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.

Still not enough: BC minimum wage increases on June 1. Remember folks, giving the lowest income earners more money doesn’t make you poorer.

But rich people cheating the system does! CRA signs secret settlement with wealthy KPMG clients involved in offshore tax scheme. Steve Mann: “Be rich. Do crime. The CRA literally says, “It’s better this way. We saved money!”

And speaking of rich people…Limos, Lambos, choppers & booze: Raucous party rocks Anmore. Ha ha, look at these rich people upset that rich people are doing rich people things. What a bunch of rich people.

$100 fine for sleeping on the street: B.C. mayor defends bylaw changes. Not that I expect much from Penticton, but it’s 2019. Criminalizing homelessness after decades of neglecting its root causes will never work.

Meanwhile, in Finland… ‘It’s a miracle’: Helsinki’s radical solution to homelessness.

B.C. police are at the front of mental-health care without the support or training that requires, review finds. We’ve been saying this since Dziekanski. Since Frank Paul. Since Phuong Na (Tony) Du. Since 2008’s “Lost in Transition” report. Since the 2010 follow up “Policing Vancouver’s Mentally Ill: The Disturbing Truth. Since they released the Vancouver Police Mental Health Strategy in 2016. They are showing that reports and studies only matter to pad their budgets.

Meanwhile, we’ve cut funding for Spikes on Bikes, the Vancouver Recovery Club, the Drug Users Resource Centre, Gallery Gachet, West Coast Mental Health Network’s Peer Support Bridging Program, the Rainier Hotel, and the Vancouver Native Health Society to name a few. Why is it that we never talk about defunding the police?

Not just Alabama: This Burnaby Conservative candidate thinks rape survivors should have to give birth.

It’s milkshake time!

Meanwhile, B.C. names new human rights commissioner — the first in 17 years. Christy Clark must be turning in her grave! [Editor: She’s not dead, Sean]

“Thanks for your donation”: Trudeau declines to call deaths of Indigenous women and girls a genocide. What does he want to call it then? “Reconciliation that needs more work”?

While most of twitter rallied behind the news with the hashtag #settlercollector, some were fixated on semantics:

if “genocide” is the word we’re now supposed to use to describe ~3,000 murders over several decades, we’re going to need a completely new word to describe the Holodomor, Holocaust, Rwandan, Armenian & Cambodian genocides etc (these being actual genocides) https://t.co/4Wf1WeGAC0

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) June 1, 2019

Nothing really shows a winner like insistence on the highest possible threshold for what constitutes genocide.

— jbanal (@jbanal) June 3, 2019

Oh and yes, it’s genocide. Here’s a handy guide if you disagree. 10 Stages of Genocide.

9 illegal pot dispensaries in Vancouver must close after court decision, city says. Nice job, none of you.

Instagram account of the day: BC Wine Memes.

Mike Smyth: Eby slams suggestion that dirty-money cleanup will hurt B.C. economy.

“I started out kind of laughing at it,” the crusading attorney general told me Monday. “Now I’m just kind of pissed off, frankly. The audacity of people to actually come out and say, ‘We want to build British Columbia’s economy on dirty money. We want to have boutique services for thugs and criminals selling fentanyl and killing people.’ ”

Can we change our license plates to “I started out kind of laughing at it, now I’m just kind of pissed off”. Like, that’s pretty much the entire theme of Tea & Two Slices from the beginning.

Ian Young isn’t having it either: Scared of falling home equity and the war on money laundering in Vancouver? Tough luck, and get a grip on reality.

Would-be buyers looked on in horror. Owners tut-tutted in sympathy: I mean, it wasn’t right, was it?

But how many humble-bragged at dinner parties about this terrible phenomenon that was also enriching them beyond all deserving? How many sneaked downstairs to repeatedly check their address on the BC Assessment website, drooling at the improbably pneumatic number spread-eagled before them?

It was ownership as onanism.

Meanwhile, The Opioid Crisis Is Killing Trees Too. Imagine just going out there and stealing trees? Oh wait, our entire country is founded upon that. Never mind.

Sudden drop in gas prices across Metro Vancouver linked to global economic gloom. Oh weird, so our gas prices are tied to the whims of global capital and not wether or not we expand a pipeline? Huh.

This Vancouver market is handing out embarrassing plastic bags to customers. Ah yes, shaming your consumers for using plastic bags. What could go wrong?

In 2019 someone thought this was a good idea: Metro Vancouver business posts photo of KKK hooded beer cans ‘lynching’ a brown bottle.

Do the right thing: Indigenous healing centre at Vancouver’s CRAB Park step closer to reality.

Still going strong: Vancouver’s Music Waste Festival celebrates 25 years of independence.

Honour Bound: Help INDEX’s longest running employee Jeff!