Vancouver Courier
for March 1, 1998

What a fun time to be on the Vancouver City Council! It's been a lot of laughs lately and the gaiety (can we use that word anymore?) compounds by the minute.

First, Premier Clark announced that the new Municipal Affairs minister was Jenny Kwan who is despised by Mayor Philip Owen and senior Councilor George Puil.

A throwback to the hard left, Ms Kwong did little to endear herself to her colleagues when she was on Council. Now she's the Victoria equivalent of the colonial governor and the question becomes, what message ought Vancouverites to extract from this appointment? Vote COPE next time or face the wrath of Victoria?

There has to be a message. Glen Clark, a Vancouver boy, is scarcely a stranger to the political goings on in his native city. He must know that out of his entire caucus he couldn't, with the possible exception of Dan Miller, have found anyone more abrasive to the right wing Vancouver City Council than Ms Kwan. What gives?

There is another sure contributor to the collective dyspepsia of our esteemed Council - Granville South and Transit proposals for rapid bus movement through the area bringing restricted parking and chnaged traffic light patterns. While on the surface there's no connection between these events, perhaps the explanation is this:- because Victoria is getting out of the transit business and rapidly downloading huge expenses to local governments generally, friendly relations between Victoria and the Vancouver Council are of little moment to the Premier.

With Granville South there are competing interests involved. People in Richmond want fast and plentiful service to downtown Vancouver and return. The merchants of Granville South want their "village" unmolested as do the residents, many of whom are elderly, who live there mainly because of this "village."

It's not easy to determine the facts. As one might expect, the merchants and residents paint the worst case scenario while the Transit people pooh pooh their concerns. A familiar dichotomy but my bias, based upon experience, favours worst case scenarios when officialdom is pitted against people.

A couple of years ago, the North Vancouver District Council extended the street I live on so that it became a long connector road. We weren't happy campers but were assured that the increase of traffic along our street would be only x cars per hour. It turned out to be 4x. Traffic engineers, like pollsters, come up with the desired answer then construct the "facts" to support them.

We were to get a school crosswalk and sidewalks. Two years later we have neither and no prospects.

By my rule of thumb, when officials meet real people they fib a lot and later cite unforeseen circumstances to explain the confirmation of the locals worst fears.

Granville South isn't really south Granville of course - it was called that because 15th Avenue was about as far as Granville went in my Mom's early days. It was the starting point for new development on the south side of False Creek so the area became the shopping area for new residents. The immediate neighbourhood, in due course, became high density because of the shops which, of course, increased to handle the new population; and on it went until Granville South became one of the most identifiable neighborhoods in Vancouver.

I know a bit about this area - as does George Puil. It was the stamping ground, many moons ago, of our youth.It'll be interesting to see what position George takes.

We never really met, of course. He was King Ed, you see, and I was PW. My restaurant was the Blue Boy, his the Normandy.

The only inter-school contact came on Thursday night after the Preview at the Stanley Theater when PWites and King Edders warily circled each other, under a thin veil of civility, in the Normandy. Sometimes that contact was fist to chin with a pretty girl somewhere in the picture. The rest of the week we stayed out of the other's restaurant.

It's remarkable how much remains the same 50 years later. The Blue Boy is gone but the Normandy remains. Mercifully, so does the Stanley. As does Thompson and Page where we all bought our records. Lots of new places but lots of old ones too.

My comment is unscientific and uncharitable.

To hell with Transit's progressive proposals. Use the streets we all use to bypass Granville South - Fir and Hemlock.

And I pass on to the merchants and residents this bit of highly prejudiced advice - whatever Transit and the City tell you is barnyard droppings. Whatever they say won't happen, will. At best it won't happen for the short time it takes for Transit to pronounce, after the routes are in place, that they must do all these bad things after all. Sorry about that.

Citoyens! Aux Barricades! (figuratively, of course). Your neighborhood may not be sacred but it's a hell of a lot more important than saving five minutes to and from Richmond or satisfying municipal munchkins with their highly suspect statistics.