by Sean Orr | This city will drive you crazy: 2014 saw Vancouver hospitals hit a six-year high for emergency mental-health visits. “Compared to police in other jurisdictions, he said, the Vancouver Police Department has proven reluctant to push for the incarceration of people with mental-health challenges…” Um, yeah…isn’t that something to celebrate? (R.I.P. Jim Chu) “Secondly, MacEwan suggested Vancouver’s relatively moderate climate means the city serves as a home to a disproportionate number of mentally ill people who are homeless…” What is this, a community college Sociology 101 paper? What does that have to do with anything, other than highlighting the need for a national response?

You know you’re in trouble when The Province agrees: We know exactly how to end homelessness in Canada. I don’t want to be tremendously cynical but does it take people dying in the centre of the universe to do something about it?

Oh, and it’s not just homeless people encountering barriers: Richard Stewart, Coquitlam mayor, points to gaps in mental health services. “He also wants to see services available in communities throughout the province, including his city…” Ding! Ding!

Related: Hope Café counters stigma around mental illness.

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark is telling employees who find themselves out of a job because of dropping oil prices that her province needs skilled workers. Yeah, but if you could go ahead and leave all your oxycontin behind and not go directly to the DTES that would be grrrreat. “B.C. needs workers for forestry, mining, construction and its proposed LNG plants…” Then why did we just lay off 700 miners, hmm?

Related tweet of the day:

PM Harper says oil shocks won’t throw gov’t off course. Except a postponed budget, program cuts, and general off-course-ness.

— ThisHourHas22Minutes (@22_Minutes) January 23, 2015

Leave your spoiled, elitist, private school brat out of this: Premier Clark raises eyebrows with ‘lazy’ New Democrat comment. God, I would hate to be in the spin-room of the BC Liberals. “By the time he’s 31 years old, if he’s still doing that, he’s no longer a teenager, he’s a New Democrat…” I hope to God, more than anything, that Hamish Clark not only becomes a New Democrat but leads the party to victory in the next election. Top comment: “So now I know something else about Clark: aside from her other issues, she’s an incompetent parent…” And for whatever it’s worth, her “let’s leave everything up to the market” fundamentalism is considerably more lazy than the Keynesian regulatory approach.

And I’ll just put this here: B.C. legislature sat 36 of 579 days.

Fraser Institute wonders if a good job with good pay and a good pension is “fair”? It’s like they’re becoming a caricature of themselves. I mean, isn’t this the brass ring that the American Dream is predicated upon?

Powell River is the new Burnaby Surrey Coquitlam Mission Hope: Powell River launches YouTube campaign to appeal to young residents. “We have craft beer now!!!!”

Surrey named one of the world’s “most intelligent communities”. Scoff all you want but it really has improved by leaps and bounds. Now if they could just do something about all those cookie-cutter, American-style strip-malls and monstrous subdivisions…

Bank robber with fake beard sought by RCMP in White Rock, B.C.. “In a statement, police said they ‘believe the beard to be a disguise.'” #facepalm

Headline of the day: New dumping rules could be crappy for Vancouver beaches: health authority.