by Sean Orr | Atlas Chip Shrugged: Charities move after billionaire Lululemon founder buys building on East Hastings. “If Starbucks is selling a latte for say $3.65, if I say I don’t want to pay $3.65, they don’t sell their latte for something else.” Yeah, because Starbucks and non-profit community spaces serving marginalized and vulnerable populations are pretty much interchangeable.

Another one bites the dust: A Modernist gem falls victim to Vancouver’s housing market. Once again it’s like Kerry Gold is the only reporter in Vancouver who is actually saying something:

It’s just another sales transaction on Vancouver’s lucrative west side. There is no time to consider history, or design, or the community that still values such houses. For the agents, builders, buyers and speculators, there is money to be made.

While McMartin laments the loss of independent auto repair shops: Running on empty — The Westside loses its garages.

Peak Liberal: Enbridge’s Gateway Resuscitated as Trudeau Wavers on Tankers. “It’s a formalized moratorium and, when we have worked out exactly what that means, we’ll let you know”. In other words, we are populists who will say anything to get elected even if we don’t know what it is we are even saying.

Canada acting ‘like a bunch of villages as opposed to a nation’ on pipelines, says Rachel Notley. Hmm, just so you know, the word “Canada” literally means village. Nicholas Ellan expands:

The central conceit here that we are one nation, and not a federation of provinces (or a “bunch of villages”), is only imaginable from the Albertan perspective, with its relatively homogenous culture. In some sense the project of Harperism was to dismantle the power of the federal government to navigate and protect the diversity of the Canadian federation, and impose a bland and largely imaginary Canadian identity upon this diversity.

Meanwhile, the BC NDP scrambles to find it’s own identity: Time for B.C. NDP to shed ‘forces of no’ label. Chris Green: “The point is not to be the ‘Party of No’ as Christy Clark has succeeded in branding us, but to be the ‘Party of Not That, But This”.

City of Vancouver moving ahead to close more than 150 pot shops. While I think dispensaries are tacky, it’s nevertheless a big backwards step to delegitimize them and move the sale of pot back underground.

Jimmy Fallon breaks into song at Vancouver’s Le Crocodile. Man, and people just sat there? I would have slammed my fork into my pan-seared veal sweetbreads with black truffled foie-gras cream sauce and stormed the fuck out.

Romeo and Metrotown: Leonardo DiCaprio explains why Burnaby, British Columbia has the most beautiful women.

Bonus: You Say Party’s Video For “Underside” Is A Gorgeous Tribute To Studio Ghibli.