Redeye

Green Party councillor Adrienne Carr asks Vancouver City Council to reconsider a snap decision they made last summer to allow natural gas to be used in new building construction. Council will also be looking at giving an international developer a sweetheart deal, and finally after 5 years of waiting, the City has launched a community engagement process addressing historical discrimination against people of South Asian Canadian descent. Mass joins us with his City Beat report.

Both the BC NDP and the Conservative Party of BC have pledged to expand involuntary care under the Mental Health Act for people who use drugs.  More than 17 organizations have condemned forced detention plans, including the BC Civil Liberties Association and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.  Meenakshi Mannoe is connected to anti-prison and anti-policing movements and has previously engaged in advocacy related to the expansion of involuntary care. We speak with her about this issue.

The First Call Child and Youth Advocacy Society has been producing election-focused materials for decades. With the BC provincial election just days away, First Call has created a toolkit focused on effective election advocacy for children and youth. Adrienne Montani joins us to talk about some of the issues facing children, youth and families in the province.

If you live in British Columbia, and you care about equality and social justice, you probably have many conversations in week about how unaffordable housing is becoming. Economists at the BC office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have examined this issue and have come forward with a multi-pronged approach to tackle the problem. We speak with senior economist Marc Lee.

A recent review of forest trends shows clearcut logging of old growth forests is continuing at unsustainable levels. This is despite the rapid increase of forest area burned - and the fact that there’s a limited area of intact forests left. The review was produced by the Sierra Club BC. I speak with Senior Policy and Science Advisor Jens Wieting.

Today, Ian Mass tells us about a 10-year retrospective on reconciliation work at the municipal level in Vancouver. Plus two major non-market housing developments in the Downtown Eastside. All this and more on City Beat.

A new handbook has been launched to assist BC school trustees who are being targeted with transphobic and homophobic abuse. It outlines some of the ways that school boards are currently under attack and ways to prevent and address this violence. The handbook was written collaboratively by a committee of the group, Lawyers Against Transphobia. We speak with one of the authors, James Chamberlain.

On a misty morning in the fall of 1985, a small group of Haida people blockaded a muddy dirt road on Lyell Island, demanding that the government work with Indigenous people to find a way to protect the land and the future. The Stand is a riveting new feature documentary drawn from more than a hundred hours of archival footage from that first blockade and the months that followed. We speak with director Christopher Auchter.

The climate crisis has already unleashed disastrous consequences from forest fires to catastrophic flooding and drought. In the face of these alarming trends, it’s crucial for us to remain hopeful and continue to seek solutions. In his book, Climate Hope, David Geselbracht recounts stories of action from around the world and reveals remarkable efforts to address them.  David Geselbracht is an environmental journalist and lawyer. His writing has appeared in Canadian Geographic, The Globe and Mail and Broadview Magazine, among other publications.

Today, almost one in 4 of all species are at risk of extinction, from caribou and spotted owls to sea stars and slime mould. In her new book, Sarah Cox visits the habitats where species are threatened, and the people who are trying to save them. She documents heroic efforts to prevent animal species from disappearing while, at the same time, challenging us to question the approaches we’re taking. Sarah Cox is an award-winning reporter and B.C. bureau chief for The Narwhal.

Municipal politicians across Metro Vancouver are back at work after an August break. Redeye collective member, Ian Mass is also back withhis City Beat report talking about Vancouver’s plan to fast-track social and co-operative housing development, review the Integrity Commissioner’s role and lots more.

In 2021, Vancouver City Council formally apologized for historical discrimination toward  passengers travelling on board the Komagata Maru steamship from British India in 1914.  Last month, the City unveiled special commemorative signs near the harbour honoring those impacted by the Komagata Maru tragedy. The street signs were designed by Jagandeep Nagra, a queer Punjabi visual artist and community advocate.

In 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel called on international scholars to break ties with Israeli academic institutions. In response, Israeli academics claimed to be simply bystanders to the apartheid policies of the Israeli state. A new book reveals just how deeply Israeli universities are entangled with the Israeli state’s systems of oppression. Maya Wind is the author of Towers of Ivory and Steel. She is a scholar of military expertise and a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

A ground-breaking new book examines and exposes the use of defamation law to silence victims of sexual violence. Author Mandi Gray draws on media reports, courtroom observations, and interviews with silence breakers, activists, and lawyers from across Canada to examine the impact of so-called liar lawsuits on those who report or are thinking of reporting sexual violence.

Jérémie Harris is a former physicist, an AI safety expert and a startup founder. He’s the author of “Quantum Physics Made Me Do It: A Simple Guide to the Fundamental Nature of Everything” and he was be a featured speaker at the 2024 Vancouver Writers Fest. We spoke with him about his new book and about the threats posed by the unregulated growth of AI.

In February, the Supreme Court dismissed a challenge by Quebec to the Canadian government’s Indigenous child welfare law, reversing a Quebec Court of Appeal decision to declare the 2019 federal law partly unconstitutional. The decision was widely celebrated by First Nations, Inuit and Métis leaders. Yet, according to lawyer Bruce McIvor, the decision has a troubling assumption at its core. Bruce McIvor is a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation and a founding partner at First People’s Law.

It seems that the more that comes out about the effects of social media on children and youth, the more concerned we should be. Now a law firm that represents victims of social media has filed cases against platforms including Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord, on the basis that they are harmful by design. Lorraine Chisholm speaks with Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center.

On February 1, Premier Danielle Smith announced that she plans to implement a slate of policies that target transgender and gender-diverse children and youth in Alberta. The proposed measures go far beyond what has already been brought in in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. We speak with Corinne Mason, professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

More and more Canadians are unable to access public primary healthcare, according to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal at the beginning of December, 2023. In fact, about 20% of Canadians have no family doctor at all, and many more have irregular access to clinicians. The CMAJ study compares the Canadian primary care system with New Zealand and eight countries in Europe including France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Dr Tara Kiran is the senior author of the study and a family physician and scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto.

In 2020, there were widespread calls to defund the police following the police murder of George Floyd. In Canada, a poll from that year found over 50% of Canadians wanted to see police budgets reduced. Despite this, no major Canadian city police department has had its funding reduced and in fact, budgets have gone up. We speak with Ted Rutland is associate professor in geography, planning and environment at Concordia University in Montreal.