OccupyVancouver told to get the hell off our lawn

Gary Mason, Globe & Mail :

"The weekend death of a female protester at the Occupy Vancouver site has done incalculable damage to a global protest campaign that suddenly finds itself at a crossroads.

Increasing problems at the sites are now overshadowing Occupy’s root cause and tarnishing the image of the entire movement. Its future gets cloudier by the day."

See, Gary would really like to support the movement but because 22 year old Ashlie Gough selfishly died at Occupy Vancouver instead of a few blocks away in the Downtown Eastside where these things go unreported, sadly he now finds himself irrevocably drawn into the get-the-hell-off-my-public-lawn media camp.

Gary declares that with the Vancouver election just 12 days away, this is "a referendum on Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson's leadership", a quote happily repeated by CKNW's Bill Good on his mayoralty  debate radio show between Robertson and NPA hopeful Susan Anton this morning.

Yup, Robertson better get cracking on evicting the homeless for safety reasons, even if they're safer here than anywhere else.

Robertson is indeed going for a fast-track court injunction to evict them tomorrow, backed up by the VPD:

"The Occupy Vancouver protest can continue. The tent encampment, as it stands now, cannot."

Luckily Kev at Trapped in a Whirlpool has provided this excellent rebuttal :

"Those who feel threatened by the Occupy movement think that by forcibly clearing out the encampments that they will cut the movement off at the knees, nothing could be further from reality. The camps will eventually end organically on their own, signalling the onset of the next phase of the movement towards social justice. But no matter how they end the movement has become unstoppable.

The Occupiers and their supporters have already succeeded in changing the conversation from one of tax cuts , deficits and the necessity of austerity to one of social and economic injustice. This is no small feat. Thanks to the Occupy Movement, Labour appears ready to end it's internecine wars and start to unite again in order to battle for the common good once more, again no small feat.

In other words this first phase of the movement has already been a huge success, violently suppressing this outpouring of dissatisfaction with the current sate of affairs will only prove to many that they Occupiers are right and can only as it has already done result in it's growth.
The battle for a better world has been joined and while it will likely be a long one, those who hanker for a more just society will never surrender."

Thank you, Kev.


Linking arms for OccupyVancouver :


A wonderful "Open Love Letter to #OccupyVancover" from My Little Soapbox. 

Some sage advice from my friend Chris Corrigan on how the movement can continue : Revitalizing #OccupyVancouver

Boris : Testing Occupy .

Montreal Simon : The Occupy Movement and the Marginalized

Dope City Free Press: Letter To the Mayor of Vancouver and a Letter Written the Next Morning To Occupy Vancouver's Organizing Committee
       
        with an intro to Mr. Beer 'N Hockey above from RossK

Petition : I Support Occupy Vancouver
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Stay classy, NaPo

The National Post, a rightwing mouthpiece which has yet to make it into the black, pitches the leak of the proposed $100-million taxpayer bail-out to Millenium to build $1.2-billion Olympic Village condos as "Dirty tricks in Vancouver Mayoral race".

OK, so who are the candidates in this dirty tricks race?
According to NaPo, the choice is either "a left-leaning juice and soup maker", or "a right-leaning council member" who isn't "kowtowing to the local poverty industry".

Kowtowing to the local poverty industry? What's that about?
NaPo : "such radical measures as preventing the closure of rental apartment buildings and low-rent hotel rooms, and forcing repairs at the owners' expense, if necessary."

Stay classy, NaPo.

Update : Hi, NaPo. Thanks for dropping by.
Could I have my link back now, please?

Shorter Monte Solberg :

: If only there were something like a Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development ... just think what we could accomplish!

ReformaTory Alliance MP Monte Solberg, the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, returned from a fact-finding trip to Portland Oregon to study their plan to end homelessness within ten years and pronounced it "a terrific idea" but explained it wouldn't work here because "Portland regularly assesses the number of people on the street" and adjusts its programs accordingly.
Solberg :

"We don't have those kinds of measurements in place. We don't have an actual number we can point to in Canada to say we know there are this many people on the street in Canada at any one time.
If you're going to set any targets at all, you have to know where you're starting from and have some kind of measurement in place, and we don't have that today."

Yes, Monte, I absolutely agree you would definitely need to have some kind of fucking clue first.

Daphne Bramham at the Vancouver Sun, via Mostly Water :

"Canada has become the only developed country in the world that has neither a national housing plan or a national mental health strategy."

Very good article. Everything you wish you didn't already know about homelessness and all on one page.

Supernatural! Downtown Eastside!

United Nations envoy Miloon Kothari, on a tour of Canada to examine homelessness, said he visited Vancouver specifically to assess whether the Olympic bid's pledges "are being kept."
"Vancouver said, 'If we get the Games, we commit to leaving a positive legacy,' and we [at the UN] are taking that at face value," Kothari said. "So far in Vancouver, there aren't many results on the ground, but we still have some time to go."
Kothari said that "the resources generated by [the Olympics] should be used to improve the adverse housing situation in Vancouver."
He specified that excess funds should be spent on "people who need their lives improved" and "not go into the hands of a few individuals."

"But our mandate is to promote the development of sport in Canada, as governed by the Host City Contract and Multiparty Agreements," said Donna Wilson, Senior VP for VANOC *Human Resources* .
"It's already committed that our surplus will go towards amateur sport."

Wilson has previously enthused that "The road to 2010 is both long and wide, and there’s room for everyone."

That's nice, Donna, but what we're actually looking for here is rooms for everyone.

In other Olympics news...
Dan Rather is here filming : "A neighbourhood of abject poverty surrounded by the five-star hotels that will be booked solid during the Olympics"
[Ed.: No way he's gonna miss all those dead First Nations sex-trade workers, Donna]
and the UN Population Fund notes the Downtown Eastside is "a two-kilometre-square stretch of decaying rooming houses, with a hepatitis C rate of just below 70 % and an HIV prevalence rate the same as Botswana's."

Well, Donna, I'm guessing free hockey sticks and being assured of adequate practice time down at the rink is not only not a burning issue with the majority of our local world-class ghetto residents, but it isn't likely to be one with the international journalists filing Olympics human interest stories either.
Light an Olympic torch under someone's Tourism Canada ass, Linda - ya still got two years to turn this thing around.