Vancouver’s climate-emergency response plan relies too much on new fees for average residents and on expensive regulation for buildings, says a public policy professor who is a member of provincial and national groups working on solutions to climate change.
As part of a series highlighting the work of young people in addressing the climate crisis, writer Patricia Lane interviews Victoria Coun. Sharmarke Dubow.
The 1990s were personally tough for me. I spent the decade immersed in action based on climate catastrophe science, trying, and by all accounts failing, to stem the tide. Hardest of all, death and dementia came to my family.
Back in 2006, when George W. Bush was president and the Paris Agreement was still a decade away, the city of Tucson, Arizona, made a modest plan to do something about climate change. It set a goal to reduce city-wide greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels, and gave itself a generous 14 years to do it.
In December 2019, Vancouver City Council passed a unanimous motion to support tying rent control to units in Vancouver’s lowest income rental stock, Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Hotels. Now we need to make sure they do that. SROs, which are 100 sq-ft rooms without kitchen or washroom facilities, are Vancouver’s housing of last resort, and rising rents there are pushing Vancouverites into homelessness.
Canada's housing shortage is almost at a "crisis level," said the CEO of an investment firm that owns dozens of B.C. apartment buildings. "The good news for investors is there is no easy solution in sight.”
In early March, Mark Goodman flew to Toronto to meet with CEOs of six of that city’s seven biggest institutional investors in multi-family residential real estate.
TransLink has been cutting bus service for years. This Labour Day most cutbacks are in Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond and North Vancouver.
Totally suspended until 2021 are Route Nos. 32, 44, 143, 258, and 480.
Frequency on other bus routes will be cut back by 10 to 33%. (Changing from every 10 mins to 15 mins or from every 20 mins to every 30 mins is a 33% cut.)
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected public transit in cities and towns across Canada. There are fewer riders as people who are able to stay home avoid public transit to physically distance. For those who rely on it, however, transit remains a necessity as it was pre-pandemic. Our governments’ responses have been to threaten massive transit budget cuts.
While the U.S. border remains closed, Joe Biden’s election slogan has found its way into Canada. “Build back better” is what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now promising as Canada rebuilds from the coronavirus pandemic.
For Toronto, building back better starts with changing the TTC for the better. Toronto needs a safe and reliable public transit system to fuel our economic recovery.
