Redeye

128 speakers have signed up this week to talk to Vancouver city council about upzoning and densifying much of Vancouver for social housing. Council was also considering support for prioritizing Commercial Drive as a pedestrian-first street, patents on Covid-19 vaccines, accessible washrooms at Skytrain stations and an apology for a decision made 107 years ago. Ian Mass joins us with his City Beat report.

Later this month the city of Vancouver will submit its application to Health Canada for permission to decriminalize simple possession of illicit drugs. The application defined a threshold limit for possession without consulting with drug users. They say this limit is far too low. Caitlin Shane is a staff lawyer with the Pivot Legal Society, working on drug policy. She spoke with James Mainguy last week.

The scale of the Israeli attack on Gaza is the most intense since the 7-week Israeli war on Gaza in 2014. To find out more about the reasons behind the current escalation, we speak with Yara Shoufani. She is a Palestinian organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement (Toronto Chapter). Yara Shoufani has a masters in Political Science with research focused on colonization and gentrification in Palestine. We spoke on Friday May 14.

On April 27, the Council of Canadians and the Canadian Health Coalition held an online day of action calling on the federal government to create national standards for long-term care in Canada, instead of handing the job off to an accreditation industry with no power to enforce standards. In this podcast, we hear from John Cartwright, Pam Beattie and Pat Armstrong. We’d like to thank the Council of Canadians and Canadian Health Coalition for making the recording of the event available to us.

In April, over 100 Canadians staged a hunger strike to raise awareness of the federal government’s plan to purchase 88 new advanced fighter jets for a total cost of over $76 billion. Dr. Brendan Martin is a member of the Vancouver chapter of the organization, World BEYOND War. He finished a two-week fast on April 23 as part of the No New Fighter Jets Coalition and joins us to talk about the campaign.

The 2021 Federal Budget promised to support people living in Indigenous communities, and allocate over $18 billion over the next five years to improve the quality of life and create new opportunities. Riley Yesno says as “historic and unprecedented” as this Budget may be, that does not mean it is sufficient. Riley Yesno is a queer Anishinaabe writer, researcher, and public speaker from Eabametoong First Nation. She is currently a Canadian Journalism Foundation Fellow, and a Yellowhead Institute Research Fellow.

In July 2020, Vancouver City Council passed a motion to decriminalize poverty. Council heard about a variety of impacts, including the intersecting impacts of poverty, gender, and racism on interactions with police. A report on the implementation of this task came to Council last week and Ian Mass, our City Beat reporter, joins us to tell us about the outcome. Plus a social housing update and a new 3-day car race proposed for Vancouver.

On April 26, the Vancouver School Board voted to end its school liaison officer program. Meenakshi Mannoe is Criminalization & Policing Campaigner at Pivot Legal Society and was involved in the fight to remove police from school. She joins us to talk about her concerns with the motion the Vancouver School Board passed and what’s next for the campaign to remove police from schools.

All Mountain caribou in Canada are at risk of extinction, and none more so than the southern Mountain Caribou of BC and Alberta. Herds have been in decline for over three decades. In March, the federal government rejected an emergency order under the Species at Risk Act to protect the threatened caribou. We speak with Charlotte Dawe, Conservation and Policy Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee.

Holborn Properties bought 224 Little Mountain social housing units in 2007 with a promise to rebuild. Fourteen years later, the lot still sits empty. Activists are fighting to see the sales agreement that the BC Liberal government signed with Holborn. A government arbitrator ordered BC Housing to release the contract but Holborn continues to fight to keep it private. We catch up on what’s happening with David Chudnovsky of Community Advocates for Little Mountain.

Yellow Objects is part digital experience and part theatrical installation. The work is inspired by the democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and created by Derek Chan, co-artistic director of Rice & Beans Theatre. Derek Chan grew up in Hong Kong and is a playwright, director, performer and translator. We speak with him about how the work came about and how he adapted it once the pandemic made live theatre productions impossible.

Someone Like Me, premiering at Toronto’s Hot Docs this month, documents what happens when a group of strangers from Vancouver’s queer community sponsor Drake, a gay asylum seeker from Uganda. With the help of Rainbow Refugee, they embark on a year-long quest for personal freedom. We speak with filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams.

The 360 Riot Walk is a multilingual interactive tour which invites participants to trace a layered history of labour politics, anti-Asian racism, and community resistance in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The tour has 13 stops between Gassy Jack and Oppenheimer Park. We speak with artist Henry Tsang, creator of the 360 Riot Walk.

The Canadian and Ontario governments recently announced they are giving $470 million to Sonofi Pasteur, a French vaccine maker, to build a new plant to manufacture vaccines for influenza. In December we talked with Colleen Fuller about how the Mulroney government sold off Canada’s Connaught Labs and their research and production capacity. We’ve connected with her again to get her take on Canada’s role in the provision of affordable vaccines, here and abroad.

It is clear that the Covid-19 pandemic has drastically reduced transit ridership, and that rebuilding rider confidence will be challenging. Councillor Jean Swanson has a motion before Vancouver City Council specifically focused on preserving bus ridership, which makes up over 60% of transit trips in Metro Vancouver. Redeye collective member and City Beat commentator Ian Mass joins us to talk about all the goings on at Vancouver City Hall and beyond.

A year into the pandemic, it’s clear that any recovery plan has to include public investment in child care. The Canadian child care sector was fragmented and under-funded before the pandemic and it’s just gotten worse. A new study by David Macdonald and Martha Friendly of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives surveyed child care providers in 37 Canadian cities and found staggering differences in how much parents pay for child care fees across the country. We talk with Iglika Ivanova, senior economist with the CCPA-BC office.

The ride-hailing giant Uber recently announced its answer to complaints about lack of benefits and labour protections for its workers when it unveiled its Flexible Work+ plan last. Uber is asking provincial governments to amend labour legislation to allow gig workers to accumulate benefit funds that they could spend on things like health insurance and pension plans. We speak with Brice Sopher, an Uber Eats courier and organizer with the Gig Workers United union.

The upcoming provincial and federal budgets are being called the most important in a generation with the opportunity of addressing long standing systemic inequality and injustices. Alex Hemingway is an economist and public finance policy analyst at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC Office. He joins us to talk about what British Columbians are hoping to see in these budgets.

On April 1. BC Supreme Court granted an injunction to logging company Teal-Jones Group to remove Fairy Creek/Ada’itsx forest defenders. This clears the path for the destruction of one of the last intact old-growth areas on Vancouver Island, on the territory of the Pacheedaht First Nations. We speak with two people from the Sierra Club, senior forest and climate campaigner Jens Wieting and forest relations coordinator Ma̱k’wa̱la – Dakota Smith.

According to a recent study, more than one and a half million child laborers were working in cocoa growing areas of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana in 2019. In a landmark human rights case, eight young men from Mali are bringing a class action suit against big chocolate companies. They managed to escape after being trafficked as children and forced to harvest cocoa in Cote D’Ivoire. We speak with lawyer and executive director of International Rights Advocates Terry Collingsworth.