by Sean Orr | Hmm, slow news day? How about we run another Time to Clean up the DTES editorial! It’s a tradition that goes back to when booze (not crack/meth/oxy/dilly/methadone) was the great social ill. As early as 1955, local editorials have been sensationalizing Skid Row/DTES, as this article entitled “The Dope Craze that’s Terrorizing Vancouver” makes clear. And even before booze, it was “too Chinese” (see the introduction of Canada’s first drug law and the 1907 anti-asiatic race riots).

Frontier Politics: Raising kids amid the hookers, junkies and drunks of Vancouver’s worst neighbourhood.

We purchased a unit pre-construction, gambling that the neighbourhood would improve significantly by the time our building was completed. It didn’t.

The funny thing with gambling is…

The Downtown Eastside may be home to my city’s least fortunate, but it is also, in many cases, home to my city’s least sanitary, least responsible, and least polite

And yet they saw that you had children and his their drugs? That sounds pretty damn polite to me. Anyways, the whole piece is just baiting for a reaction, but just comes off as more of the First World Problems same. In any event, I’d sooner read an editorial about a family of drug addicts that moves into Shaugnessy.

Or I’d rather read an article about the new Vancouver Healing Lodge. It’s probably not going to happen, though, as our 3 major dailies sold their front pages to Hyundai.

The Rubber Stamp: Sequel 138 Approved at Old Pantages Theatre Site in the DTES. “The City came to the decision after a 6 hour meeting with over 60 disgruntled Downtown Eastside residents. Naturally they didn’t want any new neighbours. They never do”. Those 60 people or all of the DTES? Because I’m pretty sure buddy above with the kids is stoked.

And yet for all the pseudo-pragmatic, tough-guy populism in the corporate media, Jeff Lee pens a discussion about real solutions, eschewing rhetoric: Vancouver must make it cheaper for developers to build housing. It’s the same solution we’ve been citing for decades. We can make something like an endowment fund, or even something akin to carbon credits — a commons.

Inculcation vs. Education: Disgusting: David Suzuki and NFB indoctrinating school kids. Of course, when it’s the church indocrinating children it’s ok: Catholic students asked to support laws that criminalize abortion. Maybe we could combine schools and teach them about the abortion of Kyoto.

Existential Council: Park Board motion aims to protect Vancouver beaches from oil spill threat. Isn’t this sort of like drafting a bill to say we are against earthquakes? I mean, I’m totally against both earthquakes and pipelines, but doesn’t this sort of seem oddly specific? Clearly we have no say in the matter. Why not impose a levy on tanker traffic that would go into an emergency clean-up fund or something? I don’t know, I’m just thinking aloud here…

This person says it way better: Open Letter Urging Premier Clark to Act for BC.