Happy belated International Worker’s Day! Super stoked we ended the 14 hour work day all the way back in 1886. Oh wait, never mind. I work in a restaurant…
To celebrate, thoughtful activists decided to give City Council a day off: Downtown Eastside Housing Organizers Blockade City Hall.
When City Hall re-opened they released the annual homeless count. Guess what? They’re up. Again:
There’s one statistic from @CityofVancouver‘s annual #homeless count that again rises above any other as simply shameful. https://t.co/VfKRsGWVTy #vanpoli
% of general population that identifies as #Indigenous: 2.2
% of homeless population that identifies as Indigenous: 40 pic.twitter.com/bLgxMm0NnK— Travis Lupick (@tlupick) May 2, 2018
Meanwhile, the poor residents of Point Grey whose massive wealth generated from housing equity in an over-heated market are under threat from a .2% tax increase, so they staged a neat little “grassroots” protest with identical signs: Point Grey residents accuse Attorney General David Eby and NDP of engaging in class warfare with property surtax.
God, I love it when rich people cite class warfare because we can all go, “Um, yeah, it is warfare, and you are the ones that started it.” I also love when they call us socialists, like it’s a bad thing. What does that make them, anti-socialists?
Speaking of class war: Justin Trudeau announces new Amazon Vancouver headquarters to bring 3,000 jobs. “‘There are many reasons why industry giants like Amazon choose to settle and grow in Canada,’ said Trudeau at a press conference Monday”. Many reasons? How about two: we pay our workers the absolute least and our corporate property tax rates are the lowest in Canada.
“I can’t wait for three thousand tech bros to show up to Vancouver and find out there are only two bars left alive, so nowhere to spend their disposable income except for MEC and parking meters. Just kidding. I won’t be living here when that happens.” – Trevor Risk
Hey Alexa, is it 'innovative' to replace unionized jobs for workers living in RVs in the parking lot? Amazon Vancouver will be at former downtown Post Office bldg. PS: corporate concentration & total market domination ain't "innovation." It's capitalism. https://t.co/RVF5dYXrAq
— Garth Mullins (@garthmullins) April 30, 2018
Our transformation into an insufferably sterile Silicon Valley outpost is almost complete. It’s almost like global capital operates best where inequality is worst. Weird!
I’ll just put this here: Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK ‘peed in bottles’ over fears of being punished for taking a break.
At least one ENGO is praising Amazon in relation to Kinder Morgan. It’s sort of a weird, neo-liberal hill-to-die-on, but whatever:
Permanent jobs from one Amazon "tech hub": 3,000
Permanent jobs from one American pipeline: 50
pic.twitter.com/jcHz778mdK— Kai Nagata ?? (@kainagata) April 30, 2018
Meanwhile: Colonization forced Yale First Nation to sign deal with Kinder Morgan says chief. Stockholm Syndrome is a bitch.
Energy expert laughs at idea Kinder Morgan delay caused high gas prices. Yeah, duh…I’ve been saying this for like, a week.
“This is not a pipeline not being built, this is not the Trump administration, this is not the carbon tax — it’s not large enough to matter — it’s convenient to say a lot of that stuff, to have a single thing to point at and blame. But those arguments don’t hold water.”
Just be careful when you say that high gas prices are actually a good thing: Here’s what you had to say about our column celebrating high gas prices.
Pointless xenophobia of the day: Douglas Todd: Immigration disappointment looms for Canada’s young foreign students. Seriously, at a time when so many newspapers are firing reporters, how the fuck does a guy like Douglas Todd still have a job?
Nostalgia of the day: ’Twas ever thus? Vancouver real estate headlines 30 years ago.
Did you know: BC Hydro selleth and taketh on solar power, but not payeth.
Headline of the day: Residents cry fowl as dozens of feral peacocks fan discontent in Surrey.
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Calling that a .2% tax increase is absurd – that would only be true if the existing property tax was 100% of the value of the property, which, of course, it is not. Arguments in favour of the tax plan can stand quite well on their own without recourse to mischaracterisation or exaggeration. Better, actually.
(Another way in which advocates of the plan fail is by calling it a “school tax,” which it isn’t – the funds go the general fund. We need to fix the school buildings, and this will help provide the funds to do that, but when it’s called a “school tax” we are compelled to wonder what other lies and mischaracterisations are afoot.)