Tea & Two Slices is a long-running local news round-up by NEEDS frontman and veteran dishwasher Sean Orr, who lives and works in Gastown, deeply aware of his privilege.

It’s weird what happens when you create a vacuum: Vancouver police believe three DTES shootings may be linked to gang activity. Yeah? No shit. As I said in August, “it’s almost as though ignoring the root causes of structural poverty and trauma for decades is having an unwanted effect. It’s funny what a poisoned drug supply, the constant criminalization of poverty and being treated as disposable will do to a community over time…”

It’s what happens when the black market controls drugs. Drugs that can be made literally anywhere. Drugs that are used to self medicate untreated trauma caused by systemic failures in policy. It’s what happens when you have a precarious unregulated illicit economy that could easily be usurped with decriminalization and safe supply. VANDU, where one of the shootings took place, echoes all this here:

Cracking down on gangs, creating harsher laws, and putting more police in our communities is only going to make these problems worse by disrupting the existing markets, driving up prices and creating more intense and violent competition.
If we really want to end the violence that plagues our community we need to talk about ending the drug war, about safe supply, about poverty, and colonization and racism. If the conversation only deals with the symptoms (gangs and guns), it will never address the real wound (social and economic injustice, and personal and historical trauma).

Even the VPD are calling for it: Vancouver police call for safe drug supply

It’s also getting national attention: Green Party would decriminalize all drug possession if elected. But as with most things the Greens do, what looks good on the surface is shockingly bad policy as they would “recriminalize some drugs later”. Like after we’re really sure that it’s working? Jesus. This plus the whole “racism is a distraction” thing, opening up the abortion “debate”, privatizing First Nations drinking water, and yikes.

Hell, they aren’t even that good on the one thing they are supposed to be good at. The environment. There’s a good Facebook thread about it but this is just the peak of elitist techno-utopian liberal wokeness: Green Party used Photoshop to add reusable cup and metal straw to photo of Elizabeth May.

Of course we have, um, bigger fish to fry: School officials join fact-challenged ‘climate strike’. Wherein a BC Liberal hack writing for a local paper owned by a guy who wants to build a $22-billion oil refinery knows more about “facts” than 99% of scientists in the world. We should totally trust a guy who puts the word “science” in scare quotes and is triggered by a self-entitled Generation Z’er who has the audacity to want to live past the age of 40.

Related: MEC, Lush Cosmetics to close stores across Canada on Friday for climate strike.

Clearly Black Press are after all those outrage-clicks that worked so well for the Globe and Mail’s platforming of Ezra Levant and the Vancouver Sun’s anti-immigrant piece. Then there’s UBC, which is welcoming the author of said anti-immigrant piece with open arms along with disgraced University of New Brunswick and white supremacist Ricardo Duchesne: Academic Freedom to Discuss the Impact of Immigrant Diversity upon Canada.

And now for the most pointless article in the world: Vancouver, you’re using escalators wrong, but that’s (mostly) OK.

On the other hand, this article is amazing: Spoils of #nature on Instagram. Instalog? Can we get that in the Lexicon, please?

Bonus: Grizzly bears fight along northern B.C. highway in rare footage. This probably a metaphor for something…