Tuesday, July 31, 2018

The Vancouver Model (ctd)...Is The Architect's Apprentice Attempting To Use It To His Advantage?

ItAin'tOverTillTheTunelessSingin'InTheRain
FinallyStopsVille


A fine young fellow named Hector Bremmer used to work for non-Surrey mayoral candidate, and former BC Liberal Minister of Everything, Rich Coleman.

That would be the very same Mr. Coleman who dismantled the illegal gaming enforcement team (IGET) in 2009, an act of purposeful commission that helped make it possible for an explosion in the number of hockey bags, et cetera, filled to bursting with drug-dusted cash to be plopped down on casino floors for laundering such that at least some of the cleaned-up dirty dollars very likely made their way into the high end of the Lotuslandian real estate market where they would have been willingly gobbled up by an 'industry' fully supported, aided and abetted by a Christy Clark-led, Coleman et al.-operationalized government that was notorious for dropping the puck for industries that paid them big money to play.

So.

What is the former apprentice Mr. Bremmer up to these days?

Well...

Just in case you missed it, Bremmer is running for Vancouver Mayor as a horse ridden by (surprise!) former Liberal rain mucker, Bee Boyz runner and BCL Klout Klub leader Mark Marissen. Given all that, imagine how surprised we were to learn that the good Mr. Bremmer, has a super-duper pineapple upside-diver downish caked plan to (put the) fix (in for) the Lotuslandian real estate bund.

Jen St. Denis of the local Star Division has the story:

...Yes! Vancouver’s mayoral candidate is Hector Bremner, a Vancouver city councillor first elected as a Non-Partisan Association candidate. But Bremner left the NPA after the party’s board decided to not allow him to proceed as a mayoral nominee for their party over conflict of interest concerns.

Bremner and his supporters then formed Yes! Vancouver. The party held a nomination meeting this weekend and will run five council candidates and one candidate each for park board and school board, as well as Bremner for mayor.

Ever since he was first elected in October 2017, Bremner has advocated for more supply as the sole solution to fixing Vancouver’s affordable housing crisis.

“The federal government and the provincial government are increasing taxes, increasing interest rates, they’re doing everything they can to slow down demand but it’s really not working,” Bremner said.

“The truth is in the Lower Mainland we have over 100,000 homes trapped up in approvals and those homes need to get to people and we need to get things done.”...




The irony, for those who have been paying attention at least, it burns.

Regardless.

Do not expect the likes of Mikey Mike or Ron Obvious to feel the heat, however.

OK?




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And don't ever forget that $800,000 in twenties is very heavy, indeed.



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Friday, July 20, 2018

The Vancouver Model (ctd)....What, Her Worry?

AllYourLaundries'RNot
MeVille


From the MoCo's mystical listicle man...



Gosh.

Does this mean they don't teach German to academic tourists at the Sorbonne?


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Monday, July 16, 2018

Sometimes The Bloody Algorithm Works Exactly As It Should.

YouThoughtGodWasAn
ArchitectVille


We're back!

From holidays I mean.

And today I needed tunes to help me get through the towering pile of paperwork that constructed itself in my absence from the day job.

The medley below is the first thing that popped up on the YouTubes and I've been listening to it on repeat all afternoon.

I am of the firm opinion that the first song should be required listening for a whole lot of folks on both sides of the 49th parallel...




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Of course, I am in no way pretending that, just because the goddamned algorithm can be used for good occasionally does not mean that it is not used for pure evil approximately ivory soap percent of the time.



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Sunday, July 01, 2018

The Vancouver Model....Why?

AllYourCorruptionEruptions'R
UsVille


There are five 'W's' in journalism.

And when it comes to what has come to be known as the Vancouver Model the first four (who, what, where, when) were nailed to the wall some time ago by the work of such folks as Sean Holman and Sam Cooper, not to mention paying attention more citizenish journalists like Sandy Garossino and Laila Yuile.

But...

Now that all four of those W's have been brought to the fore again by the D. Eby-commissioned report from Peter German, I personally don't understand why the local proMedia wurlitzer has been cranked up to tell us about how the government of the day turned a blind eye to what was going on.

Why don't I get this 'blind eye' thing*?

Because, as Laila has pointed out again today and as I fussed about awhile back, it was much more than turning a blind eye given the willful dismantling if the Integrated Gaming Enforcement Team (IGET) in 2009 by Mr. Rich Coleman.

Which gets us to the real fifth W in this case, which is....

Why did the BC Liberal braintrust do this?

Or.

Put another slightly more pointed way...

Why did they put policies in place and take active de-regulatory/dismantling steps to facilitate massive gambling corruption in British Columbia and all the internecine webs weaved as a result?


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*Actually, I do get it from a local proMedia perspective given that this story has all the same hallmarks of willful ignorance that surfaced when Dan Levin wrote his big money poli-donation 'Wild West' (sans Artemus Gordon) piece for the NYT...A piece, by the way, that Mr. Rich Coleman called 'laughable' at the time.


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