tuned and bon appétit.

In the parking lot behind the Olympic Village Canada Line station the heavy cameras of the real press – OMNI, CTV, Global, CBC – along with the inky clout of The Province and The Globe and Mail, fan out before a plastic podium, adorned with the red, white and blue of the Non-Partisan Association.

“Check one, two, one-two,” a youngish man from the hired production company clucks into the microphones.

My first ever political press event.

There’s barely time to absorb the scene before a woman in business casual seizes my hand, demands a card and informs me she has “backgrounders” – the printed materials provided for journalists too lazy or deadline-crunched to take notes or ask questions. She works for a “reputation management” company – one of the benefactors of the looming municipal elections.

“I don’t get quoted,” she tells me, but offers her number in case I want to speak to someone who does. Naturally, I sense in her offer more of the vague lies of politics.

Lingering at the back, I feel an outsider among the SUVs and impatience of the paid press, the feigned calm of the milling candidates, and the day-job stares of the production folks. Two dozen humans are present, but not one a full-fledged civilian. They’re left to learn about this on the evening news – this choreographed dance between politics and media, held not in front of the Canada Line station, but behind it, the reason no doubt related to the rusty train tracks laying idle just behind the podium. Yes, the stage is all set for the NPA’s “significant campaign platform announcement”.

But that’s not why I’m here. My reason stands to the right of the podium, hands clasped at his waist, the whole spectacle not yet routine enough for him to put on the air of calm exuded by the veterans. Another tender virgin of municipal politics. The poor bastard, I think. I’ve got him under the microscope, and he’s basically asked me to do it, this council hopeful – our window into the Vancouver civic election.

The intention is not to promote the NPA. Nor Vision Vancouver. Nor is it to undermine them. No, the aim is to provide a raw glimpse into the world of municipal politics by tracking in painstaking detail the journey of a single candidate. I’ve demanded total access. The story will be useless, I’ve explained, unless I’m there when the critical decisions are made and the pivotal battles fought. To his benefit or peril, Jason Lamarche was the first one to say, “all right”.

But that was a week ago (or maybe six), when he seemed excited at the prospect of dedicated coverage. Today I arrive at this “significant campaign platform announcement” uninvited, and filled with an amateur’s uncertainty. The NPA is a formidable political organization, having enjoyed fifteen years of majority rule until their implosion, most recently at the hands of a slick Vision Vancouver campaign fronted by a handsome man named Gregor Robertson. Decimated in 2008, the Non-Partisan Association’s current fundraising and media efforts suggest it’s serious about mounting a comeback, and it’s the only legitimate challenger to the Robertson juggernaut. Who knows how they’ll feel about Lamarche’s decision to let me in.

All that is speculation, but this much is certain: today our boy looks sharp and focused next to the podium. While the rest of the candidates engage in idle chatter, or busy themselves on their smartphones, Lamarche stands alone, having staked out an early claim, hoping to appear on the evening news next to party leader Suzanne Anton. Dressed for the task, he sports a well-cut suit (stripes aligned at every seam) and a thin red tie. Face immaculately shaved, he looks young, in spite of his retreating hairline, and I sense a grin tugging at his cheeks as he notices my presence and the snap of my shutter. As best I can tell, no one else has a dedicated reporter.

And to be fair, not many candidates would allow such a thing, especially by an unknown and cynical liability such as myself. Politicians are notoriously risk-averse. But here’s the thing about our man – the youngest on the NPA ticket, a former sponsored skateboarder, the lone renter, an unknown: somehow he needs to get known. Above the 40,000 votes the NPA will deliver him by party loyalty alone, he needs to drum up an additional 10,000 to 20,000 himself to earn a council seat. It leaves him with the question asked by candidates for the last twenty years in this town: how the hell do you convince 20,000 people to check your name in a ballot box? The vast majority of it comes down to pure name recognition. No doubt I’m a part of that strategy. The pessimist in me understands that, but beyond a calculated act of self-promotion, I can’t help but wonder if Lamarche’s willingness to open up is evidence of his confidence – not in my skills or objectivity, but in his own. Maybe, just maybe, he actually believes in what he has to say, and he believes people will like what they hear, if only he can figure out how to get them to hear it.

An opportunity presents itself: the soundcheck complete, Lamarche finds himself alone in the dead eyes of the TV cameras, and he makes what I interpret as an attempt to win the favour of their operators, in the hope they might pan to him at some future event, or ask his opinion at the next press conference:

“Do you need a white-balance card?” he quips, feigning a Vannah White pose with the imagined prop. No one laughs. With eight weeks until the November 19 elections, these early-campaign announcements are snoozers for the media heavies. (“It’s where they make the promises they’re going to break,” a network cameraman tells me while packing his gear.) Having received the morning press release, editors citywide balanced their resources against the potential payoff of this “significant campaign platform announcement”. Decisions, decisions: what if somebody gets shot?

Oh, wow, striding through the parking lot, assistant at her elbow, mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton is the last to arrive, in true dramatic fashion. Lamarche, taking the lead, begins a slow clap, and he cracks off two or three, right beside the microphones, before realizing no one else has joined in. Greetings are exchanged, hands shaken, before Anton shuffles her papers and settles in front of the podium.

“Today marks the second in a series of announcements that we will be making in the coming weeks that will offer Vancouver voters a positive, common-sense alternative to Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver,” Anton declares, reading from a script so stilted it deserves a second reading.

The newspaper folks begin jotting dutifully in their vertical-flip notebooks, and I wonder vaguely if I’m doing it wrong: recording on my phone for later, and absorbing the quality of Anton’s speech for now. I decide she would make a painful preacher – voice gripped tight in her throat and delivery suggesting an awareness of human intonation but not quite an understanding. The contrived pauses and stresses reach their climax as she delivers the punch line:

“It gives me great pleasure… to announce today, that the NPA is bringing the downtown streetcar back to Vancouver.”

An odd silence befalls her team before they break into applause, and I have the overwhelming sensation of being trapped at a sibling’s high school play. Her speech trods on, stumbling once or twice, but backed by a dozen candidates nodding in unison at anything faintly resembling a point. And suddenly I realize: these are not the calculating pros we’ve all grown cynical of, watching CNN. These are not even the comparatively slick, well-oiled campaigns of Canadian provincial or federal politicians, with their professional script-writers, market research, and illusions of spontaneity. Here in the trenches of municipal politics the vibe is raw to a point that it’s endearing. “Oh, I can’t stay mad at you!” – these are regular people, and it’s about the only thing that makes the whole awkward ballet tolerable.

Our man Lamarche, for example: the skateboarder-turned-small-business-banker. We ride the train home together, me drawing a ticket from the machine, him in possession of a one-zone pass. He holds a shitty red umbrella. We talk about the conference and I ask him about the intimidating effect of the mainstream cameras. “I didn’t know where to look,” he admits, with a modest smile. But he had fun. He enjoyed himself. And he thought the party’s announcement was genuinely important, well-conceived and well-executed. Not everyone agreed.

And once again I’m confronted by the rude question that I’ll be facing for the duration of this series: where is that line between fact and fiction? Where does the choreography end, and the real dance begin? Would he tell me if he thought the announcement was hollow, vapid, manipulative trickery? I size him up, as we stroll down Davie Street, and he pontificates on voter apathy. When I talk he leans in and makes eye contact – a Trudeau trick. When he speaks he does so articulately, and with much movement of the hands.

“You’re a believer in the system,” I finally accuse him.

“Of course,” he claims, and he gestures to the expanse of concrete before us. “This is a road. This is not an accident,” his eyes alight.

“This is a sidewalk,” he says, shifting his gaze to the ground. “This is not an accident.”

He points out the purple hue of the garbage cans and the rainbow banners hanging from the lampposts – symbols of safety and acceptance – all the while shrugging his shoulders at me and holding his palms to the sky, as if to ask, “do you not appreciate how all of this stuff gets done?”

And it occurs to me that I don’t.

At least, not yet.

Read Part Two

“The city did not burn,” recalled early resident W.F. Findlay, in a 1933 interview with archivist James Skitt Mathews, “it was consumed by flame; the buildings simply melted before the fiery blast. As an illustration of the heat, there was a man (driving horse and wagon) caught on Carrall Street between Water Street and Cordova Street; man and horse perished in the centre of the street. The fire went down the sidewalk on old Hastings Road, past our office, so rapidly that people flying before it had to leave the burning sidewalk and take to the road; the fire traveled down that wooden sidewalk faster than a man could run.”

That nobody had seen it coming would be an understatement. Though, why they didn’t is another matter entirely. News that the C.P.R. planned to extend its Western Terminus into the tiny logging community had given rise to an explosion in population and a frenzy of construction, and by the summer of 1886, the city was a literal tinderbox of planked streets, fallen trees, and closely-grouped wooden homes.

“The best way to describe Vancouver as I first saw it on 25 May 1886 is to describe it as a whole lot of fallen trees,” explains George Allen, early Vancouver businessman, “cut down, tumbled over one another; there were no streets. Save for a few buildings around Water and Carrall Street—Water Street was of course planked between Carrall and Abbott streets, bridged as it were over the hollow of the shore; there was nothing else. There were a lot of shacks of rough lumber around.”

Artist's Rendering of the Great Fire. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.

The fire itself was idiotically preventable. At the time, the West End was simply dense forest, and, in preparation to build homes for the growing population, gangs of workers from the CPR had been tasked with removing trees and brush from the area. And, while felling the trees was dangerous, difficult work, involving hours of strain with saws and axes, the gangs quickly discovered that removing the underbrush was much easier if they simply set it on fire. Now, why setting a large, uncontrolled brush fire right next to a gathering of closely grouped, wood-and-tarpaper buildings on a breezy day in the middle of summer didn’t strike the clearing crews as hazardous is a point lost in the mists of antiquity. But, at any rate, at roughly 10:00 in the morning on June the 13th, a fire set in the C.P.R lands (only embers to begin with -it was Sunday, and no work was being done) was suddenly struck by powerful winds, and grew to an unmanageable size. Locals joined in to keep it contained, though they failed to take the threat seriously, even breaking for lunch before it had been subdued. And, by 3:00 in the afternoon, when the firefighters returned from their break, the flames, fanned by more high winds, had flared completely out of control. The speed and ferocity of the blaze took Vancouverites entirely by surprise. And, as George Allen reports, no one was more surprised than the wife of the city’s Fire Chief.

“Mrs. Pedgriff [wife of Fire Chief Sam Pedigriff] was in her bath when the alarm of fire came that Sunday afternoon,” Allen recalls. “I ran and knocked on the bathroom door with all my might, and told her she would have to get out, and get out quickly. Perhaps I should be more truthful if I said that Mrs. Pedgriff was in her little cabin at the back of the store, having her bath. She answered back that she was ‘in her bath.’ I told her it did not matter what she was in, she would have to get out, and quickly too, or she would be burned up. Then, and not until then, did she come out.”

Minutes later, the city was an inferno. Homes, offices, sidewalks, even the planked streets themselves were aflame. Locals took refuge in wells, inside buildings, or leapt from the Hastings dock to escape being burned alive. The heat was so intense, the bell at St. James Church melted into slag.

“I secured our books and money—payday was nearing—but there was not much time,” W.F. Findlay recalls. “I had been in our little office but a few moments when I saw through the window a rabble of people running by. They were coming down Hastings Road from the direction of the Deighton House, Gassy Jack’s place. I went out on the road, walked up towards Gassy Jack’s, but by the time I got there the Sunnyside Hotel across the street was a mass of flame, and before I could get back to the office I had just left, that was on fire too; I had not even time to save clothing [...] I waded out into the harbour at the back of our office, between Carrall and Columbia streets now, with hundreds of dollars of pay money in my pockets, and nearly suffocated. The heat was so intense that we had to stoop down almost to the surface of the water to get our breath. There was a current of cool air close to the surface of the water we were standing in, between the heat and smoke and the surface of the water; we breathed that, and it saved us.”

Survivors, the day after the fire. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives

Less than twenty minutes later, the winds died down, but by then, only a handful of buildings remained. As the afternoon turned into evening, survivors were pulled from the harbour, and, at the behest of Mayor Malcolm MacLean, assembled at the foot of Mount Pleasant.

“The fire was at midday,” Archivist J.S. Mathews recalls. “That night all Vancouver lay black to the bare earth except where, in the distance from the foot of Mount Pleasant hill (Main Street) where the refugees had assembled under His Worship the Mayor awaiting food from New Westminster, the blackness of night was pierced with little lights in the distance, the small fires on the hill beyond, now downtown Vancouver, burning themselves out; just little glow worm lights against the dark background of gloom.”

Word of the city’s destruction quickly reached New Westminster, and, by midnight, food and supplies had begun to arrive. As former Alderman W.H. Gallagher recalls:

“Some thoughtful New Westminster woman had prepared some sandwiches, just fried eggs between bread, but with it was a little note which feelingly said she regretted it was very little, but was all she had. Sane, sensible woman, whoever she was; how pleased she would have been had she seen what her little mite accomplished for those splendid men. The sailor man who got the note turned and faced the east, raised his hand in an attitude of supplication, and offered the most beautiful prayer for New Westminster and its people, imploring the Almighty never to let them be in such distress, and asking the Lord to reward them a hundredfold. You do not expect that sort of thing from a rough sailor, and in the middle of the night.”

And, as Gallagher explains, by morning, a space had been cleared in one of the surviving buildings, where the process of collecting and identifying the bodies had begun.

“It was never known, and never will be, how many lost their lives,” he continues. “Of all the remains found, three only, those found at the corner of Hastings and Columbia streets, were recognisable by their features; then, too, we made an effort to keep the number as low as possible. Three bodies were taken out of a well down near St. James Church on Cordova Street East; at the time, there were some shacks down there. They were evidently husband, wife and little daughter, and must have been strangers, saw the fire coming, rushed away, and seeing a well, jumped into it. There was three or four feet of water in the well, and their clothing was unharmed by fire, but their faces were livid; the fire had, apparently, swirled over the well, and they had been suffocated, not burned. They were well dressed; the lady had gloves on her hands. It was the gum and pitch which made the fire so terrible, so fierce, and created a black, bitter smoke more smothering than burning oil.”

L.P. Eckstein, Barrister's office, the day after the fire. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.

Most people had only the clothes on their backs (even Mayor MacLean had lost all his possessions and both his properties – neither insured), and had nowhere to sleep and little to eat, however, in the face of the blaze which had levelled the city, a determination had emerged amongst the survivors. Before the ashes had even stopped smouldering, buildings were being raised to shelter the citizens of Canada’s newest city, and within five weeks, Vancouver was a bustling port city once more.

“McPherson put up a big barn of a place opposite Pat Cary’s on Hastings Street. I remember his sign, ‘RAISED FROM THE ASHES IN THREE DAYS’,“ recalls city pioneer G.H. Keefer. “The day after the fire, I saw a burned out hotel keeper selling whiskey from a bottle on his hip pocket and a glass in his hand, his counter being a sack of potatoes.”

Less than two months after Vancouver was incorporated, it had burned to the ground. Less than twelve hours later, the rebuilding had begun.

Ad posted to Vancouver, BC craigslist > for sale / wanted > bicycles

Ryan looks a young 30 or so, aside from the missing teeth. His face is fresh and kind, bearing none of the open wounds one typically associates with crystal meth. As we walk, his backpack jingles with the occasional sound of metal on metal. “B & E tools,” he explains, matter-of-factly.

Ryan (not his real name) is a professional thief. When his targets aren’t homes or businesses, he steals bicycles.

“No bike’s really safe if it’s on a cable lock,” he tells me.

“If it’s on a cable lock what do you do?”

“Bolt cutters,” he says, without hesitation.

While thieving, Ryan carries the powerful, over-sized scissors hanging from a string beneath his shirt, along with a cordless grinder in his backpack. Prowling the night, he searches for high-value mountain bikes he can sell to a middle-man for a quick profit. If particularly desperate, he says, he’ll steal in broad daylight – leaning forward and slipping the bolt cutters from beneath his shirt. To anyone watching, his hunched figure appears to be unlocking the bike.

As for the grinder, well, there’s nothing subtle about that – the loud, battery-operated tool is reserved for the more robust locking mechanisms, such as high-end u-locks and the thick, squared chains that can’t be cut with bolt cutters that Ryan refers to as “gangster chains”.

“The most high-profile bike I ever did was at the corner of Cambie and Hastings,” he says. “I just looked around all directions – any cops? No cops. And I just start grinding. People pull up at the red light and they’re looking at me, sparks are flying. And the worst is on some u-locks you gotta cut both sides because it won’t turn. It won’t spin around, so you gotta cut both sides.”

“So what’s safe if you have a cordless grinder?” I ask.

“Nothing,” is his frank reply. He tells me that the $200 tool, normally used with gloves and protective eyewear, is capable of cutting through any lock in under five minutes.

“So, because bike theft was your specialty, you went out and invested in a portable grinder?”

“Yeah, and I stole a bike on my way back.”

Ad posted to Vancouver, BC craigslist > for sale / wanted > bicycles

It’s not a stretch to say that bike theft is a problem in Vancouver. According to the VPD, nearly 2,000 bikes were reported stolen last year. That’s one for every 300 Vancouverites. Heck, last May, City Manager Penny Ballem had her bike lifted right off the steps of City Hall. A quick search of Craigslist shows several posts a day pleading for the return of a beloved chariot, or threatening graphic violence for the bastard who took it. So far in 2011, the VPD has received 826 reports of stolen bicycles.

A public index of these bikes is available online at the Canadian Police Information Centre, which suggests that “The public can use this site to help keep their neighbourhoods safe by checking and reporting suspicious vehicles”. Ironically, the database has become a tool for criminals as well. Everyone I talk to is aware of CPIC, and fences – the middle-men who purchase stolen bikes and resell them – use it to determine whether their merchandise has been flagged hot. If so, the bike is broken down into separate components and sold, or built into another “clean” bike; or the serial number is grinded out or painted over.

Asked what kind of machines are most desirable, Ryan tells me that the demand for roadies and hybrids is growing, but he still goes for the expensive mountain bikes. The fad of a few years ago was for shocks and disc brakes. “There used to be a guy around who’d take any bike with good disc brakes. You could call him and within an hour you’d have it sold. He went to jail. They caught him with 185 bikes in a storage unit and a bunch of other shit…”

Ryan is referring to legendary fence Gordon Blackwell, infamous for throwing eggs at a CTV news crew, but also a popular fellow for his Bike Rescue business, which he claimed reunited owners with their stolen bicycles. The business was shut down by police in 2010, followed by Blackwell pleading guilty to 36 counts of possession of stolen property. His website claimed that he scoured the internet looking for deals too good to be true and then attempted to return the bikes to their rightful owners. Anything he couldn’t resolve he sold for himself. In reality, he had an army of thieves like Ryan scouring the city for high-value mountain bikes.

A severed cable lock outside of Vancouver General Hospital

Beyond bolt cutters and cordless grinders, thieves employ a number of techniques to relieve people of their beloved bicycles. Butane canisters are sprayed into cheap, aluminum locking mechanisms, freezing the components so they can be smashed with a hammer. Street signs can be unbolted from the bottom and lifted out of the ground, allowing the thief to carry the bike away and break the lock later. Bike racks themselves are vulnerable to a similar ploy. There’s also much scuttlebutt about the use of hydraulic spreaders, or car jacks, capable of exerting massive force, for popping open even the most stubborn of u-locks.

Faced with such a well-armed and organized foe, the Vancouver cyclist might find themselves wondering what, if anything, can be done. Fret not, brothers and sisters, for there are ways to mitigate the risks: First and foremost, ditch that cable lock – the favourite lock of the bike thief – and pick yourself up a quality u-lock, or chain. Medium risk rating is the absolute minimum, and locks that come with anti-theft guarantees in the form of financial compensation are generally good choices.

Now, go buy another lock. Yes, thwarted the opportunity to steal an entire bike, thieves will settle for the accessories instead. Tires are especially easy to remove and good for a quick buck. A properly secured bicycle will have a strong lock looped through the frame and rear tire, attached to a solid anchor in a public place, with a lesser lock linking the front tire to the frame.

Lastly, take a picture of your bike and record the serial number, typically imprinted on the bottom of the frame. The VPD recovers hundreds of stolen bikes every year, auctioning off the majority because they’re unable to identify the owners.

Completing our loop around the block, Ryan and I arrive at my bike, both tires secured and tethered to a parking meter. I ask him if he could steal it. “Cordless grinder would take that off in a heartbeat” he scoffs, but in the case of my bike he says he wouldn’t do it.

“Why not?”

“Because there’s lots of security around here and that bike’s just not worth it.”

For bike thieves, the game is a balance of risk and reward. All that we can do is attempt to skew that balance in our favour. Only the boldest and most desperate of thieves will risk pulling out a car jack or letting the sparks fly in broad daylight, outside of, say, the library.

I ask Ryan if he thinks my bike would still be here if left overnight.

“I think so, because there’s lots of security, and not a lot of people have a cordless grinder,” he says with a grin.

A bicycle properly secured with a "gangster chain" around the back tire and frame and a u-lock on the front tire.

- August 2005

It started when I was six; watching Pamela Martin blink under the bright lights of the newsroom, I became so fixated on that unconscious process that, for three hours, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. By the time I was nine, it had transformed into a continuing irritation that usually struck before bedtime; windows had to be checked and rechecked, thermostats repeatedly consulted to ensure they were in the off position. The simple task of saying goodnight to my parents had to be executed in a perfect, routine fashion, or I’d be driven from my bed ten minutes later by an anxiety too pervasive and formless to grasp, to say it all over again. Two months before my nineteenth birthday, it went full-blown, and, by 2005, I hadn’t had a single moment free from physical anxiety or intrusive thoughts in four years. While my peers were concerned with going to school, traveling, getting drunk, and chasing girls, my days were spent doing nothing but clawing for the shallowest, most desperate breaths, dreaming of one day being able to catch one -just one, free of the crushing panic that pressed down on my chest from the second I woke up until the second I went to sleep.

Self-Portrait, circa 2005.

Medically, it’s known as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The DSM IV (the diagnostic manual for Mental Disorders) defines it, in the driest possible terms, as “recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety or distress,” combined with “repetitive behaviors or mental acts that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession, or according to rules that must be applied rigidly”.

“Recurrent and persistent thoughts” meant four years of desperate subsistence. Four years of missed job opportunities and squandered friendships, of lying to every person I knew about how I was doing, hoping each night that the next morning would bring deliverance. A return to normal. “Marked anxiety or distress” meant years of feelings that churned my stomach and left me wrapped around the toilet, retching until my guts burned.

Every day, I’d tell myself to toughen up. Figure it out. Get on with my life. And as I told myself this, I watched everything around me fall apart. By the summer of 2005, a four-year relationship had fractured. My job was suspicious of all of my sick-days. I had to move back in with my parents. It was around that time I first thought about ending it all. Not in the clumsy, cry-for-help fashion, and not out of any sort of angst or existential despair. It was a practical decision, or so I thought; after four years, I’d stopped seeing the point. “This is life,” my journal read. “This is every day.” And, whether it was cowardice, intelligence, or stupidity that kept me from doing it, I couldn’t tell you. But the shock of considering suicide led me to wonder, for the first time, whether something might be wrong. And still, I dreamt of one day catching that single stupid breath. Thought about it with the same enthusiasm I’d once reserved for fantasies of lottery wins and celebrity hookups.

One day it could happen, couldn’t it?

One breath, I thought. Just one.

Close to a million British Columbians are directly affected by mental illness each year. That’s 20% of the province. That’s three times as many people as suffer from diabetes. Four times as many as suffer from cancer.

In a single year, more people in British Columbia are dealing with mental illness than live with heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, dementia, AIDS, stroke, and diabetes. Combined. And, while BC’s mental health care programs were once among the most integrated and effective in the world, they are now in need of a desperate overhaul.

“In the nineties,” explains Darrell Burnham, Executive Director of Coast Mental Health, “people used to come to Vancouver to visit, and they would see basically the best, most integrated mental health system in the world, and, it had area-specific mental health teams, they had a common philosophy, they had good psychiatric services out of the local hospitals, they had access to longer-term treatment options at Riverview Hospital, they had an array of community-based services like Coast, they had supported housing. I mean, they had wait-lists for supported housing, but they weren’t miles long. [...] They had some really innovative elements. And since the mid-nineties, the demand has increased, and supply of those types of services has been static.”

Riverview Hospital's West Lawn Building, abandoned since 1983. PHOTO CREDIT: Liam Hanham

B.C. currently devotes 8% percent of its provincial health care budget to the treatment of Mental Health and Addictions. That’s the highest in the country. However, Canada itself ranks close to the bottom of the list of first-world countries when it comes to mental health spending; below the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, and even the United States.  And, though the burden of untreated mental illness on the economy and health care system is estimated in the tens of billions, and, despite dozens of recommendations from provincially-commissioned studies, supreme court judges, the United Nations and the WHO, and even in spite of an admission by former premier Gordon Campbell himself that the deinstitutionalization of Riverview has been a complete failure, there don’t appear to be any significant policy changes in the making on the Federal, Provincial, or Municipal level anytime in the foreseeable future.  The result is a province-wide system that is as uneven as it is fractured, with heavy support for certain disorders, and virtually none for others.

“If you get diagnosed with cancer in B.C., you’re likely to be treated within five days,” Burnham laments. “You’re likely to be plugged into the treatment recovery process in five days, and you’ll be layered with the best  support to get that disease under control, treated, cured. If you get diagnosed with a mental illness – first of all, how long will it take to get diagnosed? And then, how long will it take for you to get the best resources to actually help you recover? It’s a huge gap. If you go to the hospital with a heart attack, you get the best care. You go into the hospital because of a psychotic experience because of mental illness, you go to VGH, and you end up in the worst ward in the hospital. You get treatment, but you often get discharged before you’re well, with no follow-up component. The parallels are terrible.”

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a disease of nagging doubts: A housewife hits a bump in the road, and spends the next hour circling the block to make absolutely certain she didn’t hit anyone. A straight college student glimpses his roommate in his underwear, and suddenly needs to prove to himself that he didn’t feel even the tiniest glimmer of arousal. A middle-aged man uses a public restroom, and, for the rest of the day, washes his hands over and over, because, damn it, they just don’t feel clean. Intrusive thoughts tend to fall into specific categories (known as “spike themes”), with the majority being about germs, violence, or sexuality. The thoughts themselves are often quite common; we’ve all looked at someone we’re not necessarily attracted to, and had a random sexual thought. We’ve all stood at the top of a tall building and imagined what it would feel like to jump. The mind is an idea machine, constantly generating thoughts and impulses; some of them we agree with, others, we find ridiculous, unusual, or repulsive. And, while you might consider those things for a second, a minute, an hour, I couldn’t stop thinking about them for four straight years. Where the average person can dismiss an idea they don’t understand, a person suffering from OCD can’t. These thoughts become trapped in a feedback loop in the brain, with the response being anxiety, and a fanatical need for certainty. In the mind of the sufferer, certainty equals relief; if they can just make absolutely sure that they aren’t gay, aren’t infected with HIV, aren’t secretly planning to smother their newborn in their crib, then their fear will vanish.

West Lawn in different times, circa 1915. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives

My own spike themes sat most often in the region of Sexuality and Relationships – consistent, pervasive fears that I might secretly be gay, and worries that the love I felt for my girlfriend at the time wasn’t entirely sincere. As Dr. Steven Phillipson explains in his revelatory article, “I Think It Moved”, this form of obsessional doubt is extraordinarily common (in fact, it’s just as likely that a gay OCD sufferer will be tormented by fears that he’s secretly straight), and is, in his words, one of “society’s favourite spikes to enable.”

“With the vast majority of OCD spike themes the unreasonable and irrational nature of the spike is generally obvious,” Phillipson explains. “The major difference is that with these two spike themes one does not generally think of OCD as an initial consideration. As a result, most persons with these spike themes generally have a long and painful history of seeking and obtaining fruitless guidance from others in a effort to bring a reasonable resolution to these seemingly legitimate issues.”

Why my spikes revolved around Sexuality and Relationships is something I’ve never totally understood. But, as I later learned, it doesn’t really matter. Because ultimately, it’s not actually about sexuality. It’s not about violence. It’s not about cleanliness. It’s about certainty. It’s about a need to prove the unprovable. The mechanics of obsession are identical no matter what the content is. The thoughts themselves could actually be about anything.

“The predominant distinguishing variable,” Phillipson continues, “which can help determine the difference between a legitimate conflict and an OCD sufferer’s torment, is the felt need and anxiety experienced by the sufferer to gain an immediate, definite, and conclusive resolution to the question.”

It didn’t stop there. Sometimes, I became so fixated on the physical sensation of anxiety that I’d drive myself straight to a panic attack. Once, I spent four days reassuring myself that I hadn’t been possessed by the devil. I knew I was acting in this ridiculous way, but I couldn’t stop it. It was like spending years in the first four stages of grieving, without ever reaching stage five: Anger, denial, bargaining, depression. Repeat.

As far as I knew, the only way to find relief was through Absolute Certainty.

I just couldn’t find it.

“Mr. Donaldson reported a long history of obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours dating back to his childhood. He explained that when he was younger, he engaged in numerous checking behaviours (eg. checking the heater of windows a certain number of times before going to bed) and superstitious behaviours (eg, he would have to say goodnight to his parents in a certain way and if he did not do it correctly, he would have to do it again. His OCD symptoms decreased through his adolescence, but flared up in November 2000, and have gotten more severe since. [...]
He reported that he spent considerable time focused on his obsessions, resulting in severe interference in his life. Although he tried to resist the obsessions, he had little control over them.[...]
Given Mr. Donaldson’s openness to psychological interventions, previous successful experience with cognitive behavioral techniques for managing his OCD symptoms, motivations for treatment, good insight, and lack of comorbid psychological conditions, prognosis is cautiously optimistic.”

- Intake Evaluation, from an interview conducted by Rami Nader, Ph.D, on October 24, 2005

In the fall of 2005, my parents sensed that something was wrong and scheduled an appointment with my GP. As a result, I was given a referral to the UBC Anxiety Disorders Clinic, the only government-funded treatment option in the province.

I waited three weeks to hear from them.

Four.

At the end of the second month, I made a phone call, and was told that the facility had a wait list in excess of five years. There was also the chance that I’d be unable to receive treatment at all. The woman on the phone used the phrase “no guarantees”. Shortly thereafter, the clinic closed its doors forever, to be replaced by the Operational Stress Institute, a publicly-funded program which deals with instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Canadian Police and Military Officers. Currently, there isn’t a single provincially-funded option available within the City of Vancouver specifically for individuals with anxiety-spectrum disorders. And, considering that, of the 900,000 individuals affected by mental illness provincewide, 400,000 of them are suffering from an anxiety disorder, this leaves few real options: either take one’s chances with a VGH Outpatient Team, explore a few group-based options run by non-medical personnel, or pay $160 per session for psychotherapy at a fee-for-service clinic.

“The [UBC] clinic doesn’t exist anymore, because UBC decided that we don’t have anxiety disorders in BC,” explains Dr. Charles Brasfield, his voice layered with sarcasm. Brasfield is the former consultant to the UBC Anxiety Clinic, as well as former Clinical Associate Professor in UBC’s Department of Psychiatry, and the province’s only psychologist/psychiatrist. “VGH had a pretty good outpatient program for difficult anxiety disorders and personality disorders; a dialectical behaviour therapy program,” he continues. “It was discontinued last year. The DBT program now at UBC is entirely private. You can access it, if you have, you know, $3,000.”

Brasfield is also the founder of the North Shore Stress and Anxiety Clinic, the only cognitive-behavioural option in the province for individuals with anxiety-spectrum disorders. The operation employs two psychiatrists, 16 psychologists, two nurses, and takes in close to one million dollars per year. Brasfield is an affable, intelligent, soft-spoken fellow, who divides his time between the North Shore, and remote First Nations communities in BC’s North, where he is involved in outreach work. Brasfield’s expertise is formidable, and, according to him, while the treatment of anxiety disorders is never easy, the process is less mystical than many would believe.

Self-Portrait, circa December 2006.

“Panic Disorders, we can deal with in half-a-dozen sessions,” Brasfield explains. “Specific phobias, about the same. They’re simple for us- we’ve all done this for years. We know how it works. We know what the pitfalls are, and what actually helps. Chronic anxiety disorders -PTSD, they’re all about 8 months or so.”

My own psychotherapy program lasted 6 months. The clinic’s approach involves a combination of medication and cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), which, as the name suggests, deals with treatment on two fronts. On the cognitive side are number of homework assignments called Thought Experiments, meant to challenge faulty ways of thinking (known as Cognitive Errors), and shine some light into the quiet, private, muffled hell you’ve created for yourself. To contest the assumption that every thought is true and meaningful, a patient is made to record everything that passes through their brain for thirty minutes, and afterward rate its importance. As a challenge to the superhuman amounts of harm you’re afraid of causing, (the harm I imagined causing my girlfriend, for example, was near-catastrophic) you’re made to imagine and document the worst-case scenario of your fears on a chart.

It all leads toward the understanding of a single idea: that thought you had? The one that disgusts and terrifies you? That one you’ve spent days, weeks, years avoiding, or explaining away, or neutralising through compulsions?

It could be true. And there’s no way you’ll ever be sure.

The first day I uttered those words – the first day I wrote them up on my laptop, printed them, and posted them prominently on my bedroom door – was the first day in four years that my life made any sort of sense. Granted, it was a perverse and horrifying kind of sense, but it was something.

It could be true. And there’s no way to be sure.

There’s no cop-out, there’s no brush-off, there’s no attempt to soften the blow.

It’s called Acceptance, and it’s stage five.

The behavioural component of CBT is pointed toward the same goal, but it’s an altogether different beast. While Thought Experiments address the psychological, subtly forming new neural pathways, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is the therapeutic equivalent of a punch in the guts. Rather than avoiding fears, it forces the sufferer to confront them head-on – not just once, and not just for a second, but for an hour each day, until finally, through the process of habituation, those stimuli no longer provoke an anxiety response

You work with a therapist to create an Exposure Hierarchy: a list of potential triggers, ordered according to their potential for anxiety. Sufferers then subject themselves to these triggers, paying close attention during the process, and noting their body’s anxiety response on a scale of 1-10. Once a stimulus no longer causes anxiety, it is retired.

Although I had to make several (one for each spike theme), mine started off tamely enough:  say “I’m Gay” out loud. Watch a television show with a gay main character. Write a breakup letter to your girlfriend. Punctuate it with actual failings or issues. Read some homoerotic literature. Eventually, it moved to soft-core erotica. Naked pictures. Reading my breakup letters out loud. And finally, weeks and weeks of the most explicit gay porn imaginable. Acts that would make legitimate homosexuals blush. Picking the most unattractive photos I could find of my then-girlfriend, and putting them in frames nearby.

Riverview Hospital. PHOTO CREDIT: Liam Hanham

Anxiety spikes are sadistic creatures; they grow and change as time passes, evolving to fit the freshest of insecurities. And, as a result, there’s an attitude that begins to develop during the early stages of ERP; an idea equally quiet, and equally sadistic. After so many years of being a slave, you begin to get a sick thrill out of your own suffering. You can watch yourself go through some of the darkest moments of your life, but, as you watch, you begin to, in a small way, relish the pain. Thrive on it. Because you realize that through it comes relief. Recovery. Management. Because, for the first time in your life, you’re not running from your fear. You’re not avoiding it. You’re walking straight toward it. You’re looking it square in the eye, and even though you’re sweating bullets, and even though you want nothing more than to turn and bolt, you don’t even slow your step.

Instead, you open your arms, smile, and say “Bring it On.”

You’ve trained yourself to be so at peace with your own uncertainty that, if someone were to ask you about the content of your obsessions, you’d no longer have a definite answer for them.

If someone asked whether you really loved your girlfriend, you could say “Maybe”.

If someone asked whether you were gay, you could say “I don’t know.”

Funny to think that, after all that time, the ultimate expression of your liberation could be nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders.

Helen Keller once said “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

I left psychotherapy in May of 2006, and, in the five years since, thanks to the tools developed there (not to mention some medication to even out the physiology), my disorder has been more or less managed. Of course, there are still rough days – days where I feel like I spun the wheel in some random genetic lottery, and came out as a colossal fucking loser. But there are also days when I feel nothing but gratitude that I found treatment at all. That I wasn’t born fifty years ago, to be condemned to Riverview for a life of Insulin Shock treatments. That I don’t live in BC’s north, where there is zero support, few services, and the only option is to move away or die. That I had a decent-paying job and supportive parents who could help me come up with the more than $3,600 that private treatment cost. Not everyone is so lucky.

I met a girl recently, through mutual friends. She was the first “fellow” Obsessive-Compulsive I’d ever encountered, and, when we met, she was entering her second decade of symptoms. Naturally, I made mention of medication and CBT, and, though she listened, it wasn’t information she was ready to hear. Instead, she told herself to toughen up. Figure it out. Get on with her life. And as she told herself this, she watched everything around her fall apart. For her, it took a visit to the emergency room to put things into perspective. But, when she picked up the phone to figure out what to do next, I’m honoured that she called me. Thanks to that discussion, she’s now in CBT, and, after more than ten years, on the road to managing her symptoms.

There are close to a million British Columbians affected by mental illness each year. Of that million, 400,000 are affected by anxiety disorders, and 75% of them will never seek treatment of any kind. Some of these people have no options. Either due to addiction, or poverty, or simple circumstance, tens of thousands of people in this province will need assistance, and they won’t get it. Some will have that chance. And those people need to know that there is a future. Need to know that, at the end of the road, with a lot of work and a lot of money, there is recovery. There is relief. There’s a breath. There’s the reality that, one day, you’ll be looking back, and realize you did something that millions of people everywhere have never done: you looked your worst fear square in the eye, and you didn’t back down. You laughed in the face of your tormentor. You faced the single greatest challenge of your life, and you beat it. And, what’s more, you can beat it again. It’s knowing that you have the tools to manage yourself. That you know yourself more intimately than most people you’ve ever met will ever know themselves. That you’ve been to the edge of your fear and come back again, and that, if you’re willing to put in the work, you need never fear a single damn thing ever again.

The only liberation is uncertainty, and the only solution is acceptance.

Or maybe it isn’t.

There’s really no way to know.

“Indeed many of the rioters, especially the youth with no criminal history, who were caught up in the moment, didn’t think things through. I think that with the public shaming, many people are caught up in it and they’re not thinking of the consequences. There could be huge repercussions with respect to families, the future, and revenge,” explains Indira Prahst, chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Langara College.

Prahst argues the anonymity felt by the rioters is shared by the bloggers who shame them. “Irrespective of who you are at that moment in a crowd, the anonymity allows you to express certain kinds of emotion and at the same time save face,” she explains. “The fact that you have so many people engaging in this, you somehow feel safer.”

“There is cowardice in this,” she says. “There is also narcissism in this.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

The city’s public shaming movement has a leader. Known only by his Internet moniker, “Captain Vancouver” – a middle-aged father who lives outside the city of Vancouver – was nowhere near the riot, and took no photographs or video personally, but he did create the blog publicshamingeternus.wordpress.com the morning following the riots, and is credited with some high profile outings, including 17-year old water polo player Nathan Kotylak and UBC student Camille Cacnio.

“Let them suffer in the same way they have brought shame to our city. Captain Vancouver will now be your judge,” his blog declares.

After declining to appear on camera with major broadcasters including CBC and CTV, the Captain granted his first interview to The Dependent on condition of anonymity.

A proud Canucks fan, the Captain watched the game from home, and, as he watched the Stanley Cup presentation, he says he started receiving Facebook updates and messages about the violence downtown. He tells me he went to bed that night disappointed and outraged, but with no intentions of starting his blog.

“This blog may not have ever happened if I didn’t have to take my kids to school the next day,” he says. “If I hadn’t taken my kids to school I would have gone downtown to help clean up. Instead I drove my kids to school and heard all the anger and talk on the radio, and, as if it was a method to vent my own frustration, I created the blog.”

Critics of the Captain and public shaming argue that the movement circumvents our standards of justice, and they question what privilege is given to bloggers to judge the accused.

“In the end,” the Captain says, “nothing official, other than just being a citizen, frustrated, and having an avenue to voice that opinion.”

The Captain is indeed a frustrated man: frustrated with excuses, frustrated with young people he calls “morons” who lack accountability and the foresight to consider their actions, frustrated with the legal system, and the “slaps on the wrist” given to first-time offenders.

“No, I don’t buy it entirely,” he says about the theory of mob mentality. “I haven’t succumbed to that peer pressure to join a crowd on something that’s wrong. I disagree with what they [sociologists] say based on my own life experiences [...] Public shaming has the deterrent factor, has the lesson of consequences based on all your actions, especially when somebody is holding up a camera in front of your face, snapping shots and you’re looking at it and you’re saying ‘woo hoo’.”

The Captain gathers his information from reader-posted comments on his blog and on others, and follows trails of information available on the Internet, including through Facebook. Before posting Kotylak’s name on his blog, the Captain Googled the name and found shots from the teenager’s water polo team. “I looked at those photos and the riot shots and thought that ‘yes, that is him’.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

As more photos have been posted and rioters identified, the punishments have intensified, despite few formal charges being laid. Cacnio, caught on camera stealing two pairs of men’s pants, was fired from her job. Kotylak, part of an affluent Ridge Meadows family, and whose father is a respected physician, was photographed attempting to light a police car on fire, and, along with the rest of his family, has now fled his home after having received multiple threats.

Indira Prahst believes the punishments have gone too far. “The degree is such that it has deflected from the root issues, and the sensationalism downplayed the seriousness of it.”

Even the Captain shares that sentiment. “Absolutely I feel bad for them,” he says, asked how he feels about the Kotylaks abandoning their home. “That’s not what this was supposed to be about.”

He says that while he considered the effect his blog may have on the specific individuals he identified, he acknowledges he failed to consider all the outcomes of his crusade. “Not the effects it would have on their families,” he says. “What happened to Dr. Kotylak and his practice, I think that’s too much.”

He acknowledges his role in the backlash but insists the real man – the person who created the blog itself – is not as hard as the persona he’s created.

June 17: “In my pronouncement of my first judgement, I sentence you to public shaming so that whenever ‘Jonathan Mason’ is ever typed into google, your name will be forever associated with the Vancouver riots.  I will leave it up to your future employer to ask you during your interview whether you were really there or not.  Take your chance with that.  You’ve been served by Captain Vancouver punk!”

June 19: “In contrast to quite a few of the photos I’ve posted recently, most have been University or College bound kids, or currently attending. Mathew Eakin only works, parties and is not currently attending post-secondary. What an idiot.”

“Absolutely I can see what you’re saying,” says the Captain, when asked about these posts. “They probably come across that way [inflammatory]. It’s in hindsight… Even when I look back and re-read a lot of my posts… Whether people like my style or not, a lot of it was my own emotions at the time.”

When questioned about whether he believed his readers could take his inflammatory comments as tacit encouragement from their online superhero to seek retribution, given they don’t know anything about the real man, the Captain replies, after a long pause, “I actually have never thought or looked at it that way.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

The Captain also scoffs at the idea that he could accidentally mislabel individuals involved in the riot. Calling it “extensive”, he defends his vetting process, and his integrity. “Within whatever realm I operate,” says the Captain, “I feel I do everything I can possible.”

“They [the media] have been painting this picture that these photos are being arbitrarily ID’d,” he replies, “and that somehow there’s going to be all these mistakes, because how can you trust someone online ID’ing a picture? And it’s like give your head a shake – the people outing these guys are people who know them directly.”

However, despite his protestations, the Captain has already accused someone of actions they didn’t commit. On June 17, he posted a photo of a girl identified as Sarah McCusker and a boy named Luke Basso. In the shot, it appears McCusker is helping someone steal merchandise through broken glass. In his initial posting, the Captain suggested Basso was helping her.

“Luke Basso’s father, of anyone involved with any of the photos on there, is the only one who’s emailed me.”

Basso’s father said that while he doesn’t condone his son being there that evening, the photograph itself didn’t indicate that he actually participated in the looting. Upon review, the Captain agreed, and retracted his earlier comments.

However, in an ironic twist of fate, Captain Vancouver is now experiencing a social backlash of his own; claiming to have posted photos of individuals with drug and gang ties, he and his family now have concerns for their safety. It would be “stupid”, he says, to emerge from the safety of cyberspace for fear of reprisal. During our interview the Captain’s wife called the restaurant a number of times to check in. “She’s spooked,” he explained, “and I think rightly so.”

“As much as I put forth in my writing who Captain Vancouver is, that persona is also created in the perceptions of the reader,” the Captain claims, defending his online creation. “And it’s either really exaggerated, or it’s just some guy writing a blog [...] There truly does exist people really caught up in the emotion of it. You have these people who are like ‘Ra ra ra, public shame them, stone them’… Reading those opposed to it have gone so far that they’re now viewed as feeling more sorry for the people involved in the riot itself. So you have that extreme, which I think is absolutely disgraceful, and then you have the other extreme which is taking the public shaming to that level where they want to call up Dr. Kotylak’s office and berate him. Those are the two extremes. You have one side making the rioters the victims and the other side taking it too far… Those are your mobs.”

Like the riot itself, Indira Prahst believes the public shaming campaign is emotionally based, and says the catalyst for that emotion was that you could see the riot played out on television. “The fact that you actually saw it live and you were able to see this kind of criminal behaviour, that is what I think motivated people. There was a certain degree of shame because it could have been any of us.”

“We forget that we’re human. The fact there was so much emotion invested already in the Canucks’ game, it’s absolutely expected that some people will need an outlet for this repression, this anger.”

“When things are emotion,” she says, “it can stir people to irrational behaviour.”

Editor’s Note: The original version of this story indicated ‘Captain Vancouver’ lives in Burnaby. This was in error.

Mark Brand standing behind the renewed Save-on-Meats

My interview with Mark Brand is interrupted by yet another phone call, only this time the 35-year old Gastown entrepreneur doesn’t return with an apology, he tells me he has to leave – there’s an emergency at one of his stores.

As we pass the statue of Gassy Jack, he explains that someone is harassing his staff at Sharks and Hammers. We pass a cop parked on Water but Brand pays him no mind.

At the storefront the tension surrounds a tall, skinny young man wearing a torn shirt. He has no shoes on but introduces himself as Dimi, careful to point out that it’s not short for Dimitri. He’s fixated on the name of Brand’s clothing line: Welcome to East Van.

“Are you from East Van?” Dimi demands. Brand replies that he is.

“Is the designer from East Van?” he presses, “I want to meet the designer.”

“The designer’s an East Van artist, but he’s not here right now,” Brand says calmly. At about six feet and 200 pounds, he has little to fear. He’s confident and in control, but not at all hostile. Still, Dimi raises his chin:

“You want to hit me?”

“No, I don’t want to hit you,” Brand assures him. “I just want you to leave.”

“What’s that tattoo say?” Dimi asks, pointing to the ink on Brand’s neck.

“Boneta. It’s my mom’s name.”

Dimi steps forward and turns Brand’s collar down, exposing the entirety of his tattoo. That Brand doesn’t flinch seems to earn him some credit, and the situation cools. After a short conference with his staff, we’re on our way back to Boneta, Dimi left tossing a football with one of the locals Brand pays to do odd jobs.

“Do you deal with stuff like that often?” I ask.

“Almost every day,” he tells me.

Despite what the waves of waddling tourists, fawning restaurant reviewers, and hip young urbanites might suggest of Gastown, it’s still contested territory. The low-income community that’s long fought for a dignified home in the Downtown Eastside is suspicious of outsiders, new business, and development in the increasingly tony neighbourhood. Their fear: that all this revitalization will force them out.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Originally a tongue-in-cheek expression, gentrification describes the return of the gentry to the inner city. It has since become a pejorative, implying a capitalist selfishness and social ignorance. In the Downtown Eastside, home to the last stand of low-income housing in the city, its implications are particularly critical. Here, the impacts of rising land values, rents, and goods and services can have disastrous effects on those already living at the end of their means. Indeed, gentrification and homelessness are familiar bedfellows.

Here’s how it works: developers and property owners, seeking to convert land to its most profitable use, meet with a growing middle-class demand for gritty urban living. Exposed bricks and beams, access to waterfront or the downtown core, and the vibe real estate agents refer to as “edgy”, are all highly valued by the new urbanite. Aging properties previously considered unsuitable for upgrade, like those in areas of extreme poverty, grow dollar signs as cultural pathfinders begin to change the character of the neighbourhood, driving up land values and prices. Before long, the low-income residents are priced out. And, if you’re in the Downtown Eastside, the next stop is likely the streets.

Poster in the Downtown Eastside

Brand is a familiar figure on these sidewalks, but strictly speaking, he’s not from East Van. Born in Scotland, he worked as a bartender in Australia before moving to Vancouver, where he built a name for himself mixing cocktails in Crosstown’s legendary Chambar. Anointed Vancouver Magazine’s bartender of the year, Brand set out on his own about four years ago, Gastown his chosen venue.

Boneta, the name of his mother, is also the name of Brand’s first restaurant. Launched four years ago on the doubtful corner of Carrall and Cordova, it’s the first of six businesses he’s opened in the neighbourhood, with the rejuvenated Save-on-Meats the latest. Brand is part of a thriving independent business community that’s transforming Gastown from one of the most depressed areas in the city into its thriving cultural centre.

The line between revitalization and gentrification is blurry and awkward.

Although the influx of new business into the area is seen by many academics and activists as fueling the gentrification of the neighbourhood, Brand is adamant that he hasn’t displaced anyone. Gesturing to the expanse of the Boneta dining room behind us, he explains, “this space was empty and dormant and it was full of rats and pigeons. The Diamond had been dormant for years and there had been nothing but bad memories there for people. Gallery, which was Sharks, was completely dormant and empty and was a squatters’ heaven. The mini mart was dormant and also filled with rats and mice. These were not spaces that were vibrant, community spaces – I didn’t displace InSite – these were places that were empty.”

“I don’t think you can blame the independent businessman for trying to have a go at it and then affecting change. Did we push anybody out of this space? No. Did we take anything else out of here? No.”

Sean Heather seated in his first Gastown enteprise, the Irish Heather

Sean Heather, one of the first of the new wave of businessmen to enter the neighbourhood, shares a similar perspective. At the age of 27, the self-described workaholic, tired of toiling for someone else, decided to strike out on his own. Having worked the register at Benny’s Bagels during its heyday, Kits seemed the obvious place to start:

“It made sense for me to open something in Kitsilano because I could feed off of the energy and who I was,” Heather explains, his Irish accent fading. “I couldn’t afford it. For love nor money I couldn’t make it happen. So in desperation I said to the real estate agent, ‘show me anything,’ and he goes, ‘well anything? Would you go to Gastown?’”

“It was almost within a week of opening my doors I thought, ‘what have I done?’ This was probably the toughest neighbourhood in the country at that time. There were drug dealers outside the front door,” he recalls. “It was a real circle-the-wagons kind of a situation.”

Fifteen years later and the area’s heroin addiction has been replaced with crack, and Heather is now operating eight businesses in the area, including the groundbreaking Salt Tasting Room, with its lonely entrance in the reeking depths of Blood Alley. Guests wander in amongst the used rigs and human feces before sitting down for wine, cheese and charcuterie pairings offered up by young waiters in skinny ties and oxfords. The concept proved an enormous success, winning a $50-thousand first prize from Cadillac Fairview for achievement in a retail concept, third place in enRoute magazine’s top 10 best new restaurants in Canada, and numerous local accolades.

Heather, like Brand, says he’s aware of the issues surrounding business in the neighbourhood:

“I’ve been able to put my hand on my heart – it’s something that I think about before I go in there. This was a Hell’s Angels club that was mothballed,” he explains of the Irish Heather, “Salt was a burned out building. My actions haven’t physically displaced anybody. It’s not even like there was a small mom and pop there and I came in with a higher price. I’m pretty proud of the fact that nothing I’ve done has directly put people out into the street.”

“I feel like I took a chance at coming down here and I feel like a lot of what I’ve done has contributed to make this neighbourhood better,” he adds.

A building being demolished along Pender, its facade preserved. (Photo Credit: Liam Hanham)

Forget for a moment the caricature of the heartless developer evicting hapless tenants to build luxury condos. Or the global chain that outbids the mom and pop for their cherished space in the community. There’s a more subtle change that a neighbourhood like the Downtown Eastside must undergo before developers or chain stores ever consider such actions. Million-dollar condos won’t appear at Main and Hastings overnight; the uncomfortable empirical truth is that the road to caramel machiatos is paved by artists and daring entrepreneurs.

Gastown and the surrounding area is currently home to around 10,000 units of low-income housing – 5,000 rooms in the form of social housing. Funded by the government, social housing is immune to rising land values and rent increases. The remaining units, however, are held in private hands in the area’s notorious single room occupancy hotels. In one of the hottest real estate markets on the planet, the changing character of the neighbourhood, quickly becoming more palatable to the middle class, has created enormous pressure to convert the neglected heritage buildings into lofts, storefronts and condominiums. To curb the relentless demolition while the units were waiting to be replaced by social housing, the City enacted a by-law in 2003 imposing hefty fines for upgrade or conversion of any building designated a critical SRO.

The number of low-income units in the area is now effectively secured; their affordability is not. Rents can increase by inflation plus two percent annually, as is the case with any other rental unit in the city. As the neighbourhood climbs out of poverty, so too do the rents. This is the soft gentrification and slow attrition of the low income residents of the Downtown Eastside.

Heather concedes:

“As a byproduct of me being down here, I guess there are people who have been displaced, and I guess, to a degree, I would feel bad about that, yeah. But am I driving around a Porsche, flying around in a helicopter? I have a lot of business down here – I employ 110 people – but I don’t think I’ve raped and pillaged and brought negative things in. Maybe because I was stupid enough, or had no options, to come down here 15 years ago, I’ve paved the way for people who have less scruples than I feel I have. I don’t know if I can be responsible for that. I think I’ve done the best I can in the best possible way for the neighbourhood, and if it wasn’t me, then it would have been somebody else, and I don’t know that they would have done it the way I’ve done it.”

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

It’s not all doom and gloom, however; the City’s policies, while imperfect, are at least progressive. In the official community plan for the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver has outlined a policy of revitalization without displacement. The aim is to encourage economic development, thereby reversing its decline, while maintaining it as the primary neighbourhood for low income people in the region.

So then, back to Mark Brand and his latest venture, the revitalized Save-on-Meats: After a million-dollar facelift the community institution re-opened Monday, serving up butcher’s cuts and sandwiches on the main floor alongside a classic diner. In the basement: the full distribution centre for SOLEfood, an enterprising non-profit engaged in urban agriculture, providing jobs and training for community residents. (Brand offered them a 24-month abatement period as they seek financial stability.) In the back corner: the East Van Laundry company, which will do linens, chef coats, and wine polishing cloths for local restaurants. Brand says that every aspect will employ a number of at-risk people from the neighbourhood and calls his guiding philosophy “social enterprise reversed”.

“It’s trying to setup businesses that can sustain local residents and people at risk,” he explains, “but they have to sustain first – they have to be businesses that make sense that can then help. If you just come in and constantly do social enterprises, well, funding runs out – and then you’re really crushing dreams. ‘We had 20 employees who thought they could affect change, now I don’t have grants and funding…’ Well if you had a business model that was already operating and making sense…” Brand suggests.

His vision of a vibrant and diverse community is a potent and seductive one, shared by the City. The empirical evidence, however, suggests that in a market-based system, the poor will eventually lose out. Still, Brand’s passion and sincerity offers hope. Beyond employing members of the low-income community, he’s seeking to provide goods and services for the entire neighbourhood, subsidizing a lower tier of meat and sandwiches with higher cost items in the butcher and sandwich shops.

“We’ll be providing a $1.50 breakfast sandwich, $2.00 lunch sandwiches, $2.00 chowders and soup by the cup. That is a break-even product. It’s a loss-leader. I’m not going to make any money on it, which is totally fine, because the people who are buying the other sandwiches that are in there, from corned beef to braised meet, et cetera, those will be on a higher tier.”

“So without saying it, what we’re looking at here is a dignified approach to just providing something. I don’t want to be like, ‘these are for poor people and these are for rich people’, it’s got nothing to do with that, you can come in and buy something that you can afford to buy and you can make that choice with your cash and I can make whatever choice I want with mine. It doesn’t have to be pointed out, it doesn’t have to be at a distribution non-profit centre, it can just be in a business, and you can mingle and hang out with whoever you want.”

Whether the bold plan will succeed remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the entire city is watching.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

]]> http://thedependent.ca/featured/gentrifiers/feed/ 11 http://thedependent.ca/featured/planting-seeds-food-revolution/ http://thedependent.ca/featured/planting-seeds-food-revolution/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:30:30 +0000 Luke Brocki http://thedependent.ca/?p=2188 This is a story about food, land and money and how a healthy dose of civil disobedience could help create a new green economy in Vancouver.

The city is no stranger to green ideas. The stage was set by local environmentalism in the late 1960s, which launched Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation, among others. The 1990s brought the ecological footprint, a brilliant bit of land use research supervised by UBC’s Bill Rees. Some eight years ago, a pair of Vancouver writers carried out a wildly popular lifestyle experiment known as the 100 Mile Diet, a book that added to modern literary conversations about food, in the vein of Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan.

Today, the City of Vancouver is chipping away at its ambitious Greenest City 2020 plan, which includes food security as one of the pillars to hold up a green economy and a sustainable future. Discussions of food politics are now commonplace, sparked by rising food and fuel prices and legion other threats to global food security. The goal is a food revolution. It’s still too early for sweeping policy changes, but a diverse group of urban farmers is already at work, experimenting with growing and selling food in the city while testing the elasticity of local bylaws.

Growing out of Poverty

“We’ve got lettuce, Tyee spinach, bunches of arugula, French Breakfast radish, rainbow chard. We’ve been selling for two months now, mostly greens. Our tomatoes and peppers just went in,” says Seann Dory, project manager at SOLEfood Farm, a social enterprise in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that employs neighborhood residents to build, plant, maintain and harvest what’s become a productive urban farm on a half-acre parking lot outside the Astoria Hotel at Hawks Avenue and Hastings Street.

The farm started under the umbrella of United We Can, another non-profit looking to build a path out of poverty through green-collar jobs and sustainable economic development. SOLEfood secured startup funding through grants from the City of Vancouver and private companies looking to fund community projects. It then struck a deal with the landowner to pay property taxes on the lot in exchange for being able to farm it.

SoleFood Urban Farm (with Farm Supervisor Rob Holland pictured in the background) on the corner of Hastings and Hawks. Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

Last year, the farm hired two full-time and five part-time workers. Their wages were paid with market sales of some 10,000 pounds of food they grew through the season. The project is still far from profitable, but saw $40,000 in revenue in 2010, mostly from produce sales at the city’s farmers markets.

“If it wasn’t for the farmers markets and people buying local, I don’t think this would be viable. They give the farmer a direct-to-consumer contact. Otherwise, you get middled. This way, small-scale agriculture works because we’re actually getting a retail price for our products.”

SOLEfood hired seasoned farmer and author Michael Ableman, who helped design an aggressive growth strategy for the farm.

“We’re projecting a fourfold increase this year. Because we didn’t get more space, we’ve decided we would interplant all our stuff. And we’re starting to take advantage of the vertical space. This year, our returns are going to be a lot better than last year,” says Dory. “We won’t see profit until after year three. We are on a growth path and will continue to take on capital expense until, and possibly past, year three. We hope to have six acres in production by year four and we think we can model the sites to attain similar returns.”

The plan is to employ 50 to 100 staff once the project is moving at full capacity. Dory says part of the illusion that urban farming isn’t profitable comes from the community garden movement.

“Production is not the number one goal for most urban agriculture projects. Ours is [about] employment creation, which makes high production our top priority.”

SOLEfood’s goal to improve life in the Downtown Eastside is in line with the poverty elimination focus of City Hall, so the farm gets support in the form of cash and land donations, but the long-term goal is profits without perennial inputs.

“If you put the means of production in the neighbourhood, it kind of turns the charitable food paradigm model on its head,” says Dory. “It’s going to be patient capital, it’s going to be long-term, but there is a business case for it for sure.”

All Together Now

Elsewhere in East Vancouver, agronomist Ward Teulon follows a different model of urban farming. As an entrepreneur with no ties to the non-profit sector and no sources of start-up funding, Teulon forged his business through community-supported agriculture (CSA). He approached home owners one by one and offered them a share of the vegetable haul he wanted to grow in their backyards. They became his first customers. He then found would-be buyers and charged them up front for weekly shares of whatever he would pull out of the ground.

It been working well for five years. One year, before he scaled back, he tended 15 backyards for a CSA of 40 members. Last year, he grew and sold about $28,000 in produce. This year, he has nine backyards within a five-kilometer radius, where he grows some 25 different crops using organic methods and charges $580 for a weekly share of the growing season’s harvest to be picked up every Thursday.

Since 2001, the median house price in Vancouver has increased nearly 200%; the median family income, 30%.

And in 2010, the price of a detached family home in Vancouver eclipsed $1-million.

Here, the insanity that gripped North American housing markets before the 2008 financial meltdown is still alive and well. Fueled by low interest rates, foreign investment, and the belief that Vancouver is fundamentally different, housing prices in the Big Smoke have nearly doubled over the last decade. And even after the market collapse of 2008, which saw housing prices in North America plummet, March prices here have set another new record.

For the generation that frequents this publication, the boom that’s padding our parents’ portfolios leaves us with an uncomfortable legacy: there’s little hope of providing our children with the childhood provided for us. For many, it’s struggle enough to make rent, let alone support a family.

So then, a sentimental question for you: is this the place you’ll raise your kids?

And now, a practical one: will it be a place you can?

“I don’t have a snap answer or a silver bullet, but I think it is the critical question facing the city,” says City Councilor Geoff Meggs. “It’s not just a question of social inclusion – which is sort of a pompous way of saying the city should work for everybody in it, including everybody who works in it – but it’s an economic question, because the current housing prices and market rents are out of reach of precisely the people we need to build the future economy.”

Take the example of Uta Stolben, an on-call librarian at the Vancouver Public Library, and a near-perfect example of the struggle of ordinary Vancouverites. Stolben and her husband, a college professor, live with their two children in a rented townhome in Champlain Heights. A year after they moved in, the strata passed a bylaw forbidding rentals in the complex. For the past five years their existing agreement has been grandfathered, and the owner, who lives out of country, has kept their rent low so as to continue profiting from the property. According to Uta, the cost is the only thing keeping them there – the unit is too small and in poor repair, and they’ve been forced to upgrade appliances at their own expense. Stolben says they would move out if only they could afford it.

They’re living in what the Canadian government refers to as Core Housing Need: the academic term for households whose accommodations are overly crowded, crumbling, or costly. If your bed touches more than two walls, your bathroom sink doubles as a laundry machine, or you spend more than 30% of your income on shelter, you qualify. No need to be sheepish, though, in this town you’re in good company: according to 2006 census data, nearly one in five Vancouver households is living in core need right now. Even educated, double-income families like the Stolbens.

While the numbers paint a grim picture, Vancouver is not alone, and there are lessons to be learned. A phone call to Tim Wake, three-year Whistler municipal councilor and former head of the Whistler Housing Authority, reveals that the resort town a short way up the road experienced a similar crisis over a decade ago, and they’re on their way to fixing it.

“Up until the early 90’s, people like you and me, people who were earning a reasonable wage, could afford to buy a home in Whistler. After ‘95, it was pretty much out of the question,” Wake explains. “Prices went from about $200,000 to $500,000 to over $1 million dollars and more.”

At a time of explosive tourism and service-industry growth, the spike in prices had some unexpected consequences:

“We were at risk of not being able to get enough people to fill all the jobs that we had. We were also at risk of losing all the volunteers and all the great people that make up a community. Even people like doctors, nurses, firefighters and police were having trouble finding a place to live.”

In response, Whistler established a local housing authority and laid out an aggressive plan to house 75% of its workers inside the municipality by 2020. The Whistler Housing Authority was tasked with creating and managing a parallel housing market restricted to residents only, and with overseeing the ingenious program designed to deliver much of it below market rates. 2020 is still a long way out, but so far the program has been a rousing success.

To understand what they did, we must first understand some development basics: plots of land are zoned by cities and municipalities for uses and densities. “Use” indicates the type of building allowed on a property – in downtown Vancouver, we favour mixed-use zoning: retail at the street-level, offices a few stories above, and condos filling out the rest. “Density” dictates how much a site can hold. Translating loosely to height, it’s a major driver of land values – higher densities permit higher buildings, higher revenues, and potentially, higher profits. To ensure the viability of a project, developers create a sort of budget known as a pro forma. Hard costs, like land and construction, along with soft costs, like marketing and architecture, are punched into a financial model and then subtracted from the project’s estimated revenue; another subtraction for profit and voila – an insanely-simplified development pro forma. If it all balances, start building.

And here’s where things get interesting: when a developer arrives at the doorstep of Whistler, the municipality reviews their plans and, if approved, mandates an odd sort of partnership, whereby additional density is granted for the project. But rather than sell the extra units on the open market, the developer is required to sell them to working residents through the Whistler Housing Authority. And since the developer’s pro forma already covers the marketing, architecture, land, and profit for the project, Whistler demands that these additional units be sold at substantially lower prices.

“The concept here is that their margin is generated solely from the market side of the project,” Wake explains. “They’re not giving away the affordable units, they are, in effect, selling them at cost, and that cost is purely the construction cost, because the soft costs are paid for by the market side of the development, and the land is also paid for by the market side of the development.”

It’s an ingenious and effective system for providing middle-income housing.

“When we started doing it in 1997 we had about 2,500 beds of rental housing, and today we have about 6,000 beds of not only rental, but rental and affordable home ownership,” Wake beams.

Whistler isn’t the only local example of a successful middle income housing strategy. The University of British Columbia, surrounded by some of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the city, has long struggled to house its workforce and attendees.

“Largely due to our location – way at the end of the point on the west side of Vancouver – our faculty, staff and students were finding it very difficult to find reasonably priced housing within a reasonable commute distance,” explains Nancy Knight, VP of Finance, Resources & Operations at UBC.

As a result, UBC has taken on the role of developer, building non-market units on campus for staff, students, and their families. Over the last twenty years, UBC has become one of the largest developers of purpose-built rentals in British Columbia. And their reasons go beyond pure economics:

“We had a lot of pressure from adjacent neighbourhoods about traffic going back and forth to campus every day. We also had concerns about the environmental impacts of all that commuting in terms of emissions and greenhouse gases,” Knight explains.

On-campus housing is all part of UBC’s plan to build a unique, vibrant and sustainable university community. To understand how they’re building it, we’re back to the concept of the pro forma and the function of land values: In development, land represents a significant portion of the cost of a project, and UBC is blessed with lots of it. The Vancouver campus covers about 1,000 acres, 200 of which have been set aside for neighbourhood development.

“Because we own the land we’re building the rental housing on,” Knight explains, “in the pro forma we’ve not required a return to the land, and so that allows us to provide it at a lower cost to our faculty staff that would like to live on campus and rent.”

The City of Vancouver has explored similar options. The original False Creek development in the 1970’s saw condominiums built on city-owned property and sold at below-market prices. Vancouver owns a number of properties throughout the city, on which more units could be built in a similar manner.

Councilor Geoff Meggs, who lives in the Southwest False Creek development, sees this type of leasehold arrangement as one of the many possibilities for building what he terms “modest market” housing in the City of Vancouver.

“If we want people to live closer to work, reduce their requirements for automobiles, and make the maximum use of public transit in a cost-effective way, we don’t want to force everybody who makes the wheels turn to commute that long distance,” Meggs says.

“The people that I’m talking about, they’re not looking for a subsidy – they’re working hard – they just want home ownership or stable rental so they can get on with their lives, and the market at the moment is not able to deliver that to them.”

According to Meggs, it’s a valid policy decision for City Council to mandate the creation of more inclusive housing in the city.

“I think there are various ways we could reduce the costs of it. How we do it is exactly what needs to be debated,” Meggs says.

“We really need to ransack the toolbox and see what might work.”

Charlotte is sixteen-years-old. Her long curly hair is pulled back in a neat pony-tail and she’s wearing a white cardigan over a floral shirt. She’s a very polite girl, polished and somewhat stiff.

David is fourteen. He looks like any other teenage boy, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and a goofy smile. He moves awkwardly – he twists and twitches parts of his body.

Sergio is also fourteen. He sits stoically looking out from behind his glasses and from under his mop-like black hair, never raising his voice from its monotone.

They aren’t friends. Outside this room they don’t socialize or hang out on weekends. But inside this room they are three kids bound together by a single commonality few others have or understand.

I had never knowingly met someone with Asperger’s Syndrome before. My only prior knowledge of the condition was through two fictional characters – Gerry, a brilliant lawyer on Boston Legal who flapped his hands by his sides and made hooting noises when nervous, and Christopher, the teenage protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time who groans when he’s upset or scared and hates the colours yellow and brown.

We sit together in a meeting room at Monarch House Autism Centre in Burnaby. With us is Laurie Cocardon, a behavioural consultant at the Centre. She invited me here this evening – April is Autism Awareness Month and she wanted to show me what she does and introduce me to a few of the youth she works with. Tonight Monarch House is hosting a public panel discussion about autism – Charlotte, David and Sergio are the featured speakers, and Cocardon will moderate.

“What will you say if someone asks a question that makes you feel uncomfortable?” Cocardon asks.

“I’m sorry, but that question makes me feel uncomfortable and I choose not to answer it,” Charlotte replies.

The kids talk about possibly being nervous, but each claim they aren’t. Charlotte and Sergio credit their past stage experience, and David has been on a panel before. “It’s easy,” he says. “I have autism and I want to help people understand what that is.”

Cocardon asks the kids what autism, and specifically Asperger’s, means to each of them.

“We don’t know when we are doing something wrong to offend or make someone upset with us,” says Charlotte.

“I learn differently and say things and do things sometimes that are wrong and I don’t understand some people,” answers David.

“It’s social isolation,” says Sergio.

Sergio’s isolation has resulted in his classmates calling him “ninja”. He disappears for long periods and reappears when least expected.

“I’m doing this panel tonight because I want to make the others understand what’s going on inside my head,” he says.

The kids leave the room and I stay behind with Cocardon for a few minutes as she finishes preparing. I communicate my surprise about meeting three kids who seem as regular as any other. Cocardon explains that Asperger’s Syndrome is a high functioning disorder along the autism spectrum – it affects an individuals’ ability to learn and understand social cues and rules. People with Asperger’s can appear rude and emotionless, and are often prone to angry outbursts. Many adopt routines and resist change. Some have underdeveloped motor skills, causing twisting and twitching. Like so many along the autism spectrum, kids with Asperger’s are often bullied and isolated from their peers and retreat inwards.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Cocardon tells a story about the first time she met an autistic child. On one of her first days working at a preschool in her early 20s, she found a boy sitting under a table. When she asked her coworkers about the child she was promptly told that he was weird and that she should just leave him alone.

“So,” Cocardon says, “I got under the table with him.”

Cocardon has been working with Charlotte, David and Sergio for over a year. She treats them like she would anyone else, and they appreciate that. They trust her. For Cocardon, working with these kids is personal. “They are my kids. I miss them when I’m not here.”

Monarch House offers treatment in one-on-one settings and in groups, and Cocardon calls herself Monarch’s “Group Queen”. Group sessions involve discussion between Cocardon and the kids, and activities that involve structure, role-playing, and critical thinking. Cocardon complains that too often in autism treatment the focus is on molding the kids to acceptable behaviour – saying “please” and “thank you”, proper body posture and eye contact. While important, she says these kids need more.

“I want my kids to take care of themselves. I don’t want them to need help in everyday aspects of their lives. These are smart, capable kids who need a little guidance but don’t need people pandering to their disability. They need to push their boundaries just like anybody else, and they need to stand up for themselves when needed.”

We leave the meeting room and join the crowd in the conference room. It’s a full house – twenty or more people fill almost every seat. Charlotte, David, and Sergio sit at the front of the room on a stage behind a long table. Cocardon sits to their right. Now they look nervous.

Cocardon welcomes the audience and has the kids introduce themselves. They speak briefly about their families, where they go to school, and some of their personal strengths – Sergio works well with computers and specifically doing PowerPoint presentations (he showed me one earlier and the graphics and animation are better than anything I’ve seen in university), Charlotte likes to cook (she baked and brought a cake), and David is highly organized and knows every major national capital and religion in the world.

After introductions, Cocardon opens the discussion to the audience for questions. Some are expected (“How do you handle changes in your schedule?”) while others are not (“Have you ever had issues with your hearing?”). But a question about how the kids deal with their peers at school offers the evening’s first bit of poignancy.

“I have one friend at school,” says Charlotte. “She knows me and cares about me, but sometimes she’s too nice to me. When I make mistakes and don’t know when I’m doing something wrong, I need tough love. Her telling me things are okay when they aren’t doesn’t help me.”

Initially, David struggles with his answer, but finally says, “Now that I’m in high school I find it hard to relate with other people. I just need someone to talk to. That really makes my day.”

Sergio talks about bringing awareness to his condition. “When I was in elementary school, the others would treat me like trash. But as I got older I knew things would get better once they understood why I was different.”

As the evening progresses, the kids relax. They answer questions about bullying, autism awareness at school, and what they need from teachers (“No baby talk!”). All three admit to being on medication. They are open about their pasts and their feelings, and giving with their advice to the families in the audience. The differences between the kids are stark – the brooding Sergio, the outspoken Charlotte, and the affable David. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived this evening, given their perceived ailments. What I got are three teenagers who look and sound like any other you would see at any mall on any weekend, anywhere.

The discussion lasts about 30 minutes. As the evening comes to a close one more question is posed from the audience.

“If the three of you tonight were to meet a young person who had just found out they too have autism, having had the experiences you have had now, and knowing what you do now, what would you want to tell them?”

After a moment, Charlotte says, “That autism is like a speed-bump or a mountain to climb, but that there is nothing wrong with you.”

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

1 in 4 gay or lesbian students are physically harassed.

Queer children and teenagers are 4 times more likely to kill themselves than straight ones.

“Kids are taught to bully,” says Ross Johnstone, Out in School’s Education Director. “There are many families who believe gays and lesbians are not equal, and they in fact demonize the gay community.”

Out In Schools, which grew out of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, was first founded in 2004, with the aim of spreading an anti-bullying message to kids in high schools across British Columbia.

“We do 60 to 70 workshops a year all over BC reaching almost 8000 students,” says Johnstone. “We present youth-produced short films, all with an anti-homophobia message, then follow up with a discussion.”

Photo Credit: Matt Chambers

The program aims to smash stereotypes. “We want to show gays and lesbians as doctors, as police officers, as teachers, as writers – we work to show that anybody can be anything and that we are in fact equal.”

The program started in the Lower Mainland and has grown to become supported by many districts across the province, success which Johnstone attributes to the collaborative efforts of the Vancouver School Board. “The VSB is light years ahead of most districts in the country, let alone British Columbia.”

It’s easy to assume small rural communities like 100 Mile House would be less receptive to a program like Out in Schools, but, according to Johnstone, this isn’t the case.

“Our reception is almost always positive. We find teachers and administrators are often not trained or equipped to deal with these situations, and appreciate that we come to offer help.”

Johnstone says the kids are almost always positive too, and he credits the innovative and interactive nature of their presentations. But he does admit there are some kids who occasionally take issue with what they are saying.

“The only time we hear negativity is from a student who identifies themselves as religious and fundamentally believe that homosexuality is wrong. But even then they always say they enjoyed the presentation itself.”

While never having had to deal with the threat of physical violence – he stands at 6’2” and 200 pounds – Johnstone has experienced verbal abuse. So when he hears stories from students at their presentations about their experiences with bullying, or when he receives emails afterward thanking him for his message, Johnstone admits it can be emotional. “Heartbreaking”, he says.

One student who fully understands what Out In Schools is campaigning against is 16-year-old Aaron. Slight and soft-spoken, Aaron has been openly gay for about a year, and moved to Vancouver six months ago from a small town in New Brunswick.

He’s happy now, but admits the past year has been difficult. “It was very hard at the beginning, and is still very confusing, but it’s getting easier.”

Aaron says he’s learning that it’s okay to be himself, and that he’s found a community in Vancouver that accepts him as normal. But in New Brunswick, he found fear and rejection. “Everybody was putting me down for being the way I am just because I liked something different. People were expecting me to be the way they thought I should be.”

Aaron’s experiences are an example of a larger problem – teenage bullying. There are tragic examples in recent months of kids killing themselves due to bullying over their sexual orientation. A wave of emotion has prompted calls for the end of bullying from celebrities and politicians, and has resulted in rallies, “purple shirt” days, and high school anti-bullying flash mobs, including one at Oakridge Centre on January 27, 2011. They all attempt to make struggling youth believe “It Gets Better”.

When a queer teen is bullied at school, they experience unwanted attention over their perceived difference. As traumatizing as that situation can be, Johnstone is quick to point out that not being noticed at all can be just as damaging.

“Being invisible at school is as bad as being bullied. When you are closeted at school, you miss out on all the teenage stuff, and you lack the necessary self-confidence to become a successful adult. And this is when we hear the stories of gay teens abusing substances and committing suicide.”

At his school in New Brunswick, Aaron, along with a handful of friends, started a gay-straight alliance group. One of their first events was a “Day of Silence”.

“We all wore yellow and refused to talk for the whole day,” he says. “We communicated with our teachers by using signs on our chests. We did this to support youth who are silenced because they are gay.”

But Aaron doesn’t feel the need to start a GSA at his Vancouver school. He describes it as an alternative institution for students who don’t feel accepted or comfortable in regular schools. He says students are expected to welcome each other regardless of differences. Aaron’s father believes his son is far better off in Vancouver than he was in New Brunswick. “I don’t have a fear of him being bullied at school here,” he says. “Aaron gets far more support at his school here than ever before.”

Aaron’s father believes that continuing education is the way to stop teenage bullying. “We need people talking out against bullying. This isn’t a gay right – this is a human right. Everyone needs to learn that we are all human, and have the right to be treated with respect.”

Out in Schools is a program that continues education. And like all programs, they work to effect long-lasting change. But how does Out in Schools measure the impact of their program? Johnstone says it comes down to one thing – visibility. “Out in Schools measures our impact by the visibility of queer resources and issues at schools. We want teachers to include historically significant LGBT events in their curriculum. Make available to teachers and students useful queer resources to help deal with their problems. Have anti-bullying posters on the walls and create friendly and inclusive spaces.”

To this end, the program runs a yearly public service announcement competition designed to encourage students to film a short PSA and submit it to Out in Schools. They promote this campaign at each workshop by asking one question:

“How would your film change the world?”

Ross Johnstone wants to know. And he wants to help.

]]> http://thedependent.ca/featured/out-in-schools/feed/ 1 http://thedependent.ca/featured/glitter-in-your-bathtub/ http://thedependent.ca/featured/glitter-in-your-bathtub/#comments Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:42:09 +0000 Jesse Donaldson http://thedependent.ca/?p=1423

By day, they take your order in restaurants. They do your occupational therapy. They design graphics for your websites, and teach your children to play the piano. And on the second Tuesday of every month the performers of Guilt & Co.’s Pandora and the Locksmiths effectively bare it all – combining vintage striptease, go-go, singing, comedy, and live music with a classic aesthetic to create one of the most raw, energetic, and refreshing evenings of burlesque in Vancouver.

“I think the thing is, we all needed an outlet for the training that we had,” says Nicky Ninedoors, one of the show’s co-founders. “We needed a big, sparkly, ridiculous outlet, and we came to burlesque for that.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

Since their premiere in September 2010, the Pandora collective, which also  includes performers Miss Fitt, Carole Brunette, Delilah Dare, bassist John Bews, pianist Sean Bayntun, drummer Trevor Grant, and trumpet player Alison Gorman, has been a hit with local audiences and has brought new life to a night when bar and restaurant business in Gastown is typically slow.

“That first night, we had to turn away sixty people,” recalls founding member Carole Brunette, “and I think they [Guilt] were immediately impressed because we were increasing their sales by something like 300%. And we were filling up the place on a night when the rest of Gastown was quiet and asleep.”

The shows, which run about two hours, revolve around a loose theme, and are organized and programmed entirely by the eight members of the collective — each of whom brings more than ten years of experience and training to the stage. As they explain, the placement of each number is given a great deal of consideration.

“One of the things that Burgundy [Brixx, co-founder of Kitty Nights, and grand dame of the local burlesque scene] teaches, and that she teaches so well, is this idea of tension and release,” Nicky Ninedoors explains. “That’s really important, not just in a number but over the course of an entire show. If we look at what numbers we’re doing in a set, they’ll need to go in a certain order to build that tension. It’s singing, dancing, and then, finally, burlesque,” she says with a wink. “It’s that idea of tension and release. Each show has multiple burlesque numbers. And who doesn’t like multiples, really?”

Every number is backed by four musicians and a singer, making Pandora one of the only regular burlesque evenings in Vancouver to employ a live band. The arrangements for each number are worked out by the musicians and tailored to the needs of the performers.

“That’s the best thing about live performance,” Miss Fitt explains. “You can’t count on it always being the same. And that what’s great about having a band: it gives you that flexibility to work with the musicians and the singers, and sometimes things come out of that that weren’t originally intended.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

“Absolutely,” Ninedoors agrees. “For instance, the trumpet player isn’t always going to play the same solo, and that change might affect, say, how you take a glove off. It adds this level of improvisation to every single one of our numbers.”

“I think that the truth is, we all [improvise],” Brunette agrees. “I think I can quote Burgundy Brixx in saying that it’s important to leave room for improvisation in everything. And with our art form it’s most important to have a structure mainly about when things are going to come off, because you need to keep in time with the music. But, in between those moments, there’s a lot of room for play and it’s important to keep that, otherwise things can become a little too flat.”

At the time they founded Pandora and the Locksmiths, all four of the principal performers were already familiar faces in the local burlesque community, having been involved with a number of the troupes already in town. Vancouver’s burlesque scene is one of the liveliest in the country, and for Vancouverites interested in the art form’s revival there are dozens of options to choose from: the frenetic hilarity of Screaming Chicken Theatrical Society, the punk-glam of Sweet Soul Burlesque, and the mainstream appeal of Kitty Nights. Since the launch of Pandora and the Locksmiths, the community has put their full support behind the enterprise.

“I think, in general, it’s a very supportive community that we’re in,” Ninedoors says. “I mean, there are big burlesque competitions and conventions that happen. Last year, I went to the Burlesque Hall of Fame weekend in Vegas, and the vibe that you get when you see another burlesque performer in the hall or the elevator is very much ‘Hi! How’s it going?’ You’re like sisters. It’s like: ‘Hey! You find glitter in your bathtub, too!’”

“Overall, since Burlesque became a part of my life, it’s been the most empowering and supportive community I’ve ever been a part of,” Brunette adds. “It shows us that we do not have to be cookie-cutter. We do not have to be any one thing, to be ‘burlesque’. It’s about any woman, in any size or shape, being empowered and loving herself, and being creative, and being allowed to express that.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

“I think the best thing about burlesque, in my experience, is that it caused me to view myself differently, in such a positive way,” Miss Fitt recalls. “I was on a cheerleading team when I was in my early twenties, [...] and it was the most unhealthy environment I’ve ever been in, because I learned in that world that I had to look a certain way to be of value. But burlesque completely- it was this light that came on, the first time I saw it. I saw these women — and they’re all beautiful women, but they all have a different style and a different look — and I was so inspired. The more I did the whole burlesque thing, the more I realized that these are real women doing this. It was just such an important lesson for me. It broke through all these barriers.”

“I struggled deeply, deeply with self-esteem, and with body image issues when I was younger,” Brunette adds. “I’ve grown and learned to appreciate my body, but I still struggle here and there. Every one of us will deal with it, probably to some extent, forever. I dealt with eating disorders when I was thirteen. I was in ballet and I wanted to be a ballerina [...] I dabbled in anorexia. I dabbled in bulimia. I never looked in the mirror and saw somebody who was beautiful. And a couple of years after taking my clothes off onstage for fun, I realized that, for the first time, I was comfortable in my bikini.”

“I think it’s something that every burlesque performer has to work for,” Nicky Ninedoors concludes. “When I first got into it, I had little to no self-worth, and I was in need of a change. [...] It completely took me out of my skin, and made me into who I am today. Burlesque changed my life.”

But for all their discussion of empowerment, not a single performer wants to see their name in print. This, as they explain, has nothing to do with personal shame or regret, but rather with the possibility of some lingering social stigma.

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

“Ultimately we are old-school strippers,” Ninedoors explains. “More acceptable than exotic dancers, but it’s sexuality, so there is an implicit level of taboo to what we do.”

“I consider myself a performing artist specializing in burlesque,” Miss Fitt adds. “The motivation behind my performances is to use my dance and singing skills [...] to promote a sex-positive and empowering form of artistic expression. I am proud of my art [...] and there is no conflict between what I believe and what I do on stage. There is, however, a potential conflict when I am interviewing for a job. At this point, paying rent as well as advancing in my other professional career is equally as important to me, so I don’t want to put myself in a position of losing out on employment opportunities due to peoples’ misunderstandings or disapproval of what I do onstage.”

In spite of any potential stigma, Pandora and the Locksmiths continue to enjoy a capacity audience for each and every performance. And, surprisingly, by Nicky Ninedoors’ estimation more than half of the attendees are women.

“I’d say 60% [of the audience is female],” muses Ninedoors. “Most of the men who come up to me after a show are there to tell me that their wife loves me. It’s such a safe and non-competitive environment. We’re not after men. We’re not trying to seduce someone. We’re seducing an idea. We’re seducing an audience. But, with Burlesque nowadays, it’s predominantly women in the audience. Because it’s not just about women taking off clothes. It’s about women taking off fabulous clothes.”

“I think it puts women into a really good light,” Miss Fitt concludes. ”It puts them in a positive, empowered light, and I think that men and women can really appreciate and respect that. It’s just really inspiring to see somebody, no matter what their shape and size, exude that confidence. It’s such a fierce expression of feminism and femininity.”

Pandora and the Locksmiths is presented on the second Tuesday of every month at Guilt and Co, in Gastown. In addition, they will be performing an evening of Burlesque and entertainment at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Feb. 19, at 8pm.
Tickets available at www.stealthedeal.com/vancouver

“You can imagine how the advertising industry salivates,” explains Gordon Price, Director of the SFU City Program and City Councilor from 1986 to 2002. “One, it’s a light source, and two, you can constantly change it.

“Anything that’s electronic has a very different impact on how people perceive what they’re focused on. If it involves a light source, that, to me, is a definitive difference.”

Video signs were not envisioned when the Sign By-laws were drafted in Vancouver. The current regulations were established twenty to thirty years ago for signs that used lights to identify buildings, or display the time or temperature. City Council has amended regulations on a case-by-case basis for sites such as International Village Mall (known as Tinseltown), Rogers Arena, the Future Shop at Granville and Robson and the CBC Plaza southeast of West Georgia and Hamilton Street. These regulations have limited the size and number of video signs to a scale much smaller than other cities.

Some view the video signs as a welcome and appropriate addition to our historically bright and vibrant spaces. Others, like Stephanie Doerksen, a local urban designer who sits on the Vancouver Public Space Network’s Board of Directors, are concerned by the increase of private content in our public spaces. Doerksen refers to this as ‘ad-creep’:

“I see a number of issues. One of which is the fact that corporate interests are profiting off of public space, which as a public resource, is sort of fundamentally undemocratic. Another aspect is with many forms of advertising, consumers and the public, they have the ability to limit their exposure […] you can’t close your eyes to not see the billboards.”

Doerksen also objects to the concept on aesthetic grounds: “Billboards are pretty ugly,” she says, “sometimes they block views, they detract from architecture, they detract from the streetscape. They make our city and our public spaces less attractive, and less pleasant to be in.”

In approving the Future Shop and CBC video signs, Vancouver City Council required “public benefit” as a condition of implementation. The Future Shop video sign reserves 10% of its air-time for commercial-free cultural programming. The CBC video sign, meanwhile, sets aside 50% for their own programming, 5% of which is reserved for cultural programming, while the remaining 50% is sold to third party advertisers. The content of the cultural programming is overseen by the City’s Cultural Services staff.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

With respect to the reserved air-time, Stephanie Doerksen wouldn’t go so far as to call it a positive, but admits: “If there was a digital billboard that was showing 100% community content, that would be an interesting idea to consider. It would still come with some of the negative aspects, detracting from the cityscape and being not so aesthetically pleasing. But if you went with 100% community content and public art it would make it much more palatable.”

Ken Golemba, Senior Manager of Media Operations & Technology at the CBC, explains the CBC’s rationale behind their content: “From our perspective, the advertising is just a necessary evil. We would have put the screen up ourselves for our own purposes, and preferred not to have the advertising on it. But the cost of these things is so high. We have to make everything pay for itself, and try to do it without tapping the tax-payers’ dollars.

“As it gets more expensive, you need a lot of eyeballs, you need a lot of money,” explains Brad Danks, entertainment industry executive and lecturer at the Vancouver Film School. “It’s really allowed the largest corporations to control all facets of the media business. Their position is enhanced by the fact that they’re the only ones who can spend money in the space. Cities have to start looking at the value of the local.”

And Vancouver is in a good position to churn out its own material: “What Vancouver has over so many cities is the full gamut. We have a film industry, we have a television industry, we have a games industry, we have a new media industry,” he explains, “At minimum, we have a deep culture of creating story-form content, which a lot of communities really lack. They don’t have that depth.”

City of Vancouver staff supported the Future Shop and CBC video signs, noting: “There is also the opportunity to apply a portion of the revenue generated by the advertising on the sign towards commissioned video work, curated work by existing cultural venues in the City as well as calls for submission of video work from a variety of sources such as the local arts and film/video schools and other sources.”

Gordon Price feels local governments should be more assertive in leveraging public benefits from the video signs, “You think you have a right to use advertising as a way of extracting value from the public realm. Okay, we’ll play that game. Pay up. You’ve got to have a very tightly constrained and regulated advertising environment, if it’s using the public realm.”

Vancouver’s sign regulations have, thus far, limited the number and size of signs when compared to other cities. New York City’s Times Square is blanketed with video signs and other forms of private advertisements. A little closer to home, Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square currently sports five video signs, one of which has displayed cultural programming.

The question for Vancouver is this: When dealing with concerns like ‘ad-creep’ and the privatization of public space, does the provision of a certain amount of cultural content or achieving other public benefits provide a balance to offset the potential consequences?

According to Kerry Bonnis, whose family owns the Future Shop building with the video signs, the Commodore Ballroom, and a number of retail buildings along Granville Street, the video signs appropriately compliment the neon signage that currently reflects the emergence of Granville as a bustling and significant public space in Vancouver.

“It’s completely fitting that the video screens are particularly on Granville Street with respect to the historical signage that the strip is famous for,” says Bonnis, “This was the street that you came to on the weekends, for promenades, or for entertainment […] this was the number one street. It’s only fitting that it’s come full circle to be back, in this day and age, to what it was.”

As the City strives to create a more vibrant and livable downtown, there are many issues to face. On the matter of video signs, Gordon Price notes, “To just let this happen without any intervention or any judgment of value, that’s, I think, a huge mistake.”

Michael Gordon is the City of Vancouver’s Senior Central Area Planner for the downtown peninsula. William Dunn is a grad student at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

Editor’s Note: Yes, I’m aware the apostrophe is missing in the title – it’s a display bug. Thanks to all who wrote in…

In Canada, unpasteurized milk is illegal to distribute unless it is to be consumed by the owner of the cow. But Gordon Watson, along with a group of individuals dedicated to providing the Lower Mainland with an alternative to mass-produced dairy, has found a loophole through the development of an ingenious system known as the “Cow-Share”. Rather than buying milk, consumers of “Cleopatra’s Enzymatic Bath Lotion” purchase shares in the cows instead.

It’s an innovative system, but its development has not escaped the notice of health authorities.

In the mid 1800s, on account of poor dairying conditions, the consumption of raw milk became a health hazard, causing tuberculosis and even death. The solution: pasteurization. Heating milk succeeded in making it safe for human consumption and permitted dairy farmers to generate a profit even if their cows were not properly maintained. However, in so doing, it robbed the milk of much of its nutritional value.

The pasteurization process (heating it at 72ºC for 15 seconds [HTST]) eradicates any present whey protein, completely removes the natural enzymes in milk necessary for its proper digestion, and devalues the minerals. Most of milk’s remaining vitamins are lost in the skimming process when the fat necessary for their absorption is removed.

Photo Credit: Emily McFadyen

Watson, 61, began drinking raw milk in his thirties, and says that he now thrives on it. After moving to Vancouver, having spent time living on Vancouver Island where raw milk is easily-accessible from the area’s many dairies, Watson says he was surprised he couldn’t find raw milk in the Lower Mainland. He began to seek out local dairy farmers who might be willing to join him in developing a Cow-Share.

Enter Alice Jongerden. By 2007, Watson had launched and terminated several Cow-Shares in the Lower Mainland: “many farmers had trouble with the legality of it all,” he explained. Watson felt Jongerden, however, was the perfect candidate; young, healthy, and full of energy, with a passion for dairying.

Shortly after meeting, the two established Home On the Range, presently Vancouver’s largest Cow-Share (now under the name “Our Cows” Herd-Share). The Cow-Share, with its cows in Chilliwack, grew from one cow shared by only a handful of people, to twenty cows shared by over 450 in less than three years. The milk costs shareholders $19 per gallon (all-inclusive), and is dispersed at confidential depots throughout the Lower Mainland.

“The success of Home On the Range,” says Watson, “is a great example of how an idea becomes popular and then it becomes a movement and it just cannot be stopped.”

But in 2008 an officer of Fraser Health entered Home On the Range for a routine, unannounced health inspection, says Roy Thorpe-Dorward, spokesperson for Fraser Health. The subsequent testing did not fall in Home on the Range’s favour, with Fraser Health claiming they detected elevated bacterial levels in the samples. Despite appeals from Jongerden that “the milk tested was over 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which is well above the standard for properly testing milk,” the seizure resulted in a cease-and-desist order. She responded by adding a label to her jars that read: “Not For Human Consumption”.

Though The Milk Industry Act “does not prevent you from consuming un-pasteurized milk from a cow which you own,” admits John van Dongen, Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, in BC there is an additional regulation that materialized on March 31st, 2009, under our updated Public Health Act’s Transitional Regulations, Section 7:

Milk for human consumption that has not been pasteurized at a licensed dairy plant in accordance with the Milk Industry Act is prescribed as a health hazard.

On and around December 18, 2009 Fraser Health and Vancouver Coastal Health authorities dumped several gallons of raw milk from Home On the Range distribution points around the Lower Mainland.

Together with the seizures, Health Authorities told media sources that an infant, whose case of E.Coli they had been investigating, had consumed milk from Home On The Range. However, no evidence was ever produced, and even Thorpe-Dorward iterates that : “no one ever asserted that the case of E.Coli resulted conclusively from the consumption of raw milk.” Still, with new regulations enacted that deemed raw milk a health hazard, the Health Authorities decided to move forward with enforcement.

Fraser Health brought the motion to have Jongerden, Jane Doe, and John Doe (Gordon S. Watson) held in contempt of court. On September 14, 2010, rulings made were in favour of the Health Authorities; Jongerden and Watson can no longer involve themselves in the Cow-Share they founded.

Alice Jongerden can no longer milk any cows unless she immediately tosses the milk afterwards. Up until the 14th Jongerden, who grew up on a dairy farm North of London, Ontario, maintained and milked all of Home On the Range’s twenty Jersey cows.

“So as it stands, for the rest of my life, or until the law changes, I can not milk a cow – a complete abrogation of my rights. And to fight back I have to drop $10,000 in my lawyer’s pocket to start proceedings, while being unemployed.” Jongerden professes, “that sounds a bit harsh and bitter — not intended to sound so — at least not yet. I still have faith that somewhere along the line things will change and common sense will prevail.”

Michael Schmidt, a widely regarded raw milk advocate acquitted in his similar case against Ontario Health authorities, is now in charge of maintaining “Our Cows” Herd-share, with 150 new individuals on the waiting list to become shareholders.

As Gordon S. Watson recounts his story, there is not the slightest indication of distress. In fact, he looks rather pleased. Pleased to provide Vancouverites with their first taste of  what he calls “real milk”, pleased at the way in which BC’s Health Authorities have helped to increase public interest, and pleased with his prospects for the future. He is again on the hunt for a dairy farmer, this time within the limits of the hundred-mile diet. “I’m going to set up my own Cow-Share locally,” he explains, “and tell the government to get stuffed.”

Gordon S. Watson (Photo Credit: Emma Jensen)

For more information, visit: www.freewebs.com/bovinity
To acquire raw milk, email: ourcows@gmail.com

Editors Note – Jan 13, 2001 14:21: In the original version of this article we incorrectly attributed the quote “in BC there is an additional regulation that materialized on March 31st, 2009, under our updated Public Health Act’s Transitional Regulations, Section 7:” to John van Dongen, Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General.

Fourth in a four part series on drug dealing in the Downtown Eastside.

Part One: Introductions
Part Two: The System
Part Three: The Violence

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

IT’S BEEN THREE months now, and the alley entrance seems a safe and familiar place.

Good morning.

How’s the article coming?

So easy to forget the weeks of sweaty palms and alley darkness that preceded my acceptance. Now, standing in the midst of the crews operating “out back”, I’m comfortable. I’ve learned the system. I know the numbers, measurements, and slang. I’ve heard the justifications for the violence.

And these are the things that I describe to friends and family curious about the story. They listen intently, nodding as I speak but waiting to ask the inevitable question:

Who are these people?

I’ve spent enough time at their side to have a sense. We’ve shared meals, jokes, and inconveniences. I’ve been witness to their daily life, their changes in mood, their reactions to successes and failures.

The temptation is for broad and sweeping conclusions:

They’re idiots, for example.

But if the reasons behind a person’s entrance into addiction are varied and complicated, so too are the reasons for a person’s entrance into the drug trade. For every beast I encounter committing heinous acts of violence or exploitation, I hear a human tale, too.

How much of it to believe?

THREADS IS SEVENTEEN years old, part of the next generation of hopeful and ignorant kids who will either wind up in jail, fight their way to a mid-level position or drop out for a tenuous shot at a legitimate life. Addicted to Percocets and constantly under intense pressure, Threads is unpredictable. Violent. Scary.

This guy’s a fucking narc, he declared one day upon my arrival. Royal and the others ignored him but he wasn’t prepared to let the allegation slide.

If they take me down I’m coming for you, he said, pointing a finger to my chest.

A week later and he’s my best friend, vouching for the photographer and me so we can get pictures of a worker holding drugs.

While the more senior dealers come and go, Threads is a permanent fixture. He works twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and on a quiet morning at the alley entrance I venture to ask him and his partner if they like what they do.

You think I like standing here in this piss-smelling alley dealing with these fucking people all day? he scoffs.

Then why are you here?

He tells me that he dropped out of school.

I’d get stuck on a math problem and I’d get so angry that I’d just walk out, Threads says, spitting.

Seventeen years old, no high school education, an inevitable criminal record — Threads’ options seem limited indeed.

We’re fuck-ups, his partner says, chuckling. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

TEFLON, BY CONTRAST, is neatly groomed and well-dressed. I encounter him only once as he crosses the street, coffee and iPhone in hand, to help a young addict with a head full of grey hair who has collapsed to the sidewalk nearby. The addict struggles to his feet, tugging at his chest and steadying himself against one of the parking poles, but his legs tremble and he’s forced to sit back down.

He fell down over there, too, Teflon tells me as he dials 911.

For twenty minutes we make small talk with the man, trying to keep him calm and conscious. No ambulance arrives. A nearby merchant brings a cup of water and the man makes his way to wobbly feet.

As he wanders away I’m confronted by the need to reconcile the violence and exploitation I’ve witnessed with the dealers as individuals. How does this young man, his coffee, clothes, and iPhone paid for by the misery of people like the man he just helped, show compassion one moment and opportunistic indifference the next?

I hand him a card.

You seem like a sensible guy, I say, explaining my purpose.

He turns it over and I ask him the best question I can think of:

Why are you here?

He considers it for a moment.

It’s not like I moved to Canada thinking I was going to be a drug dealer, he tells me. I know this is wrong.

He says that he immigrated from Iran three years ago.

I have four years’ university education towards becoming an engineer. I tried to apply to school and they said my credits were worth nothing — I would have to start from scratch. So I started a business instead, but it went bankrupt and I owed a bunch of money to my family. My auntie lent me 22k. The bank, you can just walk away from, but you can’t do that with your aunt. So I worked a few jobs — plumber, warehouse, coffee shops — none of it could pay my bills. I realized that if I kept working like that I was going to be paying my debts for the rest of my life.

Do you ever feel guilty?

Yeah, I did for the first, like, six or seven months. Then I stopped.

Why?

These people are making choices, right? It’s their choice to be here and do this — I’m not forcing them.

He pauses.

When I first started I tried to help these two people. They were fresh down here — a guy and a girl — and I said, ‘You don’t want to be down here. This isn’t the lifestyle for you,’ and I put them up in an apartment in Burnaby.

He sighs.

But four months later they were down here again.

THE LATINOS ARE slowest to warm to me. The Icy Dealer and his crew out front finally open up when I tell them that I’m interested in their perspective.

It’s good that you’re doing this, he tells me.

We’re not bad people, a shorter dealer says. We’ve just run out of options.

I ask them why they got involved and the short one says that he moved here and tried to get into school but couldn’t because he wasn’t a citizen. He tried to find work, he says. He felt roadblocks going up all around him, and then his mother got sick.

And back home, it’s not like here — you just go to the hospital. If you don’t have money back home, you die.

All of them say they’re sending money back to their families, but they ask me not to say which country.

Were you involved in the drug trade back home? I ask.

No man. I didn’t know anything about this until I got here, the short one says.

What did you do back home?

I had gone to university for one year. I wanted to be a lawyer. I consider myself an educated person. I think I could do anything I wanted, but no one will give me a chance. If I could get a job for $15 or $18 an hour I’d take it; I’d take it for sure. I’ve tried so many things. Counting them off on his fingers, he lists: dish washing, gardening, removing asbestos, one year working on an apprenticeship as an auto mechanic. But I need to pay the bills. If someone said to me, okay, we’ll send you to school and we’ll support you while you do it, I would do it. But no one is going to do that for me. I need to support my family back home, survive, pay my rent.

Do you make better money than if you were working a regular job?

Of course.

Are you getting rich?

He laughs.

No man. If we were getting rich I’d be at home sitting in my house drinking a beer at the beach enjoying my life. Do you think I want to be out here worried about the police? Dealing with these people? Standing in the rain? No one out here is getting rich. We’re at the bottom of it all, man. We’re the lowest in the chain. Below us it’s just the workers. Maybe the guys at the top — the politicians, the guys in buildings wearing the ties — maybe they’re getting rich, but not us, man.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

I STAND NEAR the alley entrance with Playboy and his partner, Shox.

How long have you been dealing? I ask.

Not very long, he says. He claims he’s going back to school.

It’s just a summertime thing, he adds.

I’m tempted to mention that it’s already November.

Do you ever feel bad? I ask him, instead.

Of course, man, he says. I’m human. I feel human things. I feel terrible. But these people, these people who have been doing this for 10 years already, they’ve made their choice. If they want to do it they can. But when I see someone new, like this guy… and he motions to a young man dressed in crisp clothes I had assumed was a dealer.

Go home, bro, Playboy tells him. Go home. This is not the life for you.

Only now do I notice the man’s wide eyes and shifting feet. He cowers at Playboy’s address, then walks across the street, driving off in a brand new Acura.

A few weeks later, we’ll sit in a diner as Playboy shovels runny eggs into his mouth with scraps of toast. We’ll talk about soccer and girls and food, and he’ll tell me that he wants to live a simple life. He doesn’t want to be rich, he just wants a nice wife and three kids. Two boys and a girl.

Canada is a great country, Playboy will tell me. A multi-ethnic country. A tolerant country. I hate the religious extremists at home. I can’t go back to my country.

Why not?

Because they’ll see my tattoos and they’ll say I’m a non-Muslim and they’ll slit my throat.

It’s the last time I’ll see Playboy. It’s one of the last times I’ll lock my bike up and wander over to the alley entrance, wondering at what madness I’ll encounter today. Shortly thereafter, I’ll begin the task of sorting through my unwieldy tangle of notes and building the story, all the while contemplating the contents of this paragraph right here. Dreams of insights so sharp they’ll split the thing wide open. Bold, declarative statements, that wrap the story whole. But there will be nothing sufficiently satisfying, and I’ll opt instead to hope that the information I’ve presented will be enough for the readers to draw their own conclusions.

For now, though, it’s just Playboy, Shox and me; and the alley; and the man in the Acura. He’s returned, having circled the block, and this time, instead of sending him away, Playboy directs him to a nearby worker.

I ask him why he decided to sell the man something and he shrugs.

If I didn’t, someone else would.

Photo Credit: Matt Chambers

Third in a four part series on drug dealing in the Downtown Eastside.

Part One: Introductions
Part Two: The System

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Why the fuck do you want to write about this piece of shit, anyway? Threads demands. This place is fucking gay.

He begins pacing, muttering something about his worker taking off.

These people are like fucking ghosts, he says. They’re right there, then you turn around and they’re gone, bro.

He spits.

Gonna start stabbing people, he declares, fire in his eyes. And not that pussy three inch blade either — the fucking seven inch’er. Get right in there.

Do you carry a knife? I ask him, not sure if he’s serious.

No, but I’ll grab one from one of the workers and get busy, bro.

A week earlier a young woman by the name of Ashley Machiskinic fell to her death from a fifth-storey window. Community leaders are adamant that she was killed over drug debts. Standing on the corner I hear a lot about money owed. The talk isn’t of dope-sick addicts running tabs $10 too high — addicts don’t get tabs — it’s about those with sufficient credit to get themselves into real trouble: the workers, holders, and dealers.

Threads is near the bottom of the chain. He fronts borrowed drugs to addicts who then sell it and pay him back, smoking or pocketing a small profit for their trouble.

It’s a world of deep credit but shallow trust; and while the workers insulate the dealers from the law, the problem with giving $100 worth of crack to a crack head and telling him to go sell it should be obvious to anyone…

I ask a young woman — the only female dealer I’ve met — how she handles the problem.

It’s all about who you pick, she says, referring to worker selection. If you pick a crack head, they’re always going to lose a lot of it. Oh, you lost it? Yeah, right. How do you lose a gram of crack? You lost it in your pipe, that’s where. It’s better to get alcoholics, because there’s no temptation and you just pay them in booze.

Borrowing drugs $1,300 at a time, the junior dealers are gambling with every half-ball they distribute; every worker that “takes off” pushes them $100 further from settling their own debts. There are no courts to mediate, no cops to call, and the obligations are heavy.

At the Latino corner I approach an icy dealer and his crew, who have been slow to warm to me:

If they’re addicts, and you’ve got them handling all this money and drugs, do you think they’re ever tempted to take off with it?

Temptation every day, a shorter dealer tells me. Temptation every day…

So how do you deal with that?

We just let it go, says another.

We see them two weeks later but we don’t do anything, explains the Icy Dealer. What are we going to do, beat someone up for it? You can’t blame them for taking it — it’s a part of doing business. Sometimes we lose $1,500 and we don’t do anything.

The others nod their heads in agreement.

Some people will beat them up though, admits the short one, and he raises an eyebrow in the direction I came.

Like that girl who got thrown out the window, adds the other.

But the violence is not good, the Icy Dealer says. If we beat someone up and everyone’s saying ‘oh, she owed those Spanish guys money,’ then the cops are going to come for us. Like, they know who we are, they know who all of us are. If they chose to come get us, they could. They can make us a priority.

It’s tempting to believe him. And having spent so much time in their company — believing myself safe in their presence — I find it hard to believe that any of the people I’ve spoken with could be responsible for the awful kinds of violence that make headlines in this city. Still, if I accept everything they tell me as truth then there’s no violence in the drug trade, and there’s no heroin being sold in the Downtown Eastside, either.

I’ve stood at the Icy Dealer’s side and watched him send heroin addicts to his worker, yet he denies it to my face.

And though no one is keen to talk about it, I’m beginning to understand that physical violence, or at least its threat, is a lynchpin of the system.

When I confront him on this, the Icy Dealer simply responds: The cops don’t like it.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Two weeks later: I come around the corner and spot two Middle-Eastern dealers who find a novelty in my presence: Playboy and Shox. They’re speaking Farsi to a short man in a green baseball cap, and as I approach I realize that the tone is menacing. Playboy hisses something at the man and then breaks into English:

I don’t even want to look at you. Go stand in the alley for five minutes while I think of what to do with you.

The man wanders into the alley and settles against a wall.

If he wasn’t one of my countrymen, Playboy tells me, I would beat him up. If he was Black or Spanish, I would beat him up, he snarls. I try to help him out and this is what he does to me…

What did he do?

He came up short, Shox says, meaning that they didn’t receive the expected amount for the half-ball.

And what does he say?

Always excuses: Oh, I got robbed, or the cops picked me up.

Count it again, Playboy says between pulls from his cigarette.

Shox thumbs through a small stack of bills and coins. Thirty-five, he says — well short of the expected seventy.

Playboy paces, slowly dragging on his smoke, before finally calling the man over. He shuffles forward, eyes to the ground and hat in his hand as Playboy and Shox move close, speaking just inches from his face. A knot pulls tight in my stomach as Playboy draws a hand behind his back and clenches it into a fist. Another dealer, watching from a few feet away, slips on a pair of black gloves.

Images of addicts with lips like purple balloons and black eyes bulging shut. The blood spatters at the alley entrance that day we were taking pictures…

I consider what would happen if I asked them to stop, but just as the moment seems about to snap Playboy steps away and orders the man against the wall. He paces, says something I don’t understand and then flicks his cigarette in the man’s face.

Get the fuck out of here, he snarls, and the man scurries off.

Composing himself, Playboy turns to me:

I wasn’t going to hurt him, he says, I’ve just got to scare him. What can I do? Stand out here and look like a clown? You can’t let these people climb on top of you.

A week before, I overheard Shox talking about the problems they were having with a well-known worker:

…so Playboy and I took her into the alley and we were working her over and she was all screaming and crying…

Really? the other dealer asked. She’s one of my best workers. I use her every morning…

She kept coming up short. She owed the whole crew money. She owed me $40, Playboy $65. And so yesterday I’m walking down the alley and she jumps out from behind one of the dumpsters screaming that she’s gonna slit my throat!

He laughs.

So I grab her and throw her against the wall, and I’ve got her like this and I’m just about to beat the shit out of her when some big construction worker tells me to stop or he’s gonna call the cops. Man, I wish he wasn’t there. I want to beat up a girl, man.

It’s the first time that I hear any of the dealers admit to beating up a worker, but the venerable Threads is not to be outdone by Shox’s account:

Check these out, bro, he says, handing me a pair of black gloves with metal plates riveted to the knuckles. Motorcycle gloves, he explains with a nod.

What are they for?

Protect your hands, plus they fucking hurt like hell. You shoulda seen this guy knock this fucking dude out, standing right here. Come up beside him and just ‘pow’ and the guy goes fucking down, bro. Those gloves.

I pass them back.

Do you always hold them?

Keep them in the shop, he says, motioning to a storefront nearby.

And the owner lets you?

Yeah, bro, I buy tons of shit in there so he helps me out. I just tell him, ‘hold these for me,’ and I grab them whenever I need them. Hey, check these out, he says, passing them to a tall dealer in a dark hoodie.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Do you want to get breakfast? Playboy asks me.

Sure.

The two of them seem to take a liking to me. We talk about girls. We talk about religion. We talk about the magazine, and finally we talk about the violence.

The media makes it seem like a big problem, they tell me, but it’s not.

I realize this may be a dumb thing for me to say, but the other day I heard you talking about beating someone up in the alley. Do you ever beat people up?

Never.

I nod.

What about the guy today? Would you have beat him up if I wasn’t there?

Nah, bro.

The conversation cools and Playboy turns his attention to his iPhone, starting a game of online poker.

We sit in silence.

People are interested in it, I tell them. I’m not judging, but it’s my job to ask. According to everyone I speak to, no one sells heroin and no one beats up workers. I’m just looking for the truth. Have you ever beaten up a worker?

Nah, bro, Playboy says, never looking up from his phone.

What’s the point? Shox asks.

Look, I’m not stupid, I tell them.

Playboy looks up from his phone.

Pretend you were on this side and I was on your side and I asked you that question, what would you say?

I think about it.

Depends how much I trusted you and depends on how I wanted the story told.

Exactly, bro.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Read Part Four.

Second in a four part series on drug dealing in the Downtown Eastside.

Read part one.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

I return almost daily — learning the intricacies of the cop/dealer/ID dance, witnessing the alley’s welfare day transformation from ant colony to hornet’s nest, and identifying the loose schedules followed by the crews who station themselves “out back”.

My guys are the morning crew, and with them my presence is tolerated but not quite trusted. Dealers, unintroduced, stop mid-sentence to demand: who the fuck is this guy? They remain silent, eyes fixed on me, until Royal confirms that I’m “cool.”

By walking around with you, I’m vouching for you, he explains. They’d never let you stand here.

I ask him why he bothers talking to me at all, and I get a cold shrug in reply.

You’re not gonna decide that I know too much and kick the shit out of me one day, are you?

It’s the first time I’ve made him laugh.

Nah man, I’m not telling you anything the cops don’t already know.

The truth is, Royal hardly tells me anything. Instead, he tolerates my presence, often as if I’m not even there. Peering over his shoulder I build the foundations of my understanding, and armed with a few new words and some borrowed credibility I set out to learn more.

A short girl with no eyebrows marches over to the dealer beside me. They walk down the alley, talking quietly. I recognize the girl as a worker: a carrier of a small amount of drugs but a large amount of risk.

She has been fronted a half-ball, a hunk of crack worth about $100, which she breaks up with a razor blade and sells in the alley alcoves. She has come to give the dealer his proceeds of the sale, usually about $75, and is then free to sell or smoke the rest.

I step over to Grin, who stands away from the group, leaning against a building.

The workers are all addicts, right?

Yeah.

Can you use any worker you want?

Some of them are exclusive, like they got one main boss and they’ll only work for him. But others will work for anybody, you know?

As if to illustrate the point, a few minutes later he’s arguing with another dealer over the rights to a sheepish looking man in a filthy white tracksuit. Overruled, Grin settles against a telephone pole, and I’m reminded of a conversation over lunch with Royal and another senior dealer:

What would happen if I tried to start selling out back?

And you didn’t know us? It wouldn’t happen.

We wouldn’t even have to touch you, we’d just tell all the workers to give us your stuff.

And what if I did know you?

Well, you pick up off somebody and they let you in, and then you just gotta keep selling their stuff.

See, you think all those guys are bosses, but they’re not — they’re workers, Royal reveals.

Grin, along with most of the other young men out here, is only a couple of notches from the bottom. A boss fronts him a zip (the street term for an ounce of cocaine), which cooks down to about 30 half-balls. Grin pays $1,300 for the zip, due once it’s been sold. His aim is to move one a day, which clears him almost a thousand dollars, but there are plenty of obstacles — not least of all, finding workers.

How come you’re always out in the morning? I ask him. Are there shifts?

There’s no shifts; we all get to choose, you know? But if you come too late, then the workers are all tied up.

The addicts who take care of the actual sale of drugs are a hotly-contested commodity, the senior dealers laying claim to the most experienced and trustworthy. Those with a long history on the streets know the most addicts and can therefore push the most product. They’re also less likely to take off with the drugs.

As workers return, seeking their next package, the dealers whisper instructions for reloading in their ear. But if the workers are hotly-contested, the most cherished are those known as the Holders. The ghostly layer between dealers and workers is the most vulnerable part of the system, and exactly what they do is one of the few subjects still taboo in my presence.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

At the alley entrance a cop car sits, engine running, two wheels on the sidewalk. I cross the street to make a lap around the block and notice a young man with a coffee and an iPhone in hand. He rests his cup on a parking divider, pulls a wad of bills from his pocket and counts it, then does the same with a pile of coins.

Is it busier on sunny days? I ask.

He looks up, startled. A little busier on sunny days, yeah.

But busiest near the end of the month, right? I say, referring to the government checks that set the alleys ablaze.

He seems puzzled.

Last week of the month, yeah.

When I explain that I’m writing an article and ask him if he’s willing to talk he hesitates, chews at his lip, then steps over.

Is it good money?

It used to be way better. You could make over $1,000 a day. Not anymore: 300, maybe 400 a day. If you work it out it’s like $25 an hour. Too much competition. So many dealers down here now.

What about the police? Have they made it tougher?

No, he says emphatically, they let us do it. If they wanted to stop me they could, just like that, and he snaps his fingers. I had some problems with the police a couple of years ago and in like two weeks they gathered up all the evidence they needed. They got everything on me. They can do it anytime they want, but they don’t.

Are you ever holding anything that could get you in trouble?

I hold no money. I never hold drugs. Well, I hold a little bit of money, but not much. You find a guy who will hold for you and you find a worker. The worker goes out, sells, comes back, hands the holder the money, and reloads.

How much does the holder have?

Depends.

More than the workers?

Oh yeah.

And he’s an addict?

Yep.

I pause, putting it all together.

You must trust him to leave him with so much.

We get burned. The guys get pinched by the cops or they take off. But you just gotta treat ‘em right. Some people treat them like shit and get burned. You pay him well, buy him cigarettes and food and give him something to smoke. He’s got everything he needs and he’s not stupid, he sticks around. Why would he throw it all away?

The dealer tells me he’s got to get back to work and I continue on my loop around the block. My sunny day opener breaks the icy stare of a Latino dealer I’ve tried to talk to twice before.

When I explain that my story is from the perspective of the dealers, the rest of his crew gathers around. I’m keen to hear whether the Latinos out front operate in the same way as the crews out back, but before we have a chance to talk a toothless man cries out, two coming down! a chorus that is repeated all the way down the block.

The dealers tell me that they’ll be right back as two cops come over the hill with a wave of street folk cresting in front them. Arms puffed out to accommodate their guns and radios, the sidewalk is empty in their wake, but within a few minutes everyone is back, dealers included.

Gaunt, weathered faces shuffle towards us and request powder (cocaine), base (crack), or down (heroin). The dealers motion them to a tall man with a creased face and sunken cheeks standing in the middle of a lurching crowd of tokers.

Grin was right: with the Latinos there’s more on display than out back — their worker is stationed within plain sight.

I ask the icy dealer to clarify my understanding of the system.

There are three levels: the worker, who is an addict and who actually sells the product… He nods. The holder, who is also an addict, but trusted, and holds all the product and money and resupplies the workers… And the boss, who doesn’t touch anything, but just supervises.

Yep, he says, and I’m about to ask him about the temptation of the workers and holders, but we’re interrupted once again by a cry of ‘three coming down!’ On the horizon a trio of broad figures lumbers towards us.

We walk.

They know what you’re doing, right? I ask.

Yeah.

So, why do you bother moving?

Out of respect, he says. We get out of their way to show that we know who they are. Some guys just stand there, but we move.

Suddenly he stops.

Alright, man, he says, bumping my fist. And he’s gone.

Around the corner I spot Royal and a senior dealer standing with a fresh-faced guy I’ve never seen before. He’s being educated on the system.

It’s like any other business, the senior man explains, you gotta know where your inventory is at all times. He looks over at me: right, man?

I nod, not sure that it’s the right thing to do. As I do so, though, I realize that my understanding of this system is nearly complete.

Two tiers of addicts, whom the courts view as sick and exploited rather than criminal, insulate the dealers from the law and allow them to stand openly on the street corners. But while the workers and holders provide resilience to the system, they seem a likely weakness as well — I wonder how much product is lost in their pipes and arms.

Could this be the source of the fabled violence of the Downtown Eastside drug trade? I make it my aim to find out.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

First in a four part series.

FROM A BENCH at the corner of Carrall and Hastings I watch as the street dealers ply their trade. Standing in clusters, they’re easy to pick out: Hooded sweatshirts and neck tattoos. Hats with flat brims and holograms indicating authenticity still inside. They lean against buildings and parking meters, one leg up and bent at the knee – stones in a stream of sunken faces and shuffling feet.

I warily approach four men at an alley entrance. Their necks are thick and they wear Nike runners, sweatpants, and graphic print tees. We exchange nods and I launch into my well-worn spiel:

I’m writing a story about the street-level drug trade. I’m not trying to fuck with anybody; I just want to understand it from the perspective of the dealers.

This is the tense part. I’ve canvassed these streets for over three weeks and I’ve yet to encounter anyone willing to talk. The responses range from feigning hearing loss to outright hostility.

There are certainly less nervy ways to write this story: an interview with the VPD, a chat with a director at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, an appointment with the friendly folks at InSite. It would be an account of addiction, gangs, violence, and exploitation. It would be an accurate portrait of the Hastings drug trade, but it would be absent the elusive voices of those most involved, and my aim – for good or ill – is to write it in the words of the dealers themselves.

They scrutinize the business cards, pondering my proposition.

Our time’s a hundred bucks an hour, the big man says, and they all laugh.

I’m not allowed to pay.

Well, I’m not allowed to talk.

Just as I’m about to accept this as another defeat, a cop car wheels into the alley behind us, window down. The driver bids a sarcastic hello and calls over a young dealer by name, demanding his driver’s license. Scanning the remaining faces, the cop then raises a finger and unwittingly propels me into the world of the Hastings drug trade.

Did you know you’re associating with the biggest drug dealers in the Downtown East Side? he asks. The group laughs and the cop shoots them a dirty look.

They’ve wondered at my recent presence down here. A business card, coupled with the computer’s output, satisfies their curiosity. They note that the young dealer is “moving up in the world” and implore me to be careful, then disappear down the alley.

They do that to you whenever they want? I ask as we walk back to the group.

Yep.

How many times a day?

Couple.

And they know everything?

Yep.

But they can’t do anything…

Nope.

THE YOUNG DEALER melts back into the circle, which has grown by two in the familiar uniform. I linger tentatively, waiting for a break in conversation, feeling the police have provided me an unlikely in: for a moment I was treated like a dealer, and the officer’s plain talk has eliminated the need for the group to deny their purpose on these streets.

Do you mind if I hang out for a bit? I ask.

All eyes defer the question to the big man I’ll call Royal. He nods thoughtfully, hands in the pockets of a black graphic print track suit.

All right, he says, his speech slow and careless and exuding a quiet authority. What did they ask you?

About what I was doing. For a moment I felt like one of the gang.

We’re not a gang, Royal corrects me, utterly humourless. They think we are, but we’re not.

The conversation resumes and every couple of minutes a man on a bike with sunken cheeks and an ill-fitting helmet appears. Circling us, he reports on the movements of people and police. He informs us that two officers are coming down the alley and as we walk down Cordova another guy on a bike calls out to us: Six up. Four on foot, and he motions back the way we came.

I walk silently, struggling to formulate useful but innocuous questions.

How can the cops know what you do but not bust you? I ask a short, stocky dealer beside me.

They don’t know everything, Royal interjects. They think they do, but they don’t.

They know the whole game, counters the dealer, but it’s about evidence. I don’t do anything to incriminate myself. I don’t ever touch money, I don’t ever hold anything and I don’t ever send people to the workers. Well, if I do, I do it discreetly. His eyes are bright and sharp but he never meets my gaze. It’s about evidence, he continues. They build a picture of you and they collect all this evidence against you and once they’ve got something big, they bring it all together and bring a case against you.

Are you ever scared out here? I ask him.

Only when they come deep at me.

Like, tires screeching and lights blazing and that?

No, like when they just come walking over and straight up to me. I wonder if they’ve got enough evidence to put me away, but then I think, ‘no’. That’s the only thing that gets my adrenaline pumping.

We wander back to the alley entrance. Leaning against telephone poles and parking barriers, the conversation turns to girls. Cars. Steroids. Money. The mood is remarkably relaxed.

The circle expands and contracts with dealers, messengers, and addicts. Despite standing in their midst for hours I never see drugs or money.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

ROYAL WANDERS AWAY from the group and over to the benches. He moves slowly, hands in his pockets, barely checking for traffic. A younger dealer with dark skin and a wide grin goes with him, baggy sweatsuit concealing his thin frame. I follow.

Specific questions have so far been met with uncomfortable silence, so I keep things generic, hoping for breadcrumbs of truth. In a roundabout way I ask about the territories, the regular faces on the regular corners I’ve come to know over the weeks, the ethnic divides from block to block.

What about those Spanish guys? I say.

What about ‘em? asks Grin.

What’s their deal? They won’t talk to me.

He thinks about it for a moment.

They work out front, he says, motioning to Hastings, and we work out back. He nods to the alley beside us.

What if you went out front, what would happen?

Nothing, Royal says. Depends who you know. His big hands are like meat cleavers resting at his waist.

What if they came out back? I ask.

If they just came working one day out back it wouldn’t be a problem. But if they did it like, a couple days in a row we might ask what’s up, you know?

I didn’t.

They got their own way and we got ours, Grin explains. They got their Spanish style. They’ll sit out there with their guy, like just ten feet away and watch him the whole time. We let our guys go wherever and we just meet up later, you know?

So you guys don’t actually sell drugs?

He shakes his head.

So what do you do then? is what I want to ask, but I know it will be greeted with silence.

How much do you pay your guy?

If I make $100 I’ll give him $10, say, but that’s just an example.

So, ten percent?

That’s just an example.

And how much do you make in a day?

He hesitates. $500, he says finally. Anywhere from $500 to $1,000.

But it used to be way more, says Royal.

Why’s that?

The recession. Plus, that’s before they shipped all the addicts out of town or sent them to jail for the Olympics. You used to be able to make like $3,000 a day.

A cloud of marijuana smoke wafts over from a nearby bench.

Do you guys smoke weed out here? I ask.

I do at home, but I try to stay away from illegal activities when I’m here, Grin says. They bust you for anything. Smoking too close to the building. Jaywalking. Not wearing a helmet. They give you like a $250 fine, he says.

They tell us, we gotta tax you somehow.

The conversation cools and in the silence I grow uncomfortable. Rather than wear out my welcome I ask if I can come back tomorrow.

Sure, Royal says, to my surprise. When’s your article coming out?

I’ll probably research it for a couple of months.

I reach out to shake Grin’s hand but he extends his fist instead.

Around here we do it like this, he says with his wide smile, and I bump knuckles with the both of them and wander giddy into the street.

The next two months will be interesting, to say the least.

Read Part Two.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

The high-profile bankruptcy of the CanWest media empire serves as another recent example, as CanWest’s print division — including the Victoria Times Colonist, Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun and National Post, among others — was purchased by a group of creditors.

While much of this instability can be attributed to the economic downturn, it also reflects the market’s concern that the shape of media is changing; the expectation is that this change will come in the form of enterprising writers, bloggers and journalists trying to make their mark in the burgeoning world of the online press. And while many see the Internet as the future of media, most online publications can’t seem to pay the bills, and they may be falling into the same traps of bias and partisanship that have ensnared countless of their dead-tree brethren.

“I think the marketplace of ideas is just that — a marketplace,” says Peter W. Klein, Emmy Award-winning journalist and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of journalism. “Like any marketplace, if there’s a demand, then a supply pops up to meet it. Newspaper may be dying, but there’s still a large demand for good journalism, and faux-web journalists are not meeting that demand, either because of partisan bias (often hidden) or lack of reporting skill or lack of writing ability, and often some combination.”

As Klein is quick to point out, if New Media is to fill the emerging void there are still many challenges to overcome.

The Money

In a recent phone interview, Marshall Jones, editor of Kelowna.com, explained his desire for an online alternative. “My goal [...] from a newsroom perspective was to be a daily newspaper online,” he said. “We knew the daily newspaper in town wasn’t going to do that.”

The now-defunct news site was launched by Ogopogo Media Inc. as an online alternative to the local Kelowna print press, but despite these laudable goals, and a formidable newsroom staff, the project was active for only 10 months before Ogopogo shut it down. Kelowna.com is still online and operating as a kind of automated wire service for CBC content, but for all intents and purposes the project is dead in the water.

The sudden closure wasn’t Jones’ idea. “We were all told ‘two years’,” he says. So why the rapid demise? He scoffs at the suggestion that the collapse was due to difficulty finding advertisers, and claims instead that the “trouble was getting readers.” Indeed, as far as Jones is concerned, there were only two major problems for Kelowna.com:

One: “Nobody knew we were there.”

Two: He’s “just not sure that people cared.”

It’s not as if Kelowna.com wasn’t delivering good content. “What we produced for journalism, the information we uncovered, was hands down the best in town.” Kelowna.com was easily a viable alternative to the local print press, but, says Jones, “I think we over-estimated the value of solid journalism.”

Not all have had such bad luck. He points towards the success of another Kelowna-based local news site, Castanet.net, which evolved from a community forum into a full-fledged local news source. According to Jones, they get an incredible amount of traffic every week, but this online success comes at a price. “I just don’t know that the general public cares enough about integrity in news,” Jones says. And that’s bad news for journalists, because it just might mean that a community-forum oriented news site will take precedent over professional coverage.

In an emailed interview, Sean Holman, the Jack Webster Award-winning journalist behind Public Eye Online, weighs in. Originally launched as a weekly .pdf magazine in 2003, Public Eye Online was disbanded on account of an overwhelming workload. When Holman began investigating the Doug Walls affair (the scandal that earned him the Jack Webster Award), the weekly schedule “became increasingly difficult to keep up,” and publication ceased in November of 2003 as the Doug Walls investigation continued to take up more and more of Holman’s time.

Public Eye was later relaunched as an independent news site suited to Holman’s investigative work. As he explains, “I’ve always been a big believer in the purpose of journalism — holding power and the institutions of society to account. I think it’s difficult, sometimes, for the media to do that when so much of their resources are focused on covering the story of the day. And that’s why I launched Public Eye — because I felt there was a need for more of that kind of accountability.”

For Holman, the Internet has opened doors, but it’s not yet clear where they will lead.

“[The Internet's] made it possible. But it hasn’t made it profitable,” Holman writes. “The very existence of Public Eye and The Tyee, I think, points to a demand for more independent journalism. And, certainly, I hear a lot about that demand from the blogosphere. But, for myself, I continue to try to figure out how to make the model work from a financial perspective.”

He notes the differences between the United States, where “we’ve seen a proliferation of independent news websites that receive philanthropic financing,” and Canada, where such funding doesn’t seem to exist. “I think it’s because the free press — as a value — is more widely held in the States. It’s enshrined in their constitution for heaven’s sake. While, in Canada, I think foundations and charitable givers are much more likely to finance an environmental or social cause than investigative journalism.”

Jones disagrees. “You take a look at Castanet for example,” he says. “They’re a daily, an hourly, publication,” and “they’re making lots of money.” In fact, from his perspective the problem lies with journalists’ own inability to sell their content. “I think journalists generally have to do a much better job of marketing themselves.” There’s not enough of a distinction, or education, in the market these days. And why exactly should a reader care if what they read was brought to them by a reputable news provider? “It’s an important distinction if we’re going to save ourselves.”

The Bias

While the Internet is held by many as a way to counter bias and partisanship, it falls prey to those same faults, claims Alex G. Tsakumis, a former columnist for 24 Hours Vancouver who also worked as a political blogger for CTV Vancouver.

Following his CTV and 24 Hours experiences, Tsakumis established a blog that features breaking news and commentary. Receiving regular attention for its obstinate tone as well as its controversial reporting style, the site saw over 141,100 visitors this August — Tsakumis’ “biggest month ever.” He has also launched a video podcast, Front & Centre, which is “one of [the site’s] most popular features.”

Asked whether the Internet has provided a way to counter bias and partisanship in the more centralized print media forums, the picture Tsakumis paints isn’t pretty. “There are just too many blogs out there that are designed to bolster one party over another, or [to] spread gossip,” he writes. “Political parties have caught on that the Internet is a primary source of news for the younger generation [that wants] to be more engaged, so they pay for their media whores to get into the blogosphere and spin their stories. It’s shameful, but it’s done all the time.”

He would know. Just last month Tsakumis, a former Non-Partisan Association executive board member, broke a story about Vancouver political blogger Jonathan Ross’s financial connection to the Vision Vancouver party, an organization that Tsakumis regularly trashes on his blog.

Still, Tsakumis believes the issue of bias in new media can be overcome: “I think the public are better than this and get the problem.”

The Future

For Holman, the future of online journalism is still uncertain. “I think I’ve proven over the past seven years that it’s possible to do investigative journalism in the context of a daily news environment — filling the news hole that editors always worry about. But whether the media as a whole moves in that direction remains to be seen.”

“We are definitely suffering from not enough investigative journalism. No question. Particularly where the government in Victoria are concerned,” writes Tsakumis. “[T]he MSM [Mainstream Media] are not prepared to support complicated stories. They’d rather go with the dead-baby lead at six.”

Over email, Edward Henczel, an editor for The Province and faculty member of Langara College’s Department of Journalism, arrived at roughly the same conclusion: “I do believe there is a direct correlation between the number of reporters and the variety of coverage news consumers can access,” he writes. “Simply put, fewer reporters mean more wire service pap on Mel Gibson and the ilk.”

However, he feels the idea that newspapers are dying is premature. “When people talk about the death of papers, they tend to focus on the big dailies. Few realize more than half of British Columbians get news from one of the 100+ community newspapers in the province. While cutbacks at the larger papers is probably leading to more homogeneous coverage, I feel the decline of coverage in communities served by weeklies is negligible, at least in the short term.”

And as far as the Internet’s role in all this? As Jones notes, online journalism should be the domain of institutions like the Vancouver Sun. “That should be their ground.” Although he thinks the larger newspapers are eventually going to make the transition, they haven’t for now; and as far as local news coverage is concerned, “there are a lot of markets in BC for the local news perspective [...] that should have a Kelowna.com in their town.”

According to Ross Howard, faculty member for Langara College’s Department of Journalism, “newspapers in some places in the West are struggling and a few have been killed off by owners’ failed profit expectations, but newspapers will be around for a fairly long time to come, albeit many of them smaller, more specialized and targeted. Yes, there are various biases and failures but the need for someone or something — a reliable news media — to aggregate and mediate (to weigh and assess) the veritable tsunami of information that is available to most of us today thanks to new technologies is never greater.”

And what future does Howard feel the Internet holds? “Newspapers will increasingly migrate to online, but online is just another form of presenting the same info quicker, more accessibly and with greater feedback and diversity of sources.” He continues, “Unfortunately, the Web by itself provides no answer or relief from this ignorance driven by corporate imperatives and near-drowning in the info-tsunami we’re facing, because blogs and Facebook and Twitter etc. provide extraordinary diversity and interactivity but absolutely no reliability. What distinguishes journalism is its commitment to verifying the information it provides — this thing I call reliability.”

The City’s decision to re-appropriate public streets for the creation of a protected cycling track has been one of the most divisive civic issues in memory. News1130 and other media have labeled it a misappropriation of public space and funds, business owners along the routes are furious, and motorists grow increasingly frustrated. With City Council’s October 5 decision to approve the Hornby bike trial, the debate seems destined to intensify.

In the recent SFU-sponsored talk A Field Guide to Public Transit Debates, transportation consultant Jarrett Walker attributed the ferocity of these disputes to our inherent inclination to underestimate the rationale of others’ decisions. This he explained by way of the fundamental attribution error, which describes the human inclination to judge others’ behaviour through our own biased lenses.

In a recent interview with The Tyee, Dave Pratt, co-host of The Team 1040’s Pratt and Taylor show, upheld that “dedicated bike lanes are not wanted and [...] are not needed.” Pratt, whose show purports to be “the sports fanatics’ #1 choice on the drive home,” maintains an understandable perspective. The majority of radio listeners tune in from their cars, and call-in shows have served as a major battleground in the bike lane debate, with rush-hour motorists venting over the re-appropriation of road space while automobile congestion remains.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

According to Vancouver City Councillor Geoff Meggs, congestion is a key factor in the decision to expand the cycling network. With a growing population but limited space, he says that the City is forced to look for other transportation options. “For ten years, at least, Council has had a goal of increasing cycling because there’s no room to add extra roads downtown. We want to continue to grow the economy and the population of the downtown core,” Meggs explains, “it’s a very cost-effective way to do transportation because the impact on roads from cyclists is almost nil.”

With 35 individuals stepping up to speak at the Council’s Tuesday vote, the question as to whether this goal would be pursued by way of a Hornby bike track was fiercely debated late into the night. Despite strong opposition from local business owners and the Canadian Federation of Independent businesses, Council voted unanimously to approve the trial and circulated a letter to affected businesses Wednesday indicating that construction would begin immediately.

By 7:30 the next morning, work crews were already breaking ground on Hornby, prompting NPA Counciller Suzanne Anton to rescind her support for the project. “No one who spoke to Council on Tuesday expected to be a part of a Kangaroo council,” she says in an October 6 news release. “It is a fundamental trust between citizens and their elected representatives that when we meet in council chambers that we are there to listen, deliberate and debate, and finally decide based upon the inputs we have received.”

“It is crystal clear to me now that Tuesday’s council meeting was a mere formality, and pure political theatre.”

For Hi-Fi Centre owner Igor Kivritsky, a 25-year veteran of Seymour Street, it’s just more bad news for downtown business. Kivritsky, whose high-end stereo store is steps from the Dunsmuir cycle track, claimed at that track’s unveiling that he stood to lose $1 million a year in sales as a result of the elimination of right-hand turns from Dunsmuir onto Seymour. Three months later, Kivritsky estimates that his sales are down 20% from last year; he faults the new difficulty in accessing his store. “Traffic has plummeted and sales have followed. It has hurt our business,” he says.

Gordon Price, Director of SFU’s City Program and former NPA City Councillor, rejects the idea that the new bike lanes have a negative effect on businesses. “What I object to is the assumption that removing parking and putting in a cycle track is bad for business,” he says, “I’ve got studies which indicate it isn’t, what do you have?”

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Kivritsky’s criticisms don’t end at the business impact. He claims that the segregated lanes encourage people to adopt a dangerous mode of transportation; increase air pollution by increasing traffic congestion; and put too big a dent in our city’s funds to benefit too few users.

“I’m not against cyclists,” Kivritsky says. “There should be some provision for people who want to cycle for it to be safe, but I think the city is putting too much — they’re giving too much infrastructure to too small of a group of people.”

According to Gordon Price, the issue is just as much about local transportation as it is about the broader social and environmental challenges: “If you don’t like cycling, let’s talk peak oil. If you don’t like peak oil, let’s talk climate change. If you don’t like climate change, let’s talk obesity.”

All of this conflicting emotion and information puts the Downtown Business Improvement Association in a tricky spot. With pressure building on both sides, Charles Gauthier, Executive Director, explains, “We’re not opposed to cycling, we’re just concerned about what separated bike lanes do;” admitting, “Maybe in 3-5 years, if someone said to me there’s been a huge growth in cycling and that’s been a benefit to businesses that would start to change some opinions around the table.”

Jarrett Walker remains elusive with his opinion, opting instead to offer a few words of advice: A useful question to ask, he suggests, is “What if this person’s seemingly odd behavior is actually a rational response to a situation that I don’t fully understand?”

While we may all be reacting sensibly according to our own interests, this begs the question as to why the bigger issues — the ones affecting everyone — aren’t changing some opinions around the table.

]]> http://thedependent.ca/featured/the-great-bike-debate-rolls-ahead/feed/ 12 http://thedependent.ca/featured/vancouvers-underground-hip-hop-karaoke/ http://thedependent.ca/featured/vancouvers-underground-hip-hop-karaoke/#comments Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:46:25 +0000 Sara Tuppen http://thedependent.ca/?p=770

It’s 10:30PM on the second Monday of the month and the audience is already choking the stage, arms outstretched and voices rising as an unassuming man in a pressed golf shirt takes the floor at Fortune Sound Club. Senior Sales Representative for an office supplies company by day, for four minutes tonight Dan transforms into a hip hop legend. Blue and green lights flash as the beat to Masta Ace’s INC Ride takes off and Dan’s voice spills out over a bumping instrumental. With DJ Seko spinning the track and Flipout side-stage rousing the flow with whoops and yells, Dan’s pounding gestures and smooth vocals capture the front row in a simultaneous undulation. Ending on a call and response with the crowd, he swaggers offstage followed by a roar of applause.

Welcome to Hip Hop Karaoke.

It was a friend’s account of an HHK Toronto performance of three girls tossing mics at each other while bounding around to a Beastie Boys track that prompted Paul Gibson-Tigh to collaborate with Chad Iverson in developing a Vancouver chapter. With a mutual passion for hip hop music and a desire to strengthen Vancouver’s hip hop community, Chad and Paul set to establishing the Pacific Northwest’s first official Hip Hop Karaoke event. The timing was perfect: Chad’s boss had recently opened the doors of Fortune Sound Club — known for its world-class sound system for which you have to be interviewed to gain permission to even buy it — and was looking for event ideas. After months of planning, December 2009 saw the debut of HHK Vancouver.

Photo: Jesse Donaldson

Originally thought to be used as an opportunity for local crews to reach new audiences, it has become more of a celebration of hip hop performance than a launching-tool for independent artists. While some emcees are in the crowd handing out sample CDs, this is foremost a place for hip hop aficionados to gather in support of each other and the community, paying homage to their favourite artists and escaping into the world of spectacle. And though impressive swag provided by Sharks and Hammers and Dipt is an encouragement to participate, the fans hardly need any added incentive. With attendance and enthusiasm growing every month, people are even bringing their own bounty to distribute. Dickson Li, Sales Representative at NLA and avid participant of HHK Vancouver since its inception, displays personalized t-shirts featuring logos like “THE SITUASIAN”. It is with this sense of play that the foundation has been set. Now, after nearly a year, the crew is celebrating its tenth volume, and I, my introduction to HHK. Sporting a perky ponytail and pleather bomber, I am certain that my outsider status will be terribly apparent. Nevertheless, I meet our esteemed photographer out front and venture into the night and lights of the club.

Photo: Jesse Donaldson

Upon arrival, the club is packed. With a usual turn-out of up to 400 people, it is clear that before the show has even begun, the expected head count has been reached. Particularly striking is the number of females present — the ratio is, in fact, almost 50:50. Not only impressive for its balanced gender demographics, this group is hugely disparate from what you might expect at a hip hop event. Fortune hosts most of the large hip hop shows that pass through Vancouver, but Chad agrees that this is one night where “you’re not seeing the stereotypical hip hop head; you’re not seeing a bunch of guys with baggy clothes that are all thugged out.” From tight-fitting jeans and t-shirts on the guys to frilly frocks and thick-rimmed glasses on the girls, the inclusive nature of the event is remarkable. As the club fills, the crowd mingles at the foot of the stage in anticipation of the 10:30pm kickoff.

The format is simple. Five performers make up one set, and each night sees four sets with hot dance breaks peppered between. With a month to prepare between each installment, nearly all performers pre-register but walk-ins are welcome if space is still available, and the crew has books filled with hundreds of songs for last-minute track picks.

When considering your performance, there are four key points to observe, the most important of which is song choice. Advises Chad, “pick one that you love and don’t mind listening to a lot,” which brings us to practice. Just loving a song isn’t going to cut it when you are in front of a crowd. There are no teleprompters, so an intimate knowledge of the lyrics is absolutely essential. “Some people [practise in front of a mirror] and it definitely shows,” says Paul. And while neither of our co-founders has yet rocked a costume, those who do are considered “pretty legit”. The two last points to note are what seem to be the only steadfast rules set forth by the organizers: no original material and no N-bombs. Otherwise, the options are practically limitless, which provides for considerable creative license and an exhilarating show with surprises on every side.

Photo: Jesse Donaldson

Krista, a physiotherapy office assistant by day, looks out-of-place onstage as Flipout, the established host, playfully hassles her about her sweet looks and introduces the song. The beat begins and Krista’s rosy-cheeked countenance is swallowed in a wash of animated aggression yet to be met by any of the preceding male performers. With lyrics like “Watch the women get drunk as hell so I can wake up in the morning with a story to tell,” the crowd is hollering to a deafening degree and, by the time Krista is through, the front rows are exhausted and drenched in sweat. A seasoned HHK participant, Krista’s strategy is to pick a song she loves, practise it once or twice, and bring attitude to the stage. “An angry song gets the crowd more amped up,” she claims. This comment is supported shortly thereafter by a ferocious performance of Ludacris’ Act a Fool. Stooped centre-stage and growling verses as the front row’s outstretched arms paw at him, the second Dan of the night owns this act so much that it is easy to forget he is rapping someone else’s words.

Toward the end of the third set, co-founder Paul is up with P Diddy’s Bad Boys for Life, appropriately modified to “Van Boys for Life”. Bouncing around and commanding the crowd, it is hard to imagine this lanky UBC grad anywhere else. Greeted by hugs and high fives as he exits the stage, our performer wipes the sweat from his face as he works to catch his breath. “When it’s over, you feel simultaneous relief and euphoria,” he pants, his smile and energy clearly infecting every bystander. From the activity, Dickson strides onstage for Notorious B.I.G.’s Sky’s the Limit. With the swelling crowd in a thunderous frenzy, one must admit that this track’s title serves as an apt description of the event’s potential.

With my brain still buzzing with the excitement of the evening (and a few Palm Bays), upon returning home I spend the next hour on my iTunes rapping along to my favourite tracks. Whether I can develop a fast-spitting, ill-flowing performance for Fortune’s stage is still undecided. Certain, however, is that this phenomenon is catching on. With plans to bring HHK to the slopes of Whistler and the streets of Victoria, Chad and Paul hope to spread this celebration and strengthen the local hip hop community with both fresh and weathered fans. Having experienced HHK Vancouver’s development first-hand, Dickson reflects on its success in attracting such a diverse following: from accountants to teachers and servers to students. “Everyone has an inner rapper,” he says. “You just have to find it.”

Photo: Jesse Donaldson

]]> http://thedependent.ca/featured/vancouvers-underground-hip-hop-karaoke/feed/ 3 http://thedependent.ca/featured/leaks-traps-and-politics-gone-awry/ http://thedependent.ca/featured/leaks-traps-and-politics-gone-awry/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:55:16 +0000 Matt Chambers http://thedependent.ca/?p=748

The next civic election is still fifteen months away, but already the political landscape is caked with slung mud. The increasingly negative coverage of Vision Vancouver was punctuated this week with blogger Alex Tsakumis’ release of a purported media “hit-list”. According to Tsakumis, whose source remains anonymous, the list details members of Vancouver media that Vision has identified as problematic and targeted for smear campaigns.

“I know you have little children but they will one day become big children and smear campaigns by people with powerful, monied crazies can last a long time,” warned the source in a dramatic statement published on Tsakumis’ blog.

Over telephone, Tsakumis, a former 24 Hours columnist, claimed that his source is a Vision insider with exceptional credentials.

“I sat down, I looked at his material, I said: it’s not good enough for me to just see the material, I need to talk to you – I need to put you on tape.” According to Tsakumis, the leak initially declined but eventually decided that the story was too important; they completed a taped interview and Tsakumis ran the piece.

An anonymous source coming forward with damning information about the Mayor’s office has become a regular occurrence in Vancouver.

Listed as Vision enemy number one is Michael Klassen, editor of CityCaucus.com. Klassen has been at the centre of a spate of stories and leaked documents that have been bad news for Vancouver’s governing Vision party. Recent items of note are the leaked staff survey bemoaning the management style at City Hall; the exposure of no-bid, no-tender contracts; and the leaked claim that 15 iPads and iPhones are on order for the Mayor and City Council, despite the City’s financial woes.

Klassen and CityCaucus.com are the center of Vision opposition in local media, and have professional ties to the opposition NPA. CityCaucus co-founder Daniel Fontaine served as former NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan’s Chief of Staff, and Klassen did communications work for the Mayor’s office during that time. Both Klassen and Fontaine have tendrils extending deep into City Hall and consistently break leaked stories that the mainstream media can’t.

Or won’t.

In the case of the chic new Apple hardware supposedly ordered for Robertson and Co., Klassen admits that he published the claim before he was able to verify it. Still waiting for confirmation by way of a Freedom of Information request, CityCaucus.com chose to run the story, their headline reading, “15 iPads & iPhone 4 devices requested for Mayor & Council.”

“It was a tough call on that one,” admitted Klassen by email, “but that’s the way it goes sometimes.”

In the case of the iPads, Klassen has chosen to risk his credibility, banking on the reliability of his disenfranchised sources inside City Hall. So far, the gambles have paid off, but they also hint at the dangerous game being played by Klassen and CityCaucus.

Other media have begun to home in on the dangers of leaked information and anonymous sources. The same day Tsakumis broke his “hit-list” story, The Vancouver Observer published a piece claiming that Klassen is manipulating local non-partisan journalists by feeding them falsified leaks. (Incidentally, the hapless journalist fingered as Klassen’s stooge is veteran Sun reporter Jeff Lee – number nine on the supposed “hit list”.) The article also alludes to patronage positions awarded to Klassen as a result of his relationship with former NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan, with an editorial promise of more info to come.

But if Klassen’s relationships are a matter of public interest, so are The Vancouver Observer’s. Ian Reid, author of the Klassen piece is a former Vision campaign manager, and The Observer’s Vision links don’t end there. Follow the money, as they say. Founder and publisher Linda Solomon is the sister of Joel Solomon, President and CEO of Renewal Partners, an organization that invests in and offers financial support to businesses they see as fostering positive social change. Renewal invested in Gregor Robertson’s Happy Planet Juice Company, and Joel Solomon and Renewal donated a combined $32,935.10 to Gregor Robertson’s 2008 mayoral campaign. Joel Solomon is a close personal friend of the Mayor’s, and many consider him to be one of the main drivers of Vision policy.

So far, that policy has been to deny the anonymous claims of iPads and hit-lists. Responding via email, Executive Assistant to the Mayor Kevin Quinlan wrote: “There’s no truth to either; there’s no ipad order and no mayor’s office hit list.”

Wendy Stewart, Acting Communications Director for the Mayor’s office makes the same claims: “Nothing is in the pipe and IT has not ordered anything that is being reported.”

Clearly, someone is lying.

According to Tsakumis, number two on the disputed list, the Mayor’s office has begun planting information to trap and fire unauthorized sources within the organization. “They’re trying to identify internal leaks at City Hall and their internal leaks in party to get rid of them. They’re setting traps throughout City Hall all the time. The atmosphere is toxic.”

Asked whether he was concerned his source may have been fed false information, Tsakumis was adamant: “If it were a plant they would NEVER risk something that could hurt them so badly and going sideways as it has. They would never take such a risk,” he wrote.

“Besides, I know this man well enough and he is as decent as he is forthright.”

With the recently-leaked survey of non-union City staff indicating a growing dissatisfaction with operations at City Hall, it’s likely that more leaks will come, and they’ll be published by way of CityCaucus.com and Alex Tsakumis. The Mayor’s office, meanwhile, will grow ever more paranoid.

Between the spin, the lies, the competing interests and the sources unwilling to stand publicly behind their claims, the coming months have all the ingredients of politics and media at their very worst, and will leave the general public with little hope of untangling the mess.

If the truth in life seems elusive, in politics it seems downright impossible.

Bill Vander Zalm’s Fight HST campaign has mobilized and invigorated the most apathetic electorate in British Columbian history. If the 705,643 signatures on the anti-HST petition are valid, it will mark the the first time in Canadian history that a citizen-sponsored initiative has passed the signatory stage; but regardless of whether the initiative succeeds on a legal basis, the movement has given British Columbians a taste of the previously-unknown powers and perils of direct democracy.

According to Bill Tieleman, Fight HST organizer and influential columnist with The Tyee and 24Hrs newspaper, the groundswell of public outrage coupled with the use of these powerful tools has changed BC politics forever.

“This is every cliche in the book – this is waking up the sleeping giant, et cetera.”

Direct democracy allows individual citizens to draft laws and vote directly on matters of public policy. In our current system of representative government, the average citizen’s power ends with their ability to elect a representative – the theory being that elected officials translate into law the wishes of those who elected them, and if they don’t, they get voted out in the next election. The aim of the system is to provide accountability while at the same time sufficient stability for government to implement their agenda.

In BC there are two pieces of legislation that bypass the representative system: the Referendum Act, which allows for questions to be put directly to the general public as a vote; and the Recall and Initiative Act, which contains two provisions: one allowing citizens to recall their elected MLA at any time, and another permitting them to draft questions to be posed to the public as a referendum.

Ratified in 1990, the Referendum Act was the first tool of direct democracy in BC. Ironically, it was introduced by the Social Credit government lead by then Premier Bill Vander Zalm. Shortly after the act’s inception, (but not before Vander Zalm resigned in scandal) the Social Credit party used it to ask the electorate if they wanted more direct democracy.

In a 1991 referendum British Columbians voted overwhelmingly in favour of legislation for both recall and initiative, and on September 24, 1995 the Recall and Initiative Act was brought into law, where despite its initial popularity, it lay dormant for nearly fifteen years.

That is, until the HST. Organizers of the Fight HST campaign laid out a three-phase plan to force the government to repeal the HST. First, they drafted a piece of legislation called the HST Extinguishment Act, and registered it as a citizen initiative; second, they launched a court case challenging the constitutionality of the tax; and third they planned a recall campaign to remove MLAs one by one in an effort to destabilize the government and force it to either repeal the tax or lose its majority. Both recall and initiative are incredibly onerous processes. A successful citizen initiative requires the signatures of 10% of voters in every riding in British Columbia, and the recall of an MLA requires the signatures of 40% of the riding’s voters from the last election.

Over 40% of those who voted in the last election have signed Vander Zalm's petition against the HST.

For Bill Vander Zalm, who sees the HST issue as a catalyst for empowering the public through direct democracy, the high thresholds have rendered the legislation ineffective. “Right now it’s a pretense – it makes it look like we have a vehicle for direct democracy, but except for an issue like HST, it would never work.”

According to Ujjal Dosanjh, current Liberal MP and former BC Premier, that’s the point. After the 1991 referendum Dosanjh chaired a committee that consulted voters and made the recommendations that would later become the Recall and Initiative Act. Dosanjh explains that the high signatory requirements were put in place to avoid political instability and the erosion of minority rights seen in places with high occurrences of citizen-sponsored referenda. “We wanted to make sure that we have a society that is civil and stable, protects the basic rights of everyone, and doesn’t allow us to be whipped into a frenzy over minor issues.”

California is the oft-cited example of citizen initiative run amok. Critics, like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, claim the process has ruined the state’s ability to govern and subjected the state to the tyranny of the majority. With its relatively-low threshold for qualification, there are an average of 20 citizen-sponsored initiatives on every ballot, running the gamut from rewriting the entire state Constitution, to outlawing same-sex marriage.

According to Vander Zalm, while the California system is too relaxed, ours is too restrictive. “People will find ways to abuse it, so you gotta make it difficult enough that it doesn’t get abused, but not so difficult that it doesn’t work – there’s got to be a proper balance.”

Vander Zalm says that he’s committed to the reform of direct democracy even after the HST fight is over. He says technology should be leveraged to allow for greater participation in our democratic processes. “By democratizing the system, that goes a little bit beyond amending legislation – I think most everyone now has a computer, they have the internet, there ought to be ways by which they can participate online.”

Bill Tieleman believes that the reform Vander Zalm seeks is now inevitable. “I think it would be extremely hard for any political party that comes to office to completely ignore the need to fix the recall and initiative act to make it more accessible and fair to the public. I think this campaign has fundamentally changed that equation, and I don’t think any party can ignore that at this stage.”

Former BC Attorney General Geoff Plant agrees with Tieleman that reform is likely, but thinks that the Fight HST’s successful use of citizen initiative has exposed weaknesses in the Recall and Initiative Act that will actually lead to its demise.

“I think that there is a way to attack or challenge government policy,” explains Plant. “It’s political processes, it’s letters to the editors, phone calls to your member of the legislature, and it’s in the ballot box. Initiative was not intended for that process, and I think the fact that it has been so successful here probably creates the seeds of its own demise.”

He sees similar issues with the Fight HST campaign’s use of recall:

“Recall is about personal conduct and the personal decisions of an individual member of the legislature. It is not intended as a tool to oppose government policy, and yet clearly that’s what’s being planned here, and while they may be able to do it, I think that accelerates the moment in time when some government is going to be elected and says, ‘that’s actually not democratic; the place where our decisions are ultimately to be judged is the ballot box, not a recall initiative,’ so they’re either going to define recall narrowly, or they’re going to get rid of it altogether.”

“My own view is that what we’re seeing here is the misuse of potentially valuable instruments, that’s going to have the effect of undermining the goal of more accountable government because it’s going to result eventually in the elimination of the tools of recall and initiative.”

While Ujjal Dosanjh believes that the use of the initiative process to oppose the HST is within the spirit of the legislation, he shares the concerns of Geoff Plant regarding the use of recall as a tool to depose government. “There is merit to the idea that by referendum you should be able to oppose any policy that the public intensely dislikes, except rights of minority, equality rights, and things of that nature, but in terms of recall – the recall legislation was not meant to cause an overthrow of government because you disagree with the public policy of that government.”

Tieleman is unfazed by the argument and says that unless the government withdraws the HST and reverses it, there will be recall campaigns come mid-November.

Whether the public’s anger will be sufficient to support the campaigns promised by Tieleman this fall, or whether they will prefer to have it out with the BC Liberals in the 2013 general election is impossible to say, but with a charismatic old warhorse like Bill Zander Zalm committed to its pursuit, and influential columnist Bill Tieleman throwing his editorial clout behind it, the growing application of direct democracy in BC is a serious possibility.

Even Geoff Plant concedes that the movement has rejuvenated voters. “I do think that the speed with which it was possible to organize this campaign, and the size of the campaign, have probably given everyone in British Columbia a renewed sense of empowerment about what they can do to make their voice heard.”

The question is now, what will we do with that power?

Photo credit: Jay Currie

Today, within the city of Vancouver, The Georgia Straight is unquestionably an alternative media establishment. Reaching close to 600,000 readers, its pages offer everything from music and theatre reviews, to opinion and lifestyle pieces, to, occasionally, hard news. But despite its status as a cultural mainstay, the Straight of today, with the vast bulk of its pages dedicated to event listings, advertisements, and an extensive Classifieds section, is very different in both aesthetic and intention from the Straight that first appeared on the streets of Vancouver back in the spring of 1967.

“It was fuelled by large amounts of idealism,” explains Pierre Coupey, one of the paper’s founding editors, “the idea was to give voice to an anger against establishment values, and their assumption of power. The opposition was crying for a voice. It was, in the beginning, opposed to private ownership, and was designed to be a collective to fight for social justice.”

A meeting was held at 883 Hamilton Street, the home of Rick Kitaeff, on the 2nd ofApril, 1967, to discuss the aims of a free press. Among those in attendance were early Straight contributors Rick Kitaeff, Stan Persky, and Peter Hlookoff, “People’s Poet” and activist Milton Acorn, and current owner/publisher Dan McLeod.

According to Coupey’s early manifesto, The Georgia Straight was intended to be a collective enterprise, with a floating editorial board. Printed on a weekly basis, it was to provide an alternative voice to the heavily anti-youth and anti-hippie sentiment that was then being espoused by the Vancouver Sun and Province. The name itself was allegedly chosen by McLeod for the free publicity it would garner, since local radio stations often issued gale warnings for “the Georgia Strait”. Each member of the group donated whatever money they could for the first issue, with the largest contribution, according to Coupey, coming from Milton Acorn, who contributed his entire Veteran’s Pension cheque, a sum of between $200 and $250.

“Milton was essential to the start of the Straight,” Coupey recalls, “and more the inspiration for the paper than anybody else.”

Photo Courtesy of Vancouver Public Library Archives

The first issue hit the streets in May of 1967, with a cover price of ten cents. Early releases featured articles on police persecution, a how-to guide for growing marijuana, an article called “Help Stamp Out Little Old Ladies”, and cartoons such as ‘AcidMan’, whose hallucinating hero was pictured with genitals on full display. Predictably, the paper caused quite a controversy when it first appeared, and, consequently, there wasn’t a printer in town who would touch the second issue. It was banned on the streets of New Westminster, where vendors responded by selling the paper anyway, in open defiance of police. In the ensuing two years, the fledgling publication was subjected to intense police harassment and legal trouble; between 1967 and 1969, the Georgia Straight and its contributors were charged with one count of “inciting to commit an indictable offence” (for the marijuana article), 27 counts of obscenity, and one count of criminal libel for awarding Magistrate Lawrence Eckhardt the “Pontius Pilate Certificate of Justice.”

“At one time I had an escort of two or three police cars following me on a regular basis,” Coupey recalls, “we were always getting tickets and being pulled over for minor infractions. Rick Kitaeff fought most of that in court and won; he got more tickets than all of us.”

Finally, In October of 1967, the Straight’s business license was suspended by then-mayor Tom Campbell, on the grounds that it contained obscene material.

“It’s a filthy, perverted paper,” said Campbell, in a statement to the Vancouver Sun, “it should not be sold to our children.”

Coupey, now an accomplished Canadian writer, visual artist, university instructor, and founder of the influential West Coast literary magazine The Capilano Review, speaks frankly about the effect of the suspension.

“As any advertising executive knows,” he grins, “any publicity is good publicity. After the suspension, the Straight became notorious. We were emblematic of the struggle for free speech, and the result was that it sold like crazy. Being forced underground was the best thing that could have possibly happened.”

By the end of 1967, the Straight’s circulation was well over 60,000 per issue. They regularly published a column called “Heads Busted”, which dealt with the details of drug arrests. They printed articles on how to avoid police harassment at protest actions. On one occasion, they even published the home address of well-known and despised undercover Vancouver Police Officer Abe Snidanko, (immortalized by Cheech and Chong as “Officer Stedenko”) necessitating his transfer to another department. During this time, many Straight contributors, including McLeod, lived in a large house on 16th Avenue, operating the paper, and living as part of a close-knit community.

Photo Courtesy of Vancouver Public Library Archives

After 1970, the Straight’s legal and financial troubles eased, but despite its growing success, internal conflict plagued the publication. In the early 70’s, The Straight’s offices were taken over on three separate occasions; once by a group of female contributors who published an all-women’s issue, once by a group of gay-rights protestors, and once by members of the paper’s own writing staff. In January of 1972, a collective, comprising a large majority of the Straight’s writers and editors, took over their Powell Street headquarters in an attempt to “liberate” the paper.

“We wanted to make the paper a collective, which meant that if you worked on it, you owned it,” explains former Entertainment Editor and rock critic Rick McGrath, “McLeod refused. He basically said: ‘See these papers with my name on them? Too bad.’”

The collective occupied the Powell Street offices for over two weeks before McLeod obtained a court injunction to have them removed.

“The basis was economic,” McGrath continues. “Basically, we wanted to get paid. For the last eight or nine months I was there, I didn’t see a nickel. But McLeod, at the same time, had a distribution company. And, he was making all this money distributing these American magazines, and rock newspapers, and he was also distributing pornography. Well, of course, it finally dawned on some people that the money from the Straight was being siphoned off into this distribution company, and at the same time, we weren’t getting paid. It didn’t bother me so much, because I was making money as a teaching assistant, but the other guys, it was killing them. And, they finally said: ‘okay, enough of this’.”

Coupey, for his part, supported the Collective, having left the Straight in late 1967 (along with co-founders Peter Hlookoff, Milton Acorn, and Rick Kitaeff) for much the same reasons. Although the first few issues of the paper had remained true to the Floating Editorial Board policy (“Subject to Change Without Notice”, the masthead read), by late 1967, all mention of this body had vanished, replaced simply by Dan McLeod’s name, listed as “Head Editor”. Coupey, along with contributing editors Peter Hlookoff, Rick Kitaeff, and Milton Acorn, became concerned at this apparent violation of the Straight’s original policy, and, in late October of 1967, forced a meeting with McLeod to discuss the issue.

“It was always difficult to communicate with McLeod,” Coupey recalls, “it was tough to have a dialogue, because he was so talented at being inarticulate. But, by that point, he had assumed an attitude, with the Straight, quoting from Louis XIV: ‘L’Etat C’est Moi’.”

As they soon discovered, this attitude was at least partially justified; McLeod had opened the Straight bank account under his own name, and, at the end of 1967, unbeknownst to the other founding editors, created Georgia Straight Publishing Limited with himself as the owner, giving him full legal claim to the paper and all of its assets. Hlookoff and Coupey were appalled and chose to resign their posts, even after McLeod offered them each a 25% share in the paper. Among the early staff, a great deal of controversy still surrounds Dan McLeod’s ownership of the Straight, with former contributor Korky Day, going so far as to call the action “theft and betrayal”. McLeod, however, had a different opinion, stating in a 1972 response to the collective’s allegation, that: “the paper, and the community it serves are more important than the staff, and if that paper folds, it is the community which will suffer most. I believe it is quite possible the paper will fail under collective ownership, and this must not happen. I never wanted to own the Straight, but I’ve always felt very strongly that the Straight, or a paper like it, MUST survive. I have never found, though I wish I could find one, an alternative to single ownership which would ensure the survival of some kind of free press in Vancouver.”

Close to 40 years later, Coupey is moderate in his reflection on the circumstances of the split.
“I don’t think he had any devious intent at the start. I don’t think he planned to rip anybody off. In the beginning, we were all acting in good faith. The disappearance of good faith on his part was something that followed.”

Photo Courtesy of Vancouver Public Library Archives

Despite the actions of the collective, and the appearance of several other underground newspapers, such as The Western Gate, Terminal City Express, and The Georgia Grape (produced by Collective members), the Straight’s local influence continued to grow. By the mid-70’s, however, the underground press scene in Vancouver had all but died out, and the Straight was beginning to founder.

“The paper was in big trouble,” claims former editor Rowland Morgan, in a comment posted on rickmcgrath.com, “The Georgia Straight when I edited it was in transition between being a busy collective in its prime and a commercial listings free-rag in its latter decadence (with one progressive article glued on to the front to maintain cred). It still had subscribers and sold copies out of machines on the street and was not a “controlled circulation” freebie. Sales were pretty much dead in the water.”

According to Morgan, by 1976 the Straight was down to sales of fewer than 2,000 copies a week, was operating at a loss, and would have “closed, and would be forgotten” if it hadn’t been subsidized by a sister publication known as the Vancouver Star.

“The Vancouver Star was a sex newspaper in the days when sex was still controversial,” explains Morgan. “We sold these classifieds for good money, in addition to which the massage parlours all advertised, and the paper’s street sales were brisk. The Vancouver Star made a tidy profit, and McLeod used its revenues to keep the Georgia Straight afloat until he could succeed in switching it to a freebie listings rag.”

In October of 1982, the very first free issue of the Straight arrived, solving its circulation issues by relying on its scores of advertisements and classifieds to support the paper. Since then, The Georgia Straight has gone on to become an unqualified financial success. It has won dozens of Western and National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. McLeod himself has won at least two Lifetime Achievement Awards (including one from the Jack Webster Foundation), for his “contribution to journalism in BC”, and in the process, has made himself a millionaire.

“The Straight died as an underground paper,” McGrath muses, “McLeod essentially reinvented it as an entertainment handout, and now, that thing is a goldmine. There’s really nothing to it. Just some typesetting. It’s simple, easy, fast. You can always tell how successful a paper is by looking at its classified section. And, the Straight always had those listings of what was happening, what was on, and now, if you want to know what’s going on in Vancouver, it’s the only game in town. The other media don’t even try to compete with them anymore.”

So, how is it that a counterculture news-rag that once ran stories like “ShitPower Gives Birth to ShitCar!” goes on to become an alternative media institution?

“Basically, the Georgia Straight became an entertainment rag for two reasons,” McGrath concludes, “it sold papers and it sold papers. When I was there we always printed more if I had a good interview to run. The political stuff appealed to a much smaller audience -probably the guys who wrote it.”
As to the current state of the Straight, both Coupey and McGrath are skeptical.

“The goal was always to raise the bar for investigative journalism in Vancouver,” Coupey says, “rather than raise the bar, the Straight has chosen to keep it about the same, or, in some cases, lower it. It was intended to be an opposition to the Establishment, not to become the Establishment.”

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As Maynard explains the differences between varieties of chicken feed, I become distracted by the unlikely pleasantness of the scene around me. I look at my fellow students (an urbane group), at the yard (neatly landscaped), at the metal lawn furniture and the trays of healthy snacks and lemonade. This is no heated teach-in – it’s more like a garden party from an ecologically benign future. And that seems fitting. I’m here to write a story about Village Vancouver, the group that organized tonight’s workshop. Village Vancouver belongs to the Transition movement, a young and rapidly expanding network of groups dedicated to community-level sustainability. In just five years, Transition initiatives have taken form in over three hundred communities worldwide. “Transition” refers to the combined effects of peak oil and climate change – a transition from a globalized world to a slower-paced, more local one. Which might be, in other words, a world with more backyard chicken garden parties.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

Writing about an environmental group didn’t strike me as a particularly difficult assignment at the last Dependent story meeting. A group usually has a cause and a structure. Read the website, read the press releases, talk to a few members, find an angle – wham – you have a story. But things get more complicated when I talk to Ross Moster, Village Vancouver’s founder. Describing Village Vancouver, he tells me that it’s “like real life, only more sustainable.” And, when pressed, he jokes: “Have you seen the movie Soylent Green? Village Vancouver is people.” He goes on in the same enigmatic vein – Village Vancouver is less an environmental group than a “bunch of neighbours that are spread out all over the place…We get together and we figure out grassroots responses to issues like climate change and peak oil.”

It might sound too vague to take seriously. But this lack of precise definition might lay behind the Transition movement’s viral success. Transition initiatives, by definition, attempt to go beyond the confines of traditional activist circles. As Transition movement founder Rob Hopkins writes in The Transition Handbook, “the scale of the challenge of peak oil and climate change cannot be addressed if we choose to stay within our comfort zones, if ‘green’ people only talk to other ‘green’ people, business people only talk to other business people, and so on.” A free-form group (a post-group group?) might be able to involve people that would otherwise shy away from joining an environmental organization.

Of course, there is one fundamental point on which Village Vancouver and other Transition groups aren’t willing to flex, which is that there’s going to be an energy crisis as fossil fuels become ever more expensive to extract, and overcoming it will require community action. But Vancouver, a city of nearly 600,000 people, is hardly a community. Moster explains to me that Village Vancouver works by forming local neighbourhood networks, or “villages.” The villages aren’t discrete physical entities, but, according to Moster, they embody the communitarian character (“the caring, the sharing, the orientation towards sustainability”) found in bounded communities such as ecovillages. Seven neighbourhood villages currently exist in Vancouver, and Moster hopes to see villages in every Vancouver neighbourhood by next year.

Building community, Moster tells me, and building resilience are so closely related that the latter follows the former. “When you ask people to envision what their ideal neighbourhood looks like,” he says, “the answers you get are not very different than if you said ‘envision that neighbourhood using ninety percent less fossil fuels.’” He says that achieving a low-energy lifestyle doesn’t require people to make sacrifices, explaining that “if you’re cooking dinner for twelve people and you’re only using one stove, and all your neighbours are walking down the block, or if you’re having a film night rather than people driving across town to a stadium to pay a hundred dollars to see a band perform…there’s dramatic drops in [energy] consumption.”

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

I phone Leslie Kemp, a neighbourhood convenor with the newly-formed village in the Cedar Cottage area of East Vancouver. She tells me that her village is in the early stages of its development, having begun by hosting a series of discussion group evenings on climate change. She’s optimistic about the community’s potential – there’s already a popular community garden in the neighbourhood, and there’s a waiting list for plots. The community garden boasts an outdoor stage, and Kemp glows about the potential for art and performance to engage community members.  But it’s food, she feels, that has the greatest potential to reach out to people, pointing to the resurgence in popular interest in food growing and preparation. “Once you start getting people together over something like preparing food…you create other opportunities because they start talking, engaging in dialogue. And then who knows what can happen from there.”

Who knows what can happen, indeed. It could well be that coming together to garden and share meals is the first step towards a deeper connection to the local. But those words from The Transition Handbook about green people talking to other green people nag me. What about those people who, no matter what, won’t attend anything that bills itself as a “potluck”? They exist, no doubt. Or who won’t ever be, in even the slightest way, interested in gardening? Or sustainability in general? When I ask about this, Moster tells me that “the idea of Village Vancouver all along [has been] to figure out how you reach and engage that eighty-five percent of the population where if you said ‘let’s be more sustainable’ or ‘let’s build community,’ they probably would tell you to go away.” It may be a new kind of activism, but Transition still has to grapple with one of environmentalism’s oldest problems — convincing people to care about issues that, for now at least, can be ignored. How long people will be able to ignore them, of course, remains to be seen.

The chicken workshop winds down as the evening sun nears the horizon. The participants get up, shake hands with each other, and head homeward. The garden-party atmosphere begins to dissipate back into the city streets. Two of them, a pair of eager youths from East Vancouver, carry a pair of hens – their first backyard chickens, delivered to them during the workshop. They told me over lemonade that they would be among the first people in their neighbourhoods to own chickens – “hopefully,” one said, “we’ll start a trend.” Maybe they will. And maybe it’ll give them a good excuse to invite people into their backyards. That would be a trend worth starting.

City councillor for sixteen years, influential blogger, recognized global speaker and Director of the City Program at SFU – Gordon Price is one of Vancouver’s foremost authorities on the built environment.

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What would you say is the biggest planning issue facing our region today?

The vulnerability to the basic commodity upon which our entire world has been based: oil.

Let’s just cover that off: oil has some particular features that if not making it unique, the combination thereof is extraordinary: it’s liquid and stable at room temperature and it’s incredibly energy intensive. So while people may talk about alternatives, there isn’t any alternative that combines all of those particular features.

We’ve come to accept that our world can function in a certain way based on the particular characteristics of a limited resource that’s been so cheap – bottled water is more expensive – that it’s now in every aspect of our lives: food, clothes, transportation, construction materials, and just about everything that we process has an element of oil in it.

While it’s easy to get into an apocalyptic scenario around peak oil, volatility is more the issue than an actual shortage. This expectation that something as critical to your life as oil will stay at a fixed price is more important than even what the price is.

Can you give an example of the effects of the volatile price of oil?

Well, in 2005 I think that you can make a case that as a result of that spike in oil price the assumption that the asset value of homes, particularly the ex-urban ones being built in the unbelievable staggering waste known as the sub-prime blowout came to a crashing end and brought the world’s financial system down with it. It’s more complicated than that, but it seems to me that the dots are too close:

If you live in an ex-urban community where your only transportation choice is to drive and suddenly your commuting cost just doubled and you’ve already strung out your debt in order to acquire the mini McMansion, you have no room, because you have no choice. Ex-urban development is built almost exclusively on the idea that everyone will drive everywhere for everything, even internally, within their own communities. There aren’t many options to walk and cycling is seen to be a non-existent choice. There’s just no give, so that’s where I say the vulnerability comes from – this lack of choice in the system.

What does the Gateway Project mean for choice in our region’s transportation system?

It’s not the route itself over the bridge that I have a problem with it – I voted for some of this stuff when I was on the Metro and Translink boards – what I object to is the very clear message that we are going to organize our transportation system in the fastest growing parts of our region around vehicles, almost exclusively, and anything else isn’t to be taken seriously.

Still, that tends to focus narrowly on the corridor itself: the actual roadway – the bridge. The far greater significance is the land use consequences:

To make a generalization, transportation is always about land use and in particular, real estate. Every form of transportation that we’ve used has allowed us to expand the land that’s available for development. If you were constrained by your own two feet, or maybe a horse’s feet, the diameter of a city is pretty limited, so you get these compact, dense cities. With the arrival of the horse omnibus and the initial cable cars, the city begins to expand somewhat, but it was with the electric street car in 1887 that you had an exponential increase in the amount of land that a city can begin to appropriate.

Land becomes so cheap that for the first time in history an average working person can think about owning their own land and building their own house – effectively the first suburbs. It’s a very high quality way of life. In fact, every culture that can begin to afford it will tend to move towards something like what we would call a suburb.

Then, with the arrival of the automobile we see a geometric increase in the amount of land available – you can develop any parcel so long as you can get a road to it.

By the 1950s we begin to build these huge trunk lines extending to far parts of the region that then join up with transcontinental roads so that everything can be organized around the car. Architecture adapts, planning responds, and you get this combination that most of us have lived in since the ‘50s: single-purpose residential subdivisions, college campuses, office parks, mega theatres, shopping malls, strip developments – everything is basically organized on the assumption that people drive everywhere. By the time you get into the 1960s you see the urban form that’s pretty typical everywhere: a parking lot with some expression of a box.

Then you see the final stage where we don’t even allow people to walk or bike on the streets. You see a total car dominance, all based on the assumption that there will be no end to cheap, secure, fuel.

The gateway project reinforces it tremendously, and locks the next generation into auto-dependence.

Is it fair to say that the Gateway Project is intended to help the economy by reducing congestion?

That’s the argument – a fatuous calculation – they take a very small number and multiply it by a very big number. So if I’m for instance stuck in traffic for two minutes and there’s a million people, you end up with a very large number that has absolutely no consequence on how you live your life and make decisions: two minutes of no consequence. But you can say, “ahh, that’s worth x hundreds of millions of dollars to the economy.”

But it’s not some nefarious scheme by the oil industry or the car industry – it’s done on the rationale that this is best for the economy. It’s a coalition of interests – in this case we can identify them as the Gateway Council, and they consist of ports, the trucking industry, warehousing, manufacturing and the kinds of businesses that really are vehicle dependent.

Is the increase in capacity going to decrease the congestion?

It’s always promised. If you look at the first edition of the Transportation Planning Handbook by the Institute of Transportation Engineers in 1942: it was dedicated to the efficient, free and rapid flow of traffic. It’s almost never delivered that, but it’s always promised to do so. The ideal vision of a functioning region is always in the future, and there’s a good reason why they would make that type of promise and why we continue to live with it still: their job as traffic engineers is to translate infinity into a kind of reality. The infinity is based upon the fact that you can never limit the amount of automobiles. So long as people can afford an automobile and get one, there can’t be any imposed limit on the number of vehicles that come onto the road. We will never make a decision for instance, that we will match up the road space with the number of vehicles we allow, as they do in Singapore.

So the job of the road designer is to keep planning for an infinite increase, which means they will never come to terms with this idea that there is a practical limit to the amount of capacity that the system can handle, and therefore its efficiency.

Half a million vehicles have been added to Metro Vancouver's roadways over the last twenty years

Is that the same principle that drives the American phenomenon where we see eight and twelve lane freeways jammed bumper to bumper?

Absolutely. The studies are pretty clear now that if you build more road space it attracts more vehicles. There is an idea called triple-induction theory, which is that if you build new road space it will attract more traffic from three sources: people who previously would have used the road space if it were available but since it was too congested, drive at another time, use another mode of transport, or use another route. That will surely happen with Gateway: the moment that road space is completed there will be people who will now drive, or will choose to drive at rush hour, or might have taken another route or another mode – maybe Skytrain.

Road builders will argue adamantly, and they certainly did in the Gateway case, that all they’re doing is building roads – they don’t take into account what the consequences of those roads will be on land use patterns . That, they argue, is determined by municipalities and regional plans. This by the way, I think is professionally irresponsible.

One of the [Gateway] project managers said, “all that we’re doing basically is building up what we planned to do in the 60s.”

Their thinking is rooted in the height of auto-dependent urban planning.

Given carte blanche, what would you do for transportation in the region?

Build out what Translink’s already got. There’s no question what we need to do – that’s well-determined. You can have debate over the pieces and who gets the first priority, but we have demonstrated time and time again that when we build a frequent transit network – a combination of trolleys, buses, shuttles, trunk lines and rapid transit in a web that’s frequent and affordable (it doesn’t need to be cheap, it just needs to be affordable) you’ll see these kinds of increases that we’ve seen these last few years. And more importantly, land use starts to organize itself around it.

If we set out expanding that rapid transit network, would Gateway still be necessary?

Gateway would be better. That’s the brutal irony: Gateway argues that tolls will keep the number of vehicles down to the point that triple-induction won’t negate the justification for the expenditure. In other words, we’ll keep the traffic moving. But really what they’re saying is we will price people out of their cars. They will not say it that way – that’s just political dynamite – but how else can it be? If you’re going to argue with the increase in the number of vehicles that the road space you will build won’t get filled up, that can only mean that whatever the tolls on the bridge will price people out of using the road system at least at the peak times. Well, at that point you have to give them a choice. But gateway has no responsibility to provide choices. They’re not funding any buses, they’re not funding the light rail – they’re not funding any of the related part of the network that will take the pressure off of Gateway in order to make it work.

This is the scam; this is the professional irresponsibility; this is the political blindness: so we’re going to spend billions to lock people into motordom – into car dependence – not provide them with any choice and then watch the system fail because we didn’t act at a time when we are likely to be incredibly vulnerable to the fluctuating cost of oil.

I was exhausted – too busy dreaming of celebrity and backstage access to get any real sleep. The original correspondent slept worse, I’m sure – after having secured our first ever press passes, work prevented him from attending the festival. The job of rock-star interviewer and VIP then fell on the broad shoulders of your humble and responsible Editor.

My plan was ambitious but achievable: interviews with bands and festival organizers, a sober comparison to other events in North America and Europe, and a picture of the overall mood and scene by way of a crisp narrative.

These are the first two paragraphs from my notebook:

“The rented Prius purred silently as I drove to the house of our cute little rideshare from Paris, France. I waited ten minutes outside before she finally emerged from the basement suite, despite the warning call I had given upon leaving my house. She smelled of stale liquor and cigarettes, and had obviously been up late.”

“She was friendly but a little uncomfortable with such an early morning stranger. To put her at ease I suggested she plug in her iPod. Booka Shade and idle chatter occupied us on the way to the photographer’s house. He was already waiting out front, drinking a beer. His backpack was filled with the implements of photography and nothing more. He had neither tent nor sleeping bag, but he did carry a very large cooler.”

Monday, 6:40am

The Fearless Photographer burst into my tent, wearing only half his pants and laughing uproariously. “Dude, we just woke up her friends!” he said.

By “friends” he was referring to the Texans who had pulled up two days earlier in a white van with wholesome phrases like, “Sasquatch or Bust,” and “Time of Our Lives,” painted on its sides. By “we” he meant himself and the petite 25-year-old blonde he’d been courting for the past 24 hours or so.

For me there was no morning joy. I could barely open my eyes, my mouth tasted like gasoline, and I was still wearing all of my clothes, including my hat. Instinctively, I patted at my front pocket, checking for my iPhone. It was gone. As was my wallet. My keys and passport were the only things of value I still had. Worst of all, I had lost my backpack, which contained the Fearless Photographer’s driver’s license and passport.

“I lost my phone,” I told him.

“So?”

“And my wallet.”

“So?”

“And my backpack.”

“So?”

“So it had your driver’s license and passport in it.”

He stopped pulling up his pants for a moment. “So?” he finally asked.

The Fearless Photographer, charging into danger

Saturday, 9:00am

The drive to the border was pleasant.

“Where are you from?” barked the officer in the booth.

“Vancouver, Canada,” I said, motioning between the photographer and I, “and Paris, France in the back.”

He asked the Parisian if she had a visa. She didn’t understand. He thumbed through her passport and informed her that she required a six dollar stamp to enter the United States of America – something she should know. He handed us a bright orange piece of paper: “Pull into the parking – they’ll tell you what to do.”

A lifetime of harmless, illegal activities played out on the dirty projector in my mind. I wondered vaguely if today would be the first day that a man would touch his finger to my anus, or that I might spend the night in jail. Just as we were about to step inside the French girl seized my wrist:

“I have weed in the car,” she said, desperately.

I stared at her, trying to comprehend what I had just heard. “Why?” was the only response I could muster.

She didn’t respond. It was more of a rhetorical question, anyway.

Monday, 9:00am

“Well, according to my pictures the last place you had your backpack was the techno dance party,” the photographer said.

“Techno dance party?” I asked, taking a small pull from my water bottle. Even water made me want to retch.

“The school bus with the DJ and the enormous pole with the LED lights on it?” he suggested.

“Must have been a different festival.”

“Do you remember Moon?” he asked. I shook my head weakly. “Emily, the blonde that kept asking you to marry her?” I shook my head again. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What do you remember?”

“Eating ecstasy and getting on the back of the golf cart.”

“You’re worse than me,” he observed, cracking another beer.

“Worse than you? Have you even eaten since we got here?”

“Only if you count bloody marys. Now, let’s go find that passport, champ.”

We walked for an hour, the sun beating on our backs, picking our way through the endless maze of cars and crushed Keystone Lights – the evidence of the night before. A pineapple top here, a D battery there, the occasional wild-eyed wanderer still in the grips of Molly – what the American kids call ecstasy.

“Have you seen our backpack?” we’d ask random strangers sitting with their heads in their hands at their campsites.

“Nah man,” was the inevitable reply, “have you seen our keys?”

Have you seen my keys?

Saturday, 09:30hrs

Inside, the agent ordered the Parisian Drug Mule to place the four fingers of her right hand onto the green screen on his desk. “Press hard,” he told her, but she trembled to the point that the machine couldn’t read her fingerprints. He reached out and held her hand tight against the glass. It shook in his grasp.

Suddenly, the officer in the next stall spoke: “Are you eating an apple?” he asked the Fearless Photographer, incredulous. Hearing this, a senior man at the back rose from his desk and marched over.

“Are you eating an apple in front of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer!?” he boomed, “That’s incredibly disrespectful!” and he turned on his heel and marched back to his desk where he dug out a plastic bag. The photographer dropped the core in and just as the supervisor was about to tie a knot, the photographer motioned for the bag again. He leaned forward and spat out a mouthful of brown apple.

He shook his head and scowled: “ugh, that part was all bruised.”

I imagined the cruel penetration of my new cellmate’s shiv. Jail seemed the only logical outcome.

But the border agent’s physical contact with the cute little Frenchie had changed something. Or maybe it was her accent. In any case: “Sasquatch, right?” he asked.

We nodded.

“The ratio’s like a hundred to one there, you know – you don’t need to bring any girls,” he said, smiling. And then, addressing the Mule: “Normally it’s $1,000 but I’ll let you go for six.”

We walked towards the door, certain that it was a cruel trick and that we would be arm barred and beaten at any moment.

Instead, we drove in silence for at least twenty minutes. “How much do you have?” I finally asked her.

“Only a joint,” she replied.

“Well, you better spark that fucking joint, Frenchie,” the photographer said.

Monday, 1:15pm

The young woman at the lost and found did little to convince us that we would see our bag even if it was turned in. “What colour was it?” she asked, uninterested and speaking in the past tense.

“Purple,” I said, weakly.

She looked around without leaving her chair. “Nope.”

We traded the lost and found lineup for the espresso one. An iced mocha prepared me as best it could for the two-mile march from the campground to the venue. I paused every fifty feet to gather myself and stave off vomit. Our Fearless Photographer was somehow full of energy, calling out to all the beautiful freaks to come have their picture taken by the infamous Dependent Magazine. Body paint, feathers and neon glasses were committed to digital memory as group after group posed for the camera.

Beautiful Freaks

“Go be a pussy somewhere else,” he told me, sensing my anguish, “you’re killing the mood.”

I opted for a nap on the grass beneath a tent inside the venue. What sounded like the Arcade Fire’s “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)” pulled me from a fitful, sweaty slumber. A trembling hand produced the schedule from my pocket – no mention of Arcade Fire. Was my insanity now complete? I opted not to care, joining the swaying crowd and feeling life become nearly bearable again as the band broke into a shining rendition of “Intervention”.

Saturday, 5:00pm

The Mule only had a ticket for Sunday. The folks at the media check-in had been there for days already and were too weary to fight with the Fearless Photographer when he claimed the Mule was shooting video for our interviews. “Next time, play by the rules,” they told us, wrapping a blue wristband around her anyway.

We walked straight to the beer tent and were directed to a man with a stack of yellow wristbands reading, “Drinking Age Verified”. I handed him my passport and asked what percentage of the folks he was approving were from Canada. “85%,” he claimed, “most of them are from Alberta, B.C., and what’s that other one between them?”

Eleven-dollar beers in hand we strolled to the crest of the natural amphitheater. I leaned forward through the crowd and took it all in. The Mule gasped when she first saw the stage, framed as it was by ten thousand people and set against the red rock of the Columbia River Gorge. “Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed in her thick French accent, “this is huge.” She meant amazing. I nodded, awestruck, even having seen it all before. On the stage were OK Go – the geniuses behind the infamous treadmill video, and incidentally, our first interview.

I made my way to the press area to wait for Tim Nordwind, the fellow hopping about the stage in a powder blue leisure suit and slapping the bass while thousands danced around him. I was ill-prepared. Still, I was confident that I would be able to make it up as I went and that a minor celebrity such as he would be no match for my wit.

I was wrong:

Tim Nordwind – OK Go – Interview

Monday, 6:20pm

I fought the urge to vomit for the duration of my interview with The Heavy. I would later skip interviews with Booka Shade and Boys Noize for similar reasons. As Band of Horses played, the shakes and the heat and the guilt of losing all my valuables proved overwhelming. I resigned myself to the long walk back to the tent where I would grab a quick nap and return, re-energized and at peace with my sins, to catch MGMT and Neon Indian.

Arriving at the campground I found the Fearless Photographer playing a game of “Flip Cup” with two of our Texan neighbours. “Oh, brew!” he cried out. I couldn’t see his face, obscured as it was by his hood and sunglasses, but his voice informed me that we was completely shit-faced. Apparently he had come back for a nap but the girls woke him up and demanded that he join their game.

“Did you even see a show today?” I asked.

“Oh, brew, I was so close, brew!” he said, cackling and putting an arm around the blonde at his side. She wore a tank top and skirt to his jeans and sweater. Her face paint had been smeared all down her neck and in her hair.

“Come play with us!” she insisted, drunkly.

I waved a finger and gagged at the prospect of consuming another drop of liquor and made a bed in the long grass instead. I was no match for the corn-fed charm of those girls from Texas and the relentless insults of the Fearless Photographer though. For my weakness the savvy veterans punished me with drink as I figured out how to balance the cup on the edge of the table and flip it over, to land on its top.

MGMT’s “Kids” pealed from the main stage and echoed through the canyon behind us. An hour later and my brain was sufficiently lubed to be motivated again. “Let’s go back to the festival,” I suggested.

“I want to see Band of Horses!” exclaimed the blonde, their set long finished.

“One more game!” shouted the brunette, again.

Afternoon refreshments

Saturday, 9:00pm

We exited the press area and headed to the main stage where Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk” was bursting from the sound system. Neither Broken Social Scene nor The National before them had the crowd so obviously engaged. I’d never been a fan of Vampire Weekend, but the clean, African sound of those middle-class Columbia boys set something in my soul alight.

The big screens zoomed close as the lead singer laid out the crowd’s responsibilities in “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)“. He looked more like the kind of boy that mum would like to have for dinner than the kind who’d be killing the main stage at an indie rock festival.

“For those of you who aren’t familiar with our work, this one has a little call and answer,” he explained. “When I sing … You sing …” and when the chorus hit and the band went silent and the crowd crooned, “Blake’s got a new face,” in that ridiculous falsetto, I couldn’t help but join in.

It was the best moment of the festival.

Monday, 9:45pm

“C’mere,” the Fearless Photographer hissed at me. He was slouched in one of the neighbour’s fold-up chairs, arm draped over the blonde who was telling the brunette how great the photographer was.

“I need you to get that brunette out of here,” he told me, loud enough for everyone to hear. “I don’t care how you do it, but I need you to help me out here, brother – for the team,” and he held out a limp fist. At this the blonde giggled and gave the group a guilty shrug.

I weighed my options.

“All right, grab your shit, honey – we’re going to the concert.”

“But what about these guys?” she slurred. “They have to come too!”

“They’re going to meet us there,” I assured her. She nodded and for the next twenty minutes buzzed about the campsite while the photographer and the blonde groaned and pleaded for me to take her away. Cathy packed provisions for a two-day expedition: leggings, blanket, jacket, sausages, chicken burgers, advil, tampons and twelve beers.

We made it as far as the portable toilets at the campground entrance, Cathy leaning heavily on my arm.

“You’re cute,” she said. And then: “I have to pee.”

“Uh huh.”

Ten minutes later she emerged, stumbled a few yards and collapsed in a heap. “Let’s just watch from here,” she suggested, sensibly.

I fished beer after beer from the bag and listened to the strains of Neon Indian, Ween and Boys Noize from the hill beside the toilets a mile from the stage while Cathy retched and heaved beside me.

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

Saturday, 10:10pm

A flash of our media wristbands and the three of us entered the pit just as My Morning Jacket stepped out. Four songs in and the photographer, the Mule and I exchanged a wordless glance that we all knew meant it was time to leave.

We caught the last few tracks of Z-Trip’s set – the best being a schizophrenic marriage of Jay-Z and Nirvana. Beside me a shirtless man with long hair pulled a small bag from his sock. He held it open as the Fearless Photographer licked a pinky finger and plunged it in, sucking the white powder off and grimacing as he did.

We danced like fiends in the pulsing, sweaty crowd until the music stopped and we pushed our way with everyone else to the late night stage. “Why the fuck didn’t you mention Z-Trip earlier?!” the photographer demanded. The Mule nodded her head enthusiastically.

Deadmau5 (pronounced Dead-mau-five to those sarcastic fans in the know) appeared to ferocious applause. With the nod of his head and flick of a switch, nasty, stinking bass burst from the speakers. It seemed especially filthy when compared to all the indie rock that had preceded it. The crowd cheered and surged. People shoved their way to the front. Young women balanced on young men’s shoulders and exposed their painted breasts.

We were treated to the most fantastic light show I’ve ever seen – the trademark mask becoming animated as the set progressed, culminating with its freakish, glitched out face singing “Sometimes Things Get Complicated”.

But it all came to a cruel and unexpected halt with a rising track that hinted at one last enormous bass drop that never came. The crowd moaned and the word “Deadmau5″ dominated the chatter of the energized masses heading back to camp for more booze, drugs or sleep.

Tuesday, 5:46am

The Fearless Photographer burst into my tent, wearing only half his pants and laughing uproariously. “Dude, I love those Texas girls!” he said.

“What’s all that yelling?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Well it sounds like your lady friend.”

“Oh. Yeah. She locked the keys in the van and someone’s got a flight to catch.”

“Should we remind them that the batteries are dead?” I suggested.

“Let’s wait a minute.”

“Can I have a sip of that beer?” I asked, sitting up.

“Sure. And hey, I called the Canadian Embassy – they can’t turn down any Canadian Citizen at the border.”

“Excellent, now we’ve just got to prove you’re Canadian.”

“Well, if we can’t I’ll just wait until next year. Meet me here?” he asked, passing the beer over Cathy.

“Fuck yeah,” I grinned.

More Photos

Gregor Robertson’s Vancouver just got even more bike-friendly.

On May 6, Vancouver’s city council voted to dedicate $25 million to its cycling program over the next two years. The investment will pay for a host of improvements to the city’s cycling network, and also fund a new ten-year plan for the city’s cycling program. Among other things, that plan will address strategies for getting commuters out of their cars and onto their bicycles. The mayor hopes that, come 2020, bicycles will account for 10% of all trips to work in Vancouver, three times what they accounted for in the 2006 census. It’s all part of the City’s strategy to become the “greenest city in the world.”

Some might say it’s an ambitious goal. But the Province, in an editorial penned the same day, called it hubristic. The writer dismissed the investment as a waste, sneering that council “[holds] to the adage in W. P. Kinsella’s Field of Dreams, ‘if you build it, they will come.’ While that may be true with fictitious ball players, the evidence is that it’s not working with commuters. Those interested in cycling to work already do.”

Do they? And is it a waste? While it’s easy to dismiss the Province’s grumbling as just another example of a Canwest paper hating on bicycles, the Field of Dreams reference is one of those annoying common-sense arguments that can be difficult to answer coherently. What if Vancouver really was throwing money at a nonexistent need? What if Vancouver commuters never completed more than 3.7% of their trips by bicycle?

Curious to know whether the City was riding down the right path, I made some phone calls in the hopes that someone could tell me what’s keeping Vancouverites off their bicycles now.

According to Dr. Kay Teschke, principal investigator of the University of British Columbia’s Cycling in Cities project, the two major factors keeping people away from bicycle commuting in Vancouver are lack of safety and inclement weather. “And safety trumps weather,” she says. Research conducted by Teschke and her colleagues shows that Metro Vancouver cyclists – from daily riders to those who hold their handlebars less than once a year – prefer riding in places where they don’t feel threatened by traffic. In descending order, these are off-street bike paths; on-street bike lanes separated by a barrier; and residential, traffic-calmed bikeways. However, of these options, only the residential bikeways feature prominently in the city’s bicycle route network, and Teschke speculates that the traffic calming on these routes often falls below cyclists’ standards. In other words, though Vancouver’s bike route network has grown to an impressive 415 lane-kilometres in recent years, it may not provide potential cyclists enough of a feeling of safety to entice them into riding.

The Burrard Bridge, however, may be the start of something quite new. Since last July, cyclists have had their own, fully separated lanes over the bridge. A few months after the changes, city staff reported that cycling trips across the bridge had increased by 26% over what would otherwise be expected. Female riders accounted for significantly more of the new trips than did male riders, something that Teschke says is consistent with expectations: “in the places where there are those kinds of facilities, we see a different demographic riding than in most of North America.” For instance, in Denmark and Holland, where separated bike facilities have been developed extensively, Teschke says “there’s virtually no difference between age groups and between sexes in the proportions riding.”

Scott Edwards, the City of Vancouver’s Greenways and Neighbourhood Transportation Engineer, sees the increased cycle volume on the Burrard Bridge as a sign that separated lanes do encourage more people to ride. Which is convenient, because the city is building more of them. He explains that city council is currently working on building connections between cycle-only lanes such as the Burrard Bridge, the Dunsmuir Viaduct, and the Seawall, and downtown. Construction has already begun on a fully separated, two-way bike track on Dunsmuir between the Viaduct and Burrard. This will later be followed by a north-south separated lane connecting the Dunsmuir route to the Burrard bridge. “We hope to see similar increases in…the numbers,” says Edwards. “Dunsmuir provides a great connection from the Adanac bikeway through to the downtown core.” In other words, cycling downtown, now only done by the brave and hardy, will soon be within reach of a broad range of riders.

Lack of safety may be the major factor keeping potential cyclists off the road, but weather plays a role too. And the difficult thing about bad weather is that, unlike safety conditions on the roads, you can’t do much to improve it. Research conducted through Cycling in Cities compared rates of participation in utilitarian cycling – that’s cycling for function, not for fun – in cities across Canada. Sure enough, the more it rained, the less people cycled. Nevertheless, Teschke dismisses the suggestion that a rainy climate makes Vancouver inhospitable for cyclists – “our weather,” she says, “and the weather in Copenhagen and Amsterdam are very similar.” People seem to do fine there. And besides, she adds, rain isn’t nearly as much of a deterrent as are snow and ice, and Vancouver is mostly free of these.

So can Vancouver develop a culture of cycling worthy of the greenest city in the world? Arno Schortinghuis, president of the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition, thinks so. He notes that Europe, now famously bicycle-friendly, became increasingly auto-dependent through the mid-20^th century. But being resource-poor has its advantages: “there was the oil shock in the 1970s, and [Europeans] realized, hey, we don’t have any oil – we’d better wake up here and do something. And that’s when they started switching to cycling.” Vancouver, he says, is where Copenhagen was forty years ago. “Now almost 40% of trips are made by bicycle, and [Copenhagen is] going gangbusters trying to make it 50.”

Teschke agrees that Vancouver has a fighting chance of getting more bikes on the road, but she measures her words. “We’ve got a long way to go,” she says. But even, she says, if Vancouver only got to its 10% target, the result would be worthwhile. The issue is one of choice, she says. In cities like Copenhagen, there are four main choices for a commuter – one can go by car, transit, on a bike, or on foot. But in Vancouver, the biking option is limited at best. And, “when you do make that available,” she says, “it really takes some of the pressure off the car option, because bikes take up far less room than cars. If you have one car on the road, that same space could be taken by three or even four bikes.”

And as for that 10%: “It’s a very realistic target.”

They own a condo in Yaletown.

They pay a mortgage.

They have two dogs.

On Sunday, they have brunch with the family.

And, every other weekend, they travel to a secret location in the suburbs to engage in a mutually-enjoyed pastime: having sex with other couples.

They are part of a growing number of Vancouverites – teachers, doctors, lawyers, and others – who have discovered the hidden, and often misunderstood world of the Lower Mainland’s Lifestyle community. “I don’t want to just come out and say that there’s a trend toward this kind of thing, but it’s supported by the numbers,” says Eve, co-founder of Club Eden, a Lower Mainland Lifestyle club. What started in North America in the 1940s as “Key Clubs,” and would later became known as “swinging” or “wife-swapping,” “Lifestyle” is the blanket term for a number of different ideas and behaviours, from traditional full-swap “swinging” to voyeurism and exhibitionism, to threesomes and bisexual exploration.

“Currently, Eden has close to 10,000 registered members, and I’d estimate that, in the four years we’ve been open, more than 12,000 people have come through our doors,” Eve explains. “With Eden, I’d like to think that we’ve taken the whole ‘swinger club’ concept, and turned it completely inside-out. We like to think of it more as a place to realize your fantasies. If you’re a swinger couple, then it’s a swinger club. If you’re a voyeur, it’s a voyeur club. If you like dancing in lingerie, it’s a lingerie party. Of the couples that come to Eden, I’d say about 40% of them full-swap. The rest are into other things.”

A private-members’ club with tasteful decor and high ceilings, Eden hosts two adult parties per month. Prospective member couples must submit a photograph, pay a membership fee, and sign an exhaustive contract before being granted entry. Downstairs is a bar, dance-floor and DJ, a place for couples to meet, flirt, and enjoy a few drinks in one another’s company. Upstairs are several curtained areas for single or multipartner interactions, a voyeur room with a small pane of glass embedded beside the door, an orgy area replete with cushions, and even a sex-swing on one edge of the expansive balcony.

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

But, as Ben, Jennifer, and Eve all maintain, despite the popular conception, sexual encounters within the Lifestyle Community are far from a free-for-all. “People still have this conception that it’s this place where you walk in, there are mattresses on the floor, you throw your keys in a bowl, and go upstairs with somebody, whether you want to or not,” Eve notes. “But the truth is, it’s nothing like that.” In fact, during sexual encounters (known within the community as “play”), couples operate within strict rules of etiquette, with each set of rules differing slightly from couple to couple. “When you go to a club scene, there are couples at all different levels of play,” explains Chris Winchester, who, together with his wife Christina, has been involved in the Lifestyle for more than five years. “And there’s all this lingo that goes with that. Some say: ‘oh, we’re soft swap,’ ‘we’re full-swap,’ or, ‘we’re girl/girl,’ ‘boy/boy.’ There are so many different possibilities.”

On their first night, new members are discouraged from playing with others. Club ambassadors, known somewhat cheekily as Friends With Benefits, are available to answer any questions or address concerns. Because, as experienced couples will attest, for newcomers, figuring out their own set of rules is not always an easy process. “Jealousy is the biggest thing,” says Ben, “but really, it doesn’t exist. And it’s only in the first few seconds of your first experience that you realize that. Jealousy is all tied into the idea of someone else winning over you, or beating you. But if you’re in a situation where they don’t have the ability to beat you, then there’s no sense in being jealous.” Jennifer agrees: “The number-one way of avoiding jealousy is just simply checking in with the other person. And, not checking in for the sake of checking in, but actually wanting to. It’s up to everybody to be mindful. You’re not so lost in the situation that you become unaware of everything around you. You’re still in a relationship. You’re going into this with your life-partner.”

For Ben and Jennifer, the journey to becoming a Lifestyle Couple was not necessarily a simple one. Nor did it happen overnight. “We started our relationship being very: ‘oh, let’s not talk about our exes; let’s not talk about other experiences,’” says Jennifer. “It was very much up on a pedestal, and it spiralled into a very fast moving-in-together, and a very fast marriage, and an equally fast breakup. From meeting, to marriage, to breakup, it all happened in the space of about four years.”

After spending more than a year apart, they reunited, reassessed their priorities, decided that their relationship was worth fighting for, and, after much deliberation, decided to give Eden a try. “That first night, nothing happened,” Ben admits, “Jennifer had very much been the driving force behind going in the first place, but when we got to the club, I was like, ‘hey, this is all right,’ and she was suddenly very panicked about the reality of the situation. It had seemed okay as a fantasy, but all of a sudden, the fact that it might actually happen was really shocking to her, and she ended up in the kitchen crying, because everything had suddenly just become so real.” Jennifer laughs, and says, “well, yeah. You show up and there are 35 couples there. That’s 70-odd people, and most of them are experienced Lifestyle couples…we just sat back and thought: ‘what are we doing here?’”

“When we left the club that night, it was a pretty quiet drive home,” Ben remembers. “We kind of said, ‘well, that was interesting,’ and then we made sure everything was cool, and then went, ‘it’s not for us right now.’ And it was almost a year before we went back.” But, after a year’s hiatus, Ben and Jennifer returned to Eden, and, after participating in an evening of Couples Speed-Dating, engaged in a soft-swap with another couple that same night. Since then, they have attended roughly two parties per month, as well as hosting their own. If it seems unusual that Jennifer was the driving force behind her and her husband’s entry into the Lifestyle, there is considerable evidence that shows this to be less than unusual. As the website for the North American Swing Club Association attests, “sexual and social assertiveness on the part of women at swing parties and other swing activities is not only acceptable, it has come to be expected.” In other words, the community is essentially driven by women. “Back in the 60s,” Ben notes, “it used to be called wife-swapping, but, these days, it’s more like husband-swapping.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

According to research provided by the North American Swing Club Association, roughly 15% of couples in North America have incorporated swinging behaviour into their relationship on at least one occasion. This is in stark contrast to the mere 2% and 3% recorded back in 1975 and 1983. Part of the reason for such a drastic jump in numbers may be due to the legal status of swinger clubs in Canada. Until 2005, Lifestyle clubs like Eden were considered “common bawdy houses,” defined as “a place used or frequented for prostitution, or for the purpose of acts of indecency.” Unfortunately for Lifestyle clubs, since the 1960s, “indecency” has lacked a clear definition in the Criminal Code, and is defined simply as “a general average of community thinking and feeling” (Dominion News and Gifts vs. The Queen, 1969). However, in December of 2005, a 7-2 Supreme Court decision rewrote the definition of indecency, labelling it instead as behaviour “confronting members of the public with conduct that significantly interferes with their autonomy and liberty, predisposing others to antisocial behaviour, or physically or psychologically harming persons involved in the conduct.” As Chief Justice Beverly McLauchlin noted at the time: “harm, or significant risk of harm is easier to prove than a community standard of decency.”

The decision overturned the convictions of several Lifestyle club operators in Quebec, and left the door open for dozens more to open across the country. But, as Ben and Jennifer note, the social stigma against the Lifestyle is still very present. “Some people come to the club, and won’t use their real names,” Chris admits. “There are people that have pretty sensitive jobs, or who are part of really conservative organizations, and there’s still this mindset where it’s: ‘if anybody finds out about this, I might lose my job.’ It’s the same thing that sometimes happens in the gay community, that people have to keep this part of their life a secret, and it’s so unfortunate.”

“Part of it is religious conditioning,” he continues. “We’ve met couples at Eden that were devoutly religious. And it’s a big adjustment for them. Because, how can you keep going to church if you’re openly disregarding so much of the Bible? How can you lead your church choir on Sunday, if, the night before, you were at Eden?”

When asked whether they feel comfortable sharing details of their sex lives with family or friends, the answer for each couple is a firm “no.”

“In a lot of ways, swinging is the new gay,” Chris Winchester muses, “because when you bring it up, it’s kind of like you’re coming out of the closet to your friends. It’s the same thing that happened – and still happens to people in the gay community. People say: ‘Oh, you’re gay. Well, you must be telling me because you’re hitting on me.’ It’s the same thing with us. People will go: ‘oh, you’re hitting on us,’ and it’s like, ‘no, not necessarily.’ We’re actually pretty picky.”

Despite the potential societal backlash, both couples agree that the benefits of the Lifestyle far outweigh the drawbacks. As Ben explains it: “Once you enter the Lifestyle, it’s sort of like being single again, except that you’ve got this partner in crime. You go on the prowl together. You’ve got a wingman. In fact, you’ve got the ultimate wingman. Because of life, because of long hours, like any couple, our sex lives drop off at some point. But then, we’ll go to a club night, or go to a party, and spend our night enjoying ourselves together, or with other people, and then, for the next three weeks, we’re just fucking like rabbits. Because we’re both so turned on by one another. It’s such a great way to charge our sex lives. It’s something we’re doing for one another.”

In a 2000 study conducted by Dr. Curtis Bergstrand of Bellarmine University, 60% of couples surveyed said that swinging improved their relationship, while only 1.7% claimed that it had detracted from it in some way. In addition, Lifestyle couples rated themselves as happier, with 59% of respondents describing their lives as “Very Happy”, versus a surprising 32% in the rest of those surveyed. And, with a recent Georgia Straight sex study showing that the majority of both males and females in Vancouver are having sex four times a month or less, with 22% of females and 28% of males in Vancouver admitting to having sex outside of their relationship in the past year, Ben, Jennifer, Eve, and the Winchesters remain convinced that discussing the Lifestyle is more important than ever. “The Lifestyle is something that should absolutely come up in any relationship,” Ben maintains. “Then, whether or not you act on it is up to you. People are always fascinated by Jen and I, because we’re not this stereotypical swinger couple…We have jobs. We have friends. We have normal conversations. Sunday, we go to brunch with Grandpa. We’re normal people. We just party different.”

“People think, sometimes, that you’re just born into this, and that you pop out ready to do it, but that’s really not the case,” says Jennifer. “It’s a choice you consciously make. It’s a process. And looking back, we can say, ‘well, if we’d known this, or we’d known that, we might have had a less bumpy road,’ but sometimes there are things you don’t expect until it happens. And we’re still learning.”

“To me, ‘Lifestyle’ is just a word,” Eve adds, “the ‘Lifestyle’ part of it isn’t so much about the sex. Sometimes that’s there, and sometimes it’s not. It’s about the mindset of honesty and communication.”

When asked if there are any additional benefits, Ben and Jennifer both crack a smile.

“You ever been blown by two girls at the same time?” Ben asks. “That’s a fucking benefit.”

For further information on The Lifestyle, visit Eve’s blog at www.sugarspiceandsexadvice.com

Terminated by BC Place on one end and Lost Lagoon on the other, Robson Street stretches out as a bustling sidewalk densely fronted by stores, restaurants, hotels, and apartment buildings. The street exists in our minds, not as a mere traffic route, but as a destination as well. Both mentally and physically, it is a clearly bounded space. Now humour me and picture yourself in that space. Place yourself at Robson Square. Feel the energy of the crowds moving around you – young mothers with children in strollers, elderly couples, teenagers, leashed dogs, tourists. Breathe in the life that surrounds you.

Now face west and head down the sidewalk. As you stroll past shop after shop – brand-name clothing boutiques, déclassé souvenir shops, bars, cafes and trendy places to eat – you can’t help but be stimulated by the variety of people and things to look at. Take note of the street performer wailing on her guitar, the pin-traders desperately trying to unload 2010 Olympic merchandise. Have a clumsy chat with whoever happens to be plugging an issue on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Have a look into the road. If the weather is pleasant enough you’ll see aggressive young men in cars cruising slowly down the street. If you’re like me, the presence of these noisy, motorized peacocks might ruffle your feathers. Relax – it isn’t worth your while to get flustered by such boisterous male display. Better to notice that the slow-moving and sometimes gridlocked traffic these grandstanders are wedged in is contributing to your sense of ease as a pedestrian. Unlike Broadway, Main, or Commercial, on Robson there are no two-ton steel projectiles hurtling down the roadway.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

It is this pedestrian comfort that makes Robson Street work so well. Between Burrard and Jervis everything is built to a human scale and moves accordingly. The environment is compact, the destinations within walking distance. Awnings provide shelter on a rainy day. Store signage isn’t so big as to be dispiriting – like the huge golden arches staked alongside almost every suburban thoroughfare.

Designed with people in mind, the regularity of the streetscape creates an inviting room-like quality. The street and sidewalk supply the floor, while the storefronts provide the walls. And these are not blank, faceless walls either. They’re windows, doors, and balconies – providing a glimpse into what’s going on inside, or outside. The street is the focus of everything, and the result is an overwhelming sense of place.

The height of the buildings allows sunlight to reach the sidewalk, and when the sun is beaming down, a canopy of evenly spaced trees offers respite. Robson’s east-west orientation allows pedestrians to choose whether to stroll the sunny or shady side of the street, and in the fall or winter, when the deciduous trees have shed their leaves, the sun is allowed to shine through.

The street trees add further to your sense of ease. The trees, combined with the steel barricade of parked cars along the sidewalk, protect pedestrians from automobiles rumbling past. People on the sidewalk can relax, and not constantly be on guard against the possibility of a stray auto. The on-street parking also slows cars down. Drivers tend to move more cautiously when confronted with the prospect of another car pulling out into their path, especially when there’s only a single lane in each direction. This smaller road width slows traffic and also allows pedestrians to cross the street more easily, and thus more frequently. Retail reaps the benefits.

The relationship between increased traffic safety and denser, human-scaled retail streets is now well known. What Robson and its surrounding neighbourhood offers is a cozy and secure landscape that is navigable for those not in cars. Less than a third of West End residents depend on automobiles for transportation. The rest either use public transport, cycle, or simply walk to wherever they need to be. Things, however, could’ve ended up very differently.

North American road designers had one overriding objective through the mid- to late-twentieth century: to facilitate the rapid movement of vehicles. In the 1960s, Robson Street nearly succumbed to Motordom when plans were put in motion to set back new buildings an additional six feet from the road, with the goal of adding an extra lane in each direction. It’s hard to imagine what the street might have become. Thankfully, the plans never came to fruition, and today Robson remains a comfortable, shared social space and a public amenity, making it distinctive amongst Metro Vancouver streets.

The Robson shopping experience, however, is anything but distinctive. Shops like Tommy Hilfiger, La Senza, Roots, and Banana Republic offer products that can be obtained in shopping malls and on streets throughout the region. The fact that people flock here is telling: more than the shopping, it’s the space that draws people to Robson.

Centered in the Riverkeeper’s complaint is the Iona Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. The largest in Metro Vancouver, Iona pumps 500 million litres of primary sewage into the Strait of Georgia every day. An upgrade of the aging facility has long been on the radar of environmentalists and politicians but the billion dollar price tag has senior government doing all it can to push back the timeline.

To better understand the issue, The Dependent scheduled a walking tour of Metro Vancouver’s “poster-child” for wastewater treatment: Annacis Island.

Frank Dolemeyer, Operations Supervisor at Annacis, served as tour guide. He explained that incoming wastewater, known as “influent”, is first put through a mechanical process known as primary treatment. It’s screened for large debris and then pumped into holding tanks where the heavier particles sink as “sludge”, and the fats, oil and grease rise to the top as “scum”. Both are removed by metal arms slowly raking the tanks.

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

With the removal of sludge and scum, primary treatment ends. The effluent is an odoriferous, sickly brownish-grey, with about half of its solids removed.

As organic matter in wastewater decomposes it consumes oxygen. Effluent too high in organic material creates oxygen-starved areas devoid of life. A standard Canadian wastewater test places ten rainbow trout into a tank of undiluted effluent; if less than half of the fish survive, the plant is said to have failed the test. Primary treatment facilities reduce the oxygen requirements of effluent by approximately 30% – just enough for half of the fish to survive. This is the treatment employed at the Iona facility.

Annacis takes it a few steps further: those large geodesic domes visible from the Alex Fraser Bridge are called trickling filters. They mark the start of a biological and chemical process known as secondary treatment. Inside the domes are enormous honeycomb structures through which effluent slowly filters. As the water descends, the tiny organisms inside it attach themselves to the honeycomb material. Oxygen and temperature levels inside the domes are closely regulated, and a thriving colony of microorganisms is grown large enough to eat great quantities of the waste in the water. It is an ingenious and effective process, where in essence, the wastewater is used to clean itself. The effluent leaving Annacis is clear and smells faintly of chlorine.

According to Dolemeyer, the secondary treatment employed at Annacis reduces the oxygen demands of the effluent by approximately 90%. Being something of a layman, I wanted him to put it into terms that I could understand, so I asked him if he would drink it.

“Absolutely not,” was his utterly humourless reply.

While you may not make ice cubes with it, tests show that the effluent coming from secondary treatment plants like Annacis Island, Lulu Island and Northwest Langley is not acutely toxic to fish, and once it’s diluted by the Fraser River, Metro Vancouver asserts that it poses marginal environmental concern. For those of us living in Richmond, Delta or anywhere east of Burnaby, you may therefore flush with a clear conscience, whereas those of us flushing in Vancouver proper should be very ashamed indeed. Our wastewater flows through combined storm and sanitary sewers to the Iona Island or Lions Gate facilities, both of which offer primary treatment only.

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

“They [Iona] operate on a permit from the Provincial Government,” explained Douglas Chapman of Fraser Riverkeeper,  “and as part of their procedures they have to sample their effluent every month and do a toxicity test on it. They usually fail about four tests in a twelve month period. It seems that in the summer they have problems when there’s not as much rain and the wastewater isn’t as diluted.”

Chapman is one of the main drivers of the citizen submission and is no stranger to environmental law. Working as a crown prosecutor in Ontario, he was responsible for Canada’s first environmental conviction that resulted in jail time. He was also involved in a private prosecution of the Annacis Plant before its upgrade to secondary treatment. In 2007, Chapman was the informant in another private prosecution against the Provincial Government and what is now Metro Vancouver, charging that the Iona and Lions Gate facilities are operated in contravention of the Federal Fisheries Act.

The act, which prohibits releasing a substance known to be “deleterious” to fish into fish-bearing waters, has been used to successfully convict Dawson City, Yukon and Iqaluit, Nunavut, confirming that untreated effluent is known to be “deleterious” to fish.

Still, Chapman’s 2007 case was never likely to succeed. “The [Federal] Attorney General has a policy of staying private prosecutions against the B.C. Government,” explained Devon Page, Executive Director of Ecojustice. Ecojustice represented Chapman in the case. “It’s something we’ve been fighting for as long as we’ve been around. From my perspective, it’s based upon the presumption that only the government is entitled to act as a watchdog on environmental issues. We take the position that they aren’t doing a very good job.”

In November 2008, the Federal Attorney General stayed the charges as expected, declaring the case not in the public interest and furthermore, unlikely to result in a conviction. How the A.G. came to those conclusions, in spite of a Provincial Judge approving them has never been revealed. To find out, Ecojustice filed a Freedom of Information request. The Attorney General disputed the request, claiming the information was privileged. The FOI Commissioner overruled, declaring that documents pertaining to the decision had to be disclosed. The A.G. turned them over, almost fully blacked out. Ecojustice continues to pursue the matter on behalf of Mr. Chapman.

In the meantime, the T. Buck Suzuki foundation may explain why the prosecution was stayed: In their 2004 Sewage Report Card, Vancouver receives a “C-”, and in the executive summary they note that “as Provinces are often compelled by law to share the cost of infrastructure upgrades such as new sewage treatment plants with local governments, they are often loath to prosecute these same entities as the only logical outcome of such prosecution would be a demand for system upgrades.”

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

By the end of 2008 the global economy had all but finished its free-fall. The beginning of 2009 saw the B.C. Liberals announce the first provincial budget deficit in five years. The appetite for cost-sharing on a $1.4 billion project was unlikely. In fact, it still is. Metro Vancouver is currently in the process of drafting a new Liquid Waste Management Plan. The document, which must be approved by the B.C. Minister of the Environment, will formalize the timeline for upgrading the Iona and Lions Gate facilities. Metro Vancouver is pushing to complete both by 2020, but the Provincial Environment Minister has rejected any cost-sharing language in the plan.

“It’s imperative that we replace both of them [Iona and Lions Gate],” said Malcolm Brodie, Chair of the Metro Vancouver Finance Committee, “and the only thing that’s holding the replacement of both of them back is the senior-level government financial contribution. If we knew it was one-third, one-third, one-third on each, we could confidently put it into the plan for 2020.” Without Provincial and Federal assistance, Metro Vancouver is faced with the unpopular necessity of raising their sewerage fees astronomically. In a report to Metro Vancouver Board of Directors, Brodie’s Finance Committee predicted Vancouver’s annual household sewerage levy to rise from $160 in 2010 to $1171 by 2030.

Further complicating the development of the new Plan is the unveiling of the Canada-wide Strategy for the Management of Municipal Wastewater Effluent. The new Strategy sets modern standards for wastewater treatment across Canada and provides a framework for assessing plant upgrade priorities based on factors including volume and discharge environment. A new definition in the Strategy may see the Georgia Strait defined as “open marine environment” and  the Iona timeline extended from the current Provincial mandate of 2020 to 2030.

Christianne Wilhelmson is the Executive Director of the Georgia Strait Alliance. She was involved in the 2007 Ecojustice private prosecution and has played a heavy part in the development of the new Canada-wide Strategy. She says she was surprised by the new definition and stops just short of suggesting that it was crafted specifically by senior government to extend the Iona time frame: “My cynical mind says that they created that just so that Iona – well, I don’t get where those numbers come from. I’ve seen no rationale. I’d like to.”

Indeed, the new definition fits the Iona discharge profile rather snugly:

With no apparent support for near-term plant upgrades by senior levels of government, all signs point to the continuation of primary treatment at Iona for the next twenty years. For Douglas Chapman, the international filing, which has no enforcement component, is an attempt to raise the profile of these issues and get some answers: “I want to know why the Government of Canada isn’t following their own environmental laws.”

Something to think about the next time you flush in Vancouver…

Pondering life, love and the treatment of residential wastewater at the Annacis Island WWTP

It’s midnight on a cool September evening in Vancouver. At Howe and Robson cars and buses rumble down the pavement and a few groups of inebriated youths wander towards the nightly gong show on Granville. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Then from somewhere down Howe there comes a crowd of twenty or more bicycles, sprawling across two lanes of the road, riders shouting and singing. One by one, they roll down the wheelchair ramp into Robson Square. Six of them immediately ride onto the polished concrete of the outdoor ice rink and produce what look like croquet mallets. Somebody rides to the ends of the rink and makes two goals from traffic cones. Somebody else throws in an orange hockey ball, everyone yells out “one-two-three kill!” and, without any further ceremony, a game of hardcourt bike polo begins.

One rider blocks the goal with the wheels of his bike, leaning on his mallet to stay upright. Meanwhile the other five compete for the ball, swirling around and cutting in front of each other, passing the ball with their mallets and deflecting it off their wheels. One rider gains possession and starts to make a break for the goal, but another bicycle veers in front of her to block her play. The attacker makes a sharp turn to avoid the sudden check, but her wheels fly out from underneath her: even without ice, the rink is slippery. She picks herself up and rides on. Play continues, and a few goals are scored before the security guards arrive to evict the players, who ride off to transform another public space into an impromptu court.

I watched all of this happen from the sidelines that time, but maybe I shouldn’t have. “We try to be nice to new [players],” veteran Vancouver bike polo player Rory Crowley told me later. And, in fact, most of Crowley’s fellow players were themselves new to bike polo not long ago. The sport only came to Vancouver in the last few years, having emerged from Seattle, where it originated at a bicycle courier competition in the 1990s. Since then, bike polo has spread around the world – clubs are listed in twenty-nine countries on The League of Bike Polo, a website players from around the world use to coordinate meets and tournaments. East Van Bike Polo, the largest polo community in Vancouver at around thirty players, dates itself back to 2006 when its founding members first picked up mallets and began to learn the game.

Don’t be fooled by the words sport and league, though, because, as Crowley argues, bike polo might not be for the traditional athletic set. “There are definitely bike jocks out there,” he says, “who drink Red Bull or Gatorade at the tournaments, and who don’t drink beer or anything else.” But in East Van Bike Polo, they’re an exception, not the rule. He does believe that having played other sports can help a new player learn the game. But, when it comes down to it, Crowley thinks “that most…bike polo players are bike polo players first, and athletes – maybe third or fourth. Bike polo doesn’t really keep you fit,” he says, adding that the quantity of beer consumed by some during play cancels the effects of the exercise.

Bike polo straddles urban bicycle culture and maker culture. Drop by Grandview Park any Saturday after two o’clock in the afternoon and you’ll see the East Van Bike Polo crowd competing on an array of cobbled-together machines. Although you can now buy ready-made polo bikes from a handful of manufacturers, most players choose to assemble their own, often from second-hand parts. Old steel frames, after all, are more durable than the aluminum ones commonly sold nowadays. Any number of modifications can transform an old bike into a polo bike – putting on strengthened wheels, reversing the brake levers so that the rear brakes can be pulled with the left hand (freeing up the right hand for a mallet), shortening the handlebars. Most polo bikes have only one speed, and the gearing is often low to allow for better control.

As much as bike polo is becoming a worldwide phenomenon, it’s still a friendly scene in Vancouver. East Van Bike Polo member Lisa Moffatt sees it that way. “We don’t like to think of ourselves as a club. It’s more of a community.” Most of the players live within a short bike ride of Grandview Park, and they’re a diverse bunch. Moffatt describes the crowd: “There’s physicians; Rory works as a college instructor; there’s high school teachers; there’s social workers; I’m an urban planner; there’s people who run their own businesses; we’ve got artists; we’ve got people who are recovering crack addicts.” Moffatt says that people have even moved across Vancouver to be closer to the bike polo community. “Including myself,” she says, hastily adding: “That wasn’t the only reason.”

As a woman, Moffatt represents a minority of bike polo players. But in Vancouver, it’s a strong one – women account for about a third of the East Van Bike Polo community. Last year she organized a female-only bike polo tournament at Grandview Park, possibly the first in the world, which drew ten teams of women players from all across North America. “It was a response to women not being selected for the higher-performing teams at [other] tournaments,” she says. Though bike polo is usually played in mixed-gender teams, she feels that the escalating competition coming from the sport’s popularity is deterring new women players. “It’s harder for girls to crack into the game,” she says, of cities where bike polo has emerged more recently than it did in Vancouver. “It’s a little bit of a boys’ club.”

There might be one fundamental barrier that makes it hard for girls and boys alike to take up the sport: the fear of injury. Crashes are common in bike polo, and anyone who takes the game up has to be prepared to fall off their bike at some point. But Crowley maintains that new players are given space. “The way that we try to play with new players,” he says, “is that we treat them with a bit of respect…We give them a little bit of space, and let them play around with the ball a little bit…[At first] you let them roll around and cause their own crashes rather than us causing their crashes.”

Sound painful? Maybe. But even the stalwarts of East Van Bike Polo were once spectators, hesitating on the sidelines. Moffatt remembers her first bike polo game: “People were, like, falling all over the place, crashing into each other, and I was going, ‘there’s no way that I am getting myself onto this court.’ Anyway, I did, and I had a great time. I went home with some new bruises, and it’s been a love affair ever since.”

Want to try bike polo? Bring a bike that you’re willing to thrash around a little to Grandview Park (Commercial Drive & Charles Street) any Saturday after 2:00 PM – the East Van Bike Polo crowd welcomes newcomers. You can build your own mallet or try to borrow one at the courts. You should definitely wear a helmet.

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Abstract

It is widely speculated that the hipster is one of the fastest growing mammalian species in Metro Vancouver (Haddow, 2008; Henley, 2005), but to date these statements have amounted to little more than conjecture.

Efforts to obtain a reliable hipster count through conventional human population surveys have been confounded by physical appearance, grouping habits and migration patterns.

Capture-recapture techniques are commonly used to estimate the size of elusive subject groups. Here we apply a simple capture-recapture method to hipsters in Vancouver.

Introduction

Traditional methods of population estimation have proven ineffective when applied to hipsters.

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

One of the main factors preventing a regular count of the hipster is its physical appearance. Plaid and stripes break up body outlines, and a group of hipsters standing close together is often indistinguishable from a single individual. Black skinny jeans or leggings serve a similar purpose, confusing the eyes of predators, and rendering counts through direct observation unreliable.

Further complicating the task is the elusive nature of the hipster. By definition, a hipster hangout is a place you’ve never heard of, and once outsiders identify a culturally-significant location, it is quickly abandoned in favour of a new, unknown venue.

To overcome these difficulties, we have employed a simple two-capture formula commonly used in marine ecology. This method is based on the probability of encountering the same hipster following two subsequent sampling sessions.

Expressed as a formula:

where
N = Total hipster population
R = Total hipsters captured in Sample 1
P= Total hipsters captured in Sample 2
X = Count of hipsters captured in Sample 1 and Sample 2

Subjects were isolated from the group at random for capture then marked for future identification. To avoid unnecessary injury or distress individuals were marked by sleeve tattoos. The employment of this identification method was preferred, as it seemed to have no effect on the subject’s subsequent survival or reintegration back into its cohort.

Before release individuals were measured for beard length, pant cuff tension, and general distaste for all things the examiner liked using the Pearson-Polanowski test.

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

Data and Findings

Sample 1 was taken at a Red Cedar / Yukon Blonde CD Release Party, where 413 unique individuals were cataloged entering the premises. Sample 2, taken at the ASTORIA ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY!!! realized a count of 370 individuals, 2 of which had been observed in Sample 1.

Thusly,

N = 413*370 / 2

N = 76,405

Supplementary Data and Discussion

While hipster numbers appear generally healthy, observations made during Sample 2 at The Astoria support the hypothesis that their numbers are actually on the decline.

Ostensibly, the Hipster is a pack animal, but despite repeated observation, no discernible Alpha Male has been identified. Unlike other pack mammals, both male and female hipsters engage in the act of display,  engaging in rhythmic courtship rituals and presenting their plaid plumage with no apparent preference for selection versus display.

Photo Credit: Jesse Donaldson

The creature’s poor eyesight, as evidenced by the proliferation of thick-rimmed glasses, further complicates the selection process, and may explain why of the 413 individuals sampled, only 8 appeared to be active breeding pairs.

The dietary habits of the hipster exert additional negative population pressure. Subjects at The Astoria were observed consuming large amounts of an offensive-tasting fermented beverage. Its low cost of acquisition ($3.75 per serving) appears to encourage an increase in its consumption.

While the variants ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon’, ‘Lucky Lager’, and ‘Pacific Pilsner’ are not consumed by the larger mammals of Granville Street, similar beverages there have had decidedly negative effects on the health of local populations (Eustace, 2009).

Conclusion

The size of the hipster community makes the lack of available data particularly concerning. The downward pressures exerted on the species support the hypothesis that they may actually be on the decline, making growth trending ever more important.

The health of the current population provides science with a tremendous opportunity to collect data on this elusive creature. Mating habits, home ranges and dietary data, in addition to population counts, are critical for future conservation efforts.

Application of the capture-recapture method over multiple time periods is recommended to establish and monitor the ongoing trend, and scientists are encouraged to take up other avenues of data collection, lest we lose this strange and magnificent creature forever.

Waiting just in case, was a crowd of opposition protesters, their numbers estimated anywhere from 150 to 400 people. At the front of the group stood about 30 demonstrators assembled in the now-familiar Black Bloc, holding wooden batons and a large banner reading, ‘NAZI SCUM FUCK OFF!’.

David Eby, Executive Director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, stood on the fringes of the crowd as a legal observer. He said he understood the desire for anonymity amongst the protesters.

“It’s to prevent people from being identified as individuals and followed home or victimized later,” he said.

Confrontation flared only once, as two young men were said to have spat on the sign held by the Black Bloc protesters.

A man in a black hood, accused of spitting on an anti-racism banner talks to media. To the left, a man in a green hoodie talks to police.

Maitland Cassia, media liaison for the Vancouver chapter of the anti-racist organization A.R.A., believed they were scouts for the Neo-Nazi march.

“Two guys came out of a car, looked at our group and were like, ‘holy shit’. Then two guys came through wearing hoodies and sunglasses and said, ‘Oh, where’s all our friends?’, and spat on the A.P.C. [Anti-Poverty Committee] banner,” Cassia said.

A young man standing behind the banner, wielding a wooden baton, confirmed the events, saying one of the men who spat on the sign was wearing a green patterned hoodie. “We tried to catch up with them, but they were behind the pigs.”

Asked what he would have done had he caught them, the man responded: “I don’t know, hopefully smash them.”

As we arrived on the upper level of the station we witnessed two men surrounded by police, media, and a handful of demonstrators. A man in a green hoodie told the cameras that people suddenly started calling him a Nazi. “We hate all races equally,” he assured them.

The men were escorted onto a Skytrain without incident.

An hour later, Maitland Cassia addressed the crowd, thanking them for their participation and declaring the action a success.

“To the art gallery,” he called out through a bullhorn. “Let’s party.”

Rally Legitimacy

News sites have been abuzz with comments questioning whether the rally was ever going to happen.

The story appears to have originated on the website of  Anti-Racist Canada: The ARC Collective. The original story, no longer available on their site, was posted February 22nd, and included pictures of Travis Annan and Lee Peacock, who the site claimed were the organizers of the event.

Maitland Cassia addresses anti-racism protesters at Braid Skytrain Station, New Westminster

The assertion appears to be based upon a dead web page and a now-defunct Facebook group that detailed the march and listed Annan and Peacock as the organizers.

A March 8th story run by the Georgia Straight generated a number of comments questioning the legitimacy of the rally, many of which were focused on the credibility of  No One Is Illegal, the organization used by the Straight as its exclusive source of information. NOII has come under public fire for their support of the Black Bloc tactics that resulted in broken windows during the Heart Attack 2010 protest.

An NOII press release stated that they had received their information from the A.R.A.

“We have received information from Anti Racist Action and other groups that a white pride/neo-nazi group is planning a rally in the Lower Mainland on March 21st, 2010,” the statement read.

Maitland Cassia, media liaison for A.R.A., confirmed that his organization’s information was based on posts made on the Anti-Racist Canada website, and supplemented by the A.R.A.’s own investigations on Facebook.

Travis Annan meanwhile, claims he had nothing to do with the rally, and that someone used his identity online. In a comment made on Cassia’s press release, someone identifying themselves as Annan’s wife said that Annan opposed the rally, and that assertions that he was involved had put his safety in jeopardy:

“That picture you have on your site is my husband.(TA) I am cut out of the picture. who ever planed this march posed as him. He has nothing to do with this and is upset about his name being slandered. I completely disagree with the march and so does he. This has taken a horrible affect on myself and him. And i hate that his face is being posted all over this. When he had nothing to do with it. This has now put my husband and i in danger.”

Cassia confirmed he had been contacted by someone claiming to be Annan’s wife, who made similar assertions. While he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that someone could have organized the online rally in Annan’s name, Cassia said he doubted it.

“I know they talked to the Province and the Canadian Media as well, but neither could ascertain the veracity of their claims,” he said.

At the time of writing, The Dependent has not received confirmation on the source of the ARC Collective’s information detailing Travis Annan’s participation, nor have we had any success contacting Travis Annan directly.

Questions surrounding the legitimacy of the rally aside, the greeting to be expected for Nazis in Vancouver is abundantly clear:

For Fujon Hair salon on Denman, the Olympics marked the worst month of sales in nine years. Jay Hur, owner of Teresa’s Cafe, said his business was down 20%. Even Kingyo Izakaya, normally packed on Friday and Saturday nights, saw sales slow: “Our numbers were down 5%. The West End was dead,” said owner Minoru Tamaru.

Kingyo’s business has returned, but for some the effects of a quiet February linger on: “We spent so much– hiring staff, training them, stocking product according to summer inventories,” explained Jimmy Brar, owner of Characters on Davie Street.

The restaurant, in its eleventh year, saw this February down 70% over the last.

“Davie Street had nothing– no flowers, no lights. There should have been something happening in this area,” Brar said.

Tom Chambers, general manager at True Confections, echoed similar sentiments: “We were hoping that the business association would do a bit more.”

Four days into the games, Lyn Hellyar, Executive Director of the West End Business Improvement Association, told us she had received no feedback from her members, and wouldn’t be talking to them until she was back in town, the first week of March. A sign on the BIA door later confirmed she was away on vacation.

But not all the associations closed up shop:

“We’ve been sprinting a marathon for 15 days now — that’s the only way I can describe it,” said Annette O’Shea, Executive Director at the Yaletown BIA.

According to O’Shea, Yaletown started talking Olympic strategy four years ago, and adjusted their budget for the last two.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” she said, “and really successful for small business. We have 900 members, 275 of which are ground floor– ground floor of course has had the greatest impact– but across the board all of them have had the best February ever. In fact, within the first four days of the games, they had already beaten their Feb ’09, and it’s just gotten better and better.”

Yaletown was undoubtedly blessed — with the construction of the Canada Line, its proximity to the major venues, and its hosting of the LiveCity site, the neighbourhood seemed destined to benefit from the games — but the BIA deserves some credit as well.

‘Made in Vancouver’ was a 15-day street festival with 3 sound stages, a fashion stage, buskers, acrobats and jazz, put on by the BIA and ‘I Heart Van Art’. The festival featured some 3,000 hours of live entertainment performed by artists who worked for nothing more than a place to showcase their talents.

“For the last two years our BIA said, ‘let’s focus everything we can on getting the most out of this Olympic opportunity’,” said O’Shea.

When the city said it would cancel the LiveCity Yaletown site, O’Shea fought for its survival. “We lobbied very hard to ensure LiveCity happened, and that the city was aware that it was welcomed and supported here, and that we would do what we could to help it.”

“We wouldn’t have been very successful if it hadn’t been for the David Lam site,” she added.

The Yaletown BIA, like its West End counterpart, is funded by local businesses, who pay through a city-imposed levy on property taxes. The budgets are put to vote at an Annual General Meeting, and require final approval by city council.

Yaletown, with its base of around 900 members, received $531,003.13 in tax levies from the city for 2009/10.

The West End BIA received $600,000.01 from around 800 members– the second highest grant in Vancouver.

Originally founded as the Davie Village BIA, then spanning only three blocks, the association expanded its boundaries to include Davie Street West, Denman Street, and a portion of Robson. After the required notifications and public hearings, the expansion was approved by council for April 1st, 2007, and the grant jumped from $160,000 to $500,000.

The BIA expansion process requires that 33.3% of affected merchants or property owners submit written objection if an expansion is to be denied. Votes not cast are assumed to be in favour– or least not openly opposed.

According to City BIA Program Coordinator, Peter Vaisbord, no expansion request in Vancouver has ever been denied. The West End was close though; including letters of objection received after deadline, holders of 29.9% of the assessed land value opposed its creation. 35 individual merchants (9.2% of the total) also wrote in to protest.

Three years later and the association has yet to gain a firm foothold with its new members, and struggles to reach the 15 votes required for quorum at its AGM.

In a March 10th interview, Lyn Hellyar identified awareness amongst her members as a key issue: “A lot of merchants don’t even know they’re a member, which to me is almost incredible, because if you’re running a business and you’re paying money out towards something, you’d think you’d want to know what it was going to do.”

Part of the disconnect occurs in the way the city collects the levy, which is itemized on the property tax to the landlord, but may never be shown to the tenant, who ultimately bears the cost.

Aftab Ali Khan, owner of Ciao Bella and La Bistro de Paris, has hosted BIA meetings in the past, but said he had no idea he was paying into it. Like many others in the West End, he wishes the BIA did more for the Olympics. “Nothing happened. It was very disappointing. It was like a big party and we were not invited.”

Khan has never voted at any of the West End BIA’s general meetings, and is beginning to think he needs to participate. “I should be a part of it,” he said, “it would be much better.”

“Perhaps it’s my fault too,” he added.

Lynn Hellyar speaks frankly about the challenges in her catchment: “I could have a wonderful board because I have all kinds of contacts downtown. I’ve got people that would say yes to come sit on my board, but I can’t ask them because you have to be either a property owner or a merchant within the boundary [...] My pool isn’t as good as what his [Charles Gauthier, Executive Director of the Downtown BIA] is.”

As for the Olympics, Hellyar said the BIA’s options were limited: “We couldn’t have had a live site — that was VANOC mandated — but maybe we could have had one of the pavilions. In terms of having a big screen TV [...] even if we had wanted to have one and could get permission, we don’t have that kind of budget.”

The West End BIA focused instead on an awareness campaign, centered around their hand-delivered newsletter: “I realized that a lot of our merchants were just oblivious to the Olympics. The Olympics were happening ‘there’, not ‘here’. And so they weren’t thinking in terms of, okay, we should decorate for this, we should do promotions– there’s things that we should do. So we started to try and tell them about the things that they could do.”

Sean McCann, proprietor of Fun-O-Rama on Denman, fished the latest newsletter from the trash beneath his desk. “I have no idea what they do aside from put up banners and pay those guys who walk around in the red clown suits,” he said, referring to the Downtown Ambassadors program, funded in part by the West End BIA.

“We’ve got a printer right across the street and they get their printing done outside of the West End,” he said, holding the newsletter.

McCann said that given the opportunity he would vote the BIA out, but like the vast majority of business owners in the area, he doesn’t attend the annual general meetings.

While the future of the embattled association may be uncertain, one thing is not: in a democracy, you must speak for your voice to be heard.

He was speaking at a VIVO-hosted discussion on ‘diversity of tactics’, and was addressing specifically the black-clad demonstrators who clashed with police and smashed windows during the Feb. 12th, 2010 ‘Heart Attack’ Olympic protest.

The same evening David Eby was making this statement, I was cornered by activists at the Olympic Tent Village and threatened while Olympic Resistance Network spokesperson Harsha Walia snatched my cell phone and deleted my audio recordings.

At around 8.40pm, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010, photographer Liam Hanham and I entered the Olympic Tent Village at 58 W Hastings, intending to cover reports of undercover police officers infiltrating and provoking the encampment. At the entrance we greeted the half dozen people milling about with a nod and ‘hello’.

“Okay everyone, we’re about to start the meeting,” a woman called out as we surveyed our surroundings.  We opted to pass the two dozen people gathering beneath the large tarps near the entrance, and proceed into the heart of the camp.

Inside, only two people were visible: a man who exited the toilet and disappeared beneath a tarp, and a young woman from Calgary who sat in front of a fire drinking orange liquor from a plastic bottle.

She invited us to sit and talk.

“It’s complicated,” was all she would say about her current situation. She declined to give us her name.

We made our way over to the meeting.

The three of us stood outside the circle while I activated the voice recording on my phone and stepped through the outer ranks. As I did, a university-aged woman wearing a fashionable rain jacket noticed the glow from my phone and asked me what I was doing.

“I’m recording.”

“Are you a journalist?”

“Yes.”

“Who are you with?”

“The Dependent Magazine, here in Vancouver.”

With this, she turned her attention back to the speaker: a man who appeared to be in his mid thirties, talking about security and the need to protect the camp from the police and anyone trying to get in to take photographs. He outlined a strict no-alcohol policy.

I stepped into the open center of the circle and leaned against a pole which supported the tarp overhead.

A middle-aged woman with long, curly hair began to speak. I pointed the microphone at her.

She explained the ultimatum that had been issued to B.C. Housing to find permanent shelter for all the people in the camp. She said that she didn’t expect the demand would be met.

“We know they have spaces. We need to keep the pressure on,” she said. She then asked for suggestions from the group as to how to raise media awareness. Silence followed until a man behind me suggested they camp outside the B.C. Housing building. I turned and pointed the microphone to catch what he said.

Another man suggested a sit-in in their lobby.

A woman with a shock of curly, red hair chimed in: “I think it’s great that we’re finding places for people who want them, but what about the people who want to stay on the streets?” she asked.

The time on my recording registered just over eight minutes.

The meeting continued, bouncing between the group’s discussion on media awareness and strategy, and the woman with red hair who continued to raise the issue of people who wanted to live on the streets.

A young woman later identified as Harsha Walia interrupted:

“Wait a minute– is that guy recording?” she asked, stepping into the circle.

I said that I was.

“Did anyone say that you could?” she asked.

A number of similar questions arose from the crowd: ‘Who gave you permission?’, ‘Who are you?’, ‘Who are you with?’

Harsha walked up beside me. “Why are you recording?” she asked.

“I’m writing a story.”

“Did anyone give you permission?”

“No, I don’t need permission.”

She asked me to stop the recording, which I did.

“That’s unethical journalism,” someone called out.

“You’re having a public meeting in a public place and I’m recording it. There’s no expectation of privacy. You asked me to stop and I stopped, what’s unethical about that?”

“We’re trying to protect our anonymity,” a young woman called out.

“Delete it,” Harsha told me.

I refused.

Another young woman approached. She wore glasses and had her hair tied back in a ponytail. “Did you ask anyone’s permission to record this?”

“I don’t need anyone’s permission.”

People began to rise from their seats.

Harsha suggested we move outside the circle so that the meeting could continue.

“Who are you?” the second girl asked me as we walked.

“Matt Chambers. I’m a writer for The Dependent.” I handed her my business card. “Do you have a card?”

She said that she didn’t, and refused to give me her name.

“Let’s go talk to the legal observers,” I suggested.

“Why?” the second girl asked.

“Because I want to talk to them.”

“They have nothing to do with this,” she replied.

I stepped outside the camp entrance and onto the sidewalk. Harsha and the second girl were at either side of me. The bright orange shirts of the legal observers were nowhere to be seen.  Half a dozen people lingered around us– a mixture of activists and neighbourhood residents.

Harsha stepped in front of me and once again demanded that I delete the recording.

I refused. She continued to insist.

As we talked a visibly intoxicated man approached us. He was thickly built, had his hair in a ponytail and carried a guitar on his back. He said something loud and unintelligible to me. The second girl addressed him by name, asking him to calm down.

“Delete it,” Harsha said.

I refused once again, angering the man. He said something that I couldn’t understand and then reached out to grab me. I took a step backwards and out of his reach.

“This guy’s gonna hurt me. You clearly know him, please ask him to leave.”

“Not until you delete it,” Harsha said.

The man began yelling at me again and waving his finger in my face. Fearing for my safety, I told them I would delete the recording. The second girl then stood between the man and I. Harsha stood within a foot of my person as I deleted the recording.

When I had finished, she told me to give her my phone.

I refused, and showed her the display. The last recording was an interview with Spencer Herbert, West End MLA, from around 3pm that day.

“Give it to me,” she repeated.

I refused once more, and the man began to yell again. He reached out to grab me. I stepped backwards.

“Let me see it,” Harsha said, following.

The man stepped towards me and Harsha took the phone from my hand. The drunk man then pushed me hard in the chest and I stumbled backwards. He pursued, yelling, as I moved behind a parking meter to put something between us. Harsha walked to the entrance of the camp with my phone.

The second girl ran forward and put herself between the man and I. She told him to leave.

I stood dumbfounded as they walked away.

Once the man had disappeared from sight before I approached the camp entrance where a new scuffle had broken out just inside. I spotted Harsha on the outskirts of the confrontation and asked for my phone back. She turned it over without a word.

The second girl approached me once more. “You’re unethical,” she told me, then walked away.

I checked the phone– all the voice memos had been deleted. Hours of work and personal notes.

We gathered our thoughts, mounted our bikes, and left with precisely the opposite story we had expected.

For those of you with big screens, I highly recommend clicking through the thumbnails for hi-res, uncropped images.

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The Street Party

Olympic Ground Zero, aka, Granville and Robson erupted in celebration with Canada’s 3-2 overtime win over the U.S. in Olympic Men’s Hockey:

The Nervous Police

The police presence was thick, with a lone officer stationed on the rooftop below us as we snapped photos and video. He watched the surging crowd nervously as drunken revelers piled onto lampposts to wave their flags. When an international film crew joined Liam and I he came up the stairs and asked us to leave. The reaction to my camera was a little more aggressive than I had anticipated. Apparently he was expecting the festivities to get out of hand:

Her fingers hover over the keyboard as she contemplates a title.

“WHAT EVERY MAN DESERVES,” she types, and wanders into the bedroom to pack her bag: lingerie, bikinis, hand sanitizer, toothbrush, mouthwash, magazines, deodorant, lube, condoms, dildos, handcuffs, gag, and a knife. Last to go in is a small satchel, filled with good-luck charms.

Her phone begins to ring: a trickle at first, becoming a torrent by 11pm.

“What are your restrictions?”, ”Do you do anything bareback?”, “Do you like what you do?” they ask.

“Depends what you look like,” she replies, her frankness causing some of them to hang up.

Others are emboldened. Others still are masturbating. Occasionally, someone calls wanting more than just her voice; and by 7am, she’s made three appointments and $1,000. Opting to pass on the rush of pre-meeting quickies, she retires to bed, one of over 800 women using the internet to prostitute in Vancouver.

Born in small-town Ontario, Demi moved to Coquitlam six months ago to live with a boyfriend. After being beaten and locked in a closet, she left him, but decided to stay in the city. Without a job, and without a safety-net of friends and family, rent loomed. The prospect of quick and easy cash proved irresistible.

“As a beautiful girl I get hounded all the time,” she says, “I just decided to take advantage of it.”

Demi is 24, Caucasian, and what seems a world away from the horrors of survival sex that play out on the Downtown East side. For her, there is no strutting on street corners; she posts an ad on Craigslist, and 15 minutes later her phone is ringing.

The free classifieds site has long been a tool of the sex trade, and was described as “the largest source of prostitution in America,” by Illinois Sheriff Tom Dart during a 2009 lawsuit to shut down the ‘Erotic Services’ section. The suit was thrown out, but the publicity it generated, along with the subsequent murder of a Boston masseuse who used Craigslist to find clients, compelled the company to act. In the United States the ‘Erotic Services’ section was replaced by the ‘Adult Services’ section, which requires a $10 credit card charge per ad, and has a manual approval process for every post.

In Canadian cities the Erotic Services board remains; users pay no fees and validate their account with a phone number rather than a credit card. In Vancouver, the board sees an average of 1,100 advertisements a day — which is more than any U.S. city, and bested only by Toronto — but the count paints a slightly misleading picture: Demi posts up to a dozen ads a day.

Craigslist didn’t respond to a request for a count of active users, but a computer program written by The Dependent revealed, over a one-month period in the Vancouver area, over 800 unique numbers.

For Demi, Craigslist is the only source of business; it generates 2-3 clients a day, and upwards of  $1,000.

“It’s unbelievable the money you can make,” she says.

Demi tries to operate like a business, and found that her Coquitlam location was holding her back.

“It’s nice inside, but from the outside, it’s a crack shack. I’d see the Porsches drive up and then leave,” she tells me. She hired a driver so she could meet clients on their own terms.

For $40 an hour, she’s chauffeured through the city in a late-model Jeep Cherokee. Connected to the internet through her iPhone, she continues to post advertisements, respond to messages, and answer phone calls.

“I get lots and lots of calls,” she says, “most of them just want to hear my voice or get more pictures, or jerk off. The more questions they ask, the less likely they are to make an appointment. If they’re really interested, I tell them to text me their name, number, address, and buzzer. Before I started that I used to get stood up a lot.”

Once a client confirms, the driver punches the address into his GPS. They agree on a pickup time and he drops her off.

“You walk in, take a deep breath, knock on the door, and hope for the best –  that it’s a clean gentlemen, decent looking, and not ready to kill you,” she laughs.

“I’m not scared, but I’m cautious.”

“The driver’s supposed to add security,” she says. “If you’re not out there, it’s his duty to come get you.”

Amazingly, the driver is the only criminal in Demi’s operation.

Prostitution itself is legal in Canada. The peripheral activities, such as operating a common bawdy house, communicating in a public place for the purposes of prostitution, or living off its avails are all crimes, but by visiting clients rather than using a regular in-call location, Demi skirts the bawdy house law; and by communicating over the internet or telephone, instead of the city streets, she also avoids the communication law.

Statistics Canada data shows that the communication law accounts for 98% of all prostitution-related charges. Its intention is to address the nuisance associated with the street trade, and almost all of the efforts of Law Enforcement are focused there. SFU professor John Lowman, who has spent the last decade researching the local sex trade, estimates that over 80% of Vancouver prostitution occurs indoors — in massage parlours, hotel rooms, and private residences.

The City of Vancouver issues licenses to escorts, escort services, and body rub parlours — the latter for “manipulating, touching or stimulating … a person’s body or part thereof”. It is the only questionable license in the city that doesn’t explicitly forbid prostitution on site, and its $7,891 fee is the third most expensive, behind only the PNE and Hastings Downs.

PIVOT Legal Society, a local non-profit, has launched a charter challenge in B.C. Supreme Court, claiming this two-tiered status of prostitution in Canada contributes to the violence perpetrated against sex-trade workers. Centered in their suit is the communication law.

“It forces workers into isolated areas to avoid police, and into cars before they’ve had a chance to size up a date,” explains Katrina Pacey, of PIVOT.

Pacey also argues that bawdy-house laws prevent sex workers from operating in safe and sanitary conditions, and that the procuring and avails laws prevent them from working together, or with security.

For Demi, the hiring of a driver was less about safety than business. While it was an improvement over her Coquitlam location, she found herself paying $40 an hour to be carted from tanning salon to shopping centre, nail parlour to restaurant during the slower afternoons. She began renting a Yaletown condo for $1,900 a month, in addition to her $700 a month Coquitlam residence.

“You make better money in Yaletown,” she says, “the guys are there. The money’s there. They call when they’re coming out of their office and they’ll be like, 15 minutes.”

Bouncing between the two apartments for work and sleep, she rents the Yaletown location out to other escorts when she’s not working.

“I never enjoy the sex,” she tells me, “but every day of my life is fun.  I love walking in, click, click, click with the heels, and seeing the guy’s jaw just drop. Most of my job doesn’t even involve sex. I shake my ass, slip the condom on and it’s over — three pump dump — $300 in 15 minutes,” she laughs. “Ahh, the world of looking at men as suckers.”

Two weeks later and I’m calling with some follow-up questions.

“Hey,” she says plainly; in the background: voices, and the periodic burst of an intercom, “I’m in the E.R.”

“Swine Flu?” I ask, hopefully.

“No, I fell off the wagon—” she says,  “crack. I went to detox but they wouldn’t take me, I was so fucked-up. They sent me here.” She pauses. “You show strong for so long, but you can only do it for so long. I was abused as a kid, and it’s all coming back to me… everytime… it just got on top of me.  I’m going back to visit my family in Ontario; I’ll call you in a bit.”

Two days later: “I’m getting some wind,” she says. She sounds tired.

“I had a boyfriend who was using and kept leaving me to do it. I asked him, ‘if you use here, will you leave me tonight?’ He said no, and so he stayed and I used.”

She says she won’t return to the sex trade.

“But, I don’t regret it. We all fuck up — we do.  For me, it was easier money than a real job, and when you’ve got low self-confidence, you think that’s all you can be. I don’t have an education. I wasn’t raised in a normal way. I’ve been running my whole life not knowing what I’m looking for or where I’m going, but I don’t regret it. I can’t regret it. I take it, absorb it, learn from it, and move on.  Reflecting on what I’ve done is hard, you know? It’s not the purest of things.”

“Do you think it should be legal? I ask.

“No,” she says, emphatically, “we’re sick for taking their money and they’re sick for giving it to us.”

She says talking is a part of the recovery.

“I’m not ashamed of it. It goes in the memory box.”

Three days later, she’s upbeat and energetic. She’s playing cards with a friend, the phone pinned between her ear and shoulder.

“I’m going to be a counselor,” she tells me, “I haven’t given to society and I want to.”

Her future in the sex trade is less certain.

“Now that I’m clean, I know I’ll still do calls. I’ve got a guy in Vancouver who calls me, begging to pay me three grand to do an ass smoothie.”

“What’s an ass smoothie?” I ask.

Her friend laughing in the background.

“Well if you don’t know…” she says.

And I never hear from her again.

While global population growth has stabilized at 1%, urban numbers continue to explode. Planners the world over are on the lookout for functional models of density, and now, Vancouver’s unique approach has earned it a classification all of its own: Vancouverism.

For those living here, it’s easy to take for granted the vibrant, densely-populated urban core, with its abundance of public spaces and parks, and its pedestrian-friendly streetscapes. It is a balance of prosperity and livability envied across the globe, one reflected in our continuous ranking as the world’s most livable city. But conscious, considerate planning has not always been the hallmark of Vancouver’s progress. This Golden Age has been preceded by many decades of bronze, and nowhere is that better exemplified than in the history of the West End.

When the Canadian Pacific Railway arrived in 1886, its executives sought land to build homes. As one of the few areas that didn’t require the construction of a new bridge, the West End presented an obvious choice, and the first mansions were built along a bluff rising 40 feet above Coal Harbour, with fine views of the inlet and the North Shore.

Not long after settlement began, the Dominion of Canada set aside the 1,000 acres of logged forest nearby. Named after Governor General Lord Stanley, the park was dedicated ‘to the use and enjoyment of peoples of all colours, creeds, and customs, for all time’. At first it was indiscernible from the tangle of tree and thorn covering the Downtown Peninsula, but with the steady conversion of woodland to Victorian mansion, Lord Stanley’s Park became quite the jewel indeed, and the magnificent homes beside it – so close to work, beach, and greenspace – comprised the most exclusive neighbourhood in the city. By 1910, the entire square mile of 66′ lots was occupied by rich and middle-class families.

High Density Housing

The British Columbia Electric Railway operated rail cars on Robson, Denman, and Davie Streets. The Central Business District and the West End fed off one another – demand for workers increasing the demand for housing, and demand for housing increasing the demand for jobs. Retail shops began to appear along the streetcar lines, servicing those coming to and from work. Vancouver enjoyed a booming trade in forestry, fishing and mining, and the success of the city put pressures on the West End that its original structures could not withstand.

As of 1926, Vancouver had no concrete zoning regulations. Development continued unchecked throughout the 66′ grid, with the construction of apartments and conversion of old homes to multi-tenant dwellings becoming commonplace. To serve the growing population, storefronts were setup on ground floors and in front yards. Wooden construction, now several decades old, began to show its age. The upper classes fled the neighbourhood.

With the Great Depression came an enormous demand for cheap rental accommodation, and a rapid acceleration in the breakdown of private homes, and their conversion to multi-tenant rentals. Newly-enacted zoning laws limited wooden structures to two stories and inadvertently encouraged an aggressive use of lot space. While the original houses of the West End were vigorous exercises in timber construction, the apartments that replaced them showed little imagination. In areas where considerable redevelopment had taken place, the resulting street picture was monotonous, and the basic standards of light, air, and privacy were minimized by the closeness of the buildings.

By the 1940s the conversion from upper to lower-class was complete, and the papers were filled with articles describing the crowded and polluted living conditions to be found in the West End. City health officials labeled over 50% of the suites they inspected as ‘unsuitable’ for living. Pollution from heavy industry along False Creek forced Mamie Maloney – the newspaper columnist – to wash her kitchen drapes every two weeks, and lament the ‘tattle-tale grey’ that stained her white linens, hung out to dry.

Nothing changed until the 1950s. Motordom – the idea that everyone would drive everywhere for everything – was changing the course of entire countries. Modern construction and financial instruments made it possible to build larger structures, more quickly than ever before. A profound change was unavoidable, sealed by the arrival of Gerald Sutton Brown as City Planning Director. Sutton Brown sought to change planning from a custodial enterprise into an active effort to improve the human environment. Centered in his sights, was the West End. “Where else is there residential so close to the business center of a great city?” he admired, and dismissed the construction of two storey apartments as ‘useless’, tabling instead a plan for buildings ten stories or more.

In 1956, City Council enacted the new zoning bylaws recommended for the West End. They eliminated height restrictions, and introduced a new tool for controlling development: floor space ratio. It is a metric still used today – calculated by dividing the total square footage of a building by its total site area. The West End was permitted an FSR of 3.0, intended as a deterrent to the ‘box’ forms of apartments, and a promotion of tall, well-spaced modern architecture. The number of building sites doubled from 1955 to 1956. It spawned an explosion of high-rise apartments, fueled by the booming economy, and while the rest of North America burst out into suburbia, the West End experienced a 50% increase in population in the 1960s.

Photo Credit: Liam Hanham

The new construction was tall, fast and cheap, and quickly recognized as such. Proponents cited the strong lines and clean facades as new heights in architectural design, but few saw the bland, repeated patterns as anything other than pure capitalism. The new zoning regulations affected little control over the whims of private capital, and shrewd developers realized that while the FSR limited a building’s footprint, it could still be constructed narrowly across the width of the site, thus providing and stealing as many ‘views’ as possible. The structures were declared parasites on the community – thieves of light, air and amenity. Residents bemoaned the new character of their neighbourhood: “In 1955, the eight storey Sylvia Hotel was the tallest building in the West End. Today, 20 years later, it is hidden beneath a forest of high-rise apartment buildings; the fine old mansions that once surrounded it are gone; the inexpensive rooming-houses destroyed; the human scale of the area obliterated; and all in the name of progress and profit.”

Compounding the despair was the constant flow of traffic. The original streets, converted from horse cart paths and still dissecting the 66′ grid, could not keep up with the demands of motorists. Every summer they were clogged with the automobiles of beach and park goers, and every rush hour, the arterial streets were jammed with cars trying to get out to Georgia. So pervasive was the mentality of motordom, that Sutton Brown’s planning department could only imagine the neighbourhood with a complete saturation of the automobile:

“On the basis of estimated traffic figures, it appears that an elaborate arrangement of freeway connections and major arteries will be required to service the West End … At present, most of the local streets are residential in character, but with the necessary improvements and the volume of traffic to be carried, this residential amenity will be removed.”

It was a transformation taking place all across North America, but opposition in the West End was strong. The neighbourhood was built for life before the car, and over 50% of its residents lived as such.

In 1971 the Social Development Committee commissioned a report by Robert Collier, who stressed an emphasis on people over technology.

“In the past five years the city has spent close to $1M on transportation studies,” he observed, “we seem to be more interested in cars than people – for we have not spent one-tenth of that amount obtaining up-to-date social information.”

His report filled that void, making extensive use of community dialogue. Collier discovered – much to the shock of the city – that people actually enjoyed living in the West End. A high value was placed on its easy access to work, play, shopping, variety of accommodation, and reasonable rent. The main leisure activity was walking, and the primary concerns of residents were noise, pollution, traffic, parking, and community spirit. Collier stressed the importance of public input in the development process, citing residents criticism of the city’s past insensitivity to their concerns. The assessment spawned a critical shift in planning policy, and local teams were established to consult the city.

The result was a moratorium on the construction of new towers, the installation of traffic barriers and mini-parks to restore calm and reduce noise, the construction of a new community center, and a community development plan, which saw a reduction of floor space ratios, a restoration of building height limitations, rules governing sunlight penetration, and incentives to integrate amenities into new buildings. The 1975 West End Plan was a recognition that, although the massive redevelopment of the district did not result in absolutely disastrous consequences, it did produce a number of problems that, if unchecked, would lead to a severe deterioration in the quality of life of the residents in the district.

The 1975 plan was the result of almost a century of rapid development in the West End. Its principles remain largely unchanged even today, and the neighbourhood’s skyline is almost exactly the same as it was forty years ago. Still, it is one of the most desirable places to live on the planet, and the memory of its successes and failures have been applied to False Creek, Coal Harbour, the Olympic Village, and the city of Vancouver as a whole.

Check out those view corridors, and that easy access to pristine coastline.

Oh, yeah.