For those who know me, they know I go to a lot of coffee shops. I seriously considered opening one in 2008 and am the foursquare Mayor of several along Commercial Drive in Vancouver. There’s one in particular that I go to almost every single evening for weeks at a time and then sporadically maybe 3x a week when I’m not there every night. I see the same employees over and over and we share several conversations.
I take my laptop with me and it’s a bit sketchy to leave it unattended, but it’s also cumbersome to pack it up every time I need to take a phone call or run to the men’s room. So when I arrive, sometimes I head to the men’s room first. And I don’t order beforehand because someone might take my order or whatever else – just not interested in leaving it unattended. Last week, when I asked for the key to the men’s room, an employee that’s there as often as I am looked at me and said “Are you going to buy something? The washroom is just for customers.”
This same employee asks this every time and instead of saying “Yes” like I usually do, I said “I come here almost every day and you ask me this question almost every single time. You can almost start making my Americano when I walk in the door because you know that’s what I’ll order. And I order several times per visit because I don’t like just camping out with my laptop for free.”
Her response: ”I have to ask.”
So my question is – when am I a customer for this high-turnover coffee shop? Is it the second or two that I’m actually handing over money or should it lie in my commitment to constantly be coming back?
I imagine this cashier is just following instructions to the letter, but I was caught off guard by her narrow definition and apparent lack of sense about customer relationships, but maybe it’s just me expecting long-term, satisfactory, value-added customer relationships all over the place?
More importantly, does this organization define “customer” or are they letting their employees just wing it?
I don’t weigh in too much on the 2010 Olympics in person and have never opined in writing. Today, as I head off from Vancouver to Whistler for my last visit before the big 2010 extravaganza I’m feeling somewhat compelled. I don’t sway one way or the other on whether the Olympics should or should not happen, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to happen anyway.
This past summer, I sat down with a prominent Vancouver business person for lunch. At the time, he shared with me a thought that I didn’t immediately buy into. He said (and I paraphrase to capture the spirit, but didn’t have a recorder):
“I don’t care one way or the other about the Olympics. I support them in public because of the opportunity for this city and the province. Did you see what happened on The Bachelorette when it was filmed here? One televised shopping trip on Robson Street for a pink hoodie or whatever she bought and that place is sold out of hoodies the day after the show airs. That is the opportunity these Olympics bring us, but on a much larger scale.”
At the time, I thought “Great – let’s have this big, expensive event and reinforce our consumer culture to an extent we’ve never seen in Vancouver. We’ll benefit a few at the cost of many.” That stuck with me a long time. I was torn. I really couldn’t make up my mind what to think while watching the idiocy, indecency and stupidity of activities by certain groups, 2 of which come to mind:
Vancouver’s Anti-Poverty Coalition, who resort to one of the lower common denominators to get attention for their cause (If someone from APC reads this, could you please Comment on your cause below? I can’t remember if you just wreck things to get on TV or if you were trying to be somehow productive…);
VANOC, an organization that, as far as I can tell, really doesn’t care about anything, including our citizens’ rights, so long as the sponsors get paid (hopefully there’s no new bylaw that will get me fined for saying that).
One day a couple of weeks ago, it all came together
for me, via Twitter from one of the best people I’ve met through Social
Media, Dorette Steenkamp in South Africa. She quoted a recorded address by Nelson Mandela, a man she reveres and has taught me about over the past year. In discussing the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup, Mandela was cited as saying:
“We must ensure the event leaves a lasting benefit for all our people.” – Nelson Mandela (via Dorette Steenkamp, Dec 4/09)
My response was a reflex, but it dawned on me just what I really expected from my friends and neighbours here in British Columbia when I read it a second time:
“I wish we in Vancouver were so motivated with the 2010 Olympics instead of so much whining about their inevitability.” – Dave Macdonald, Dec 4/09
Every protest against the Olympics, every exhibition of public idiocy, reduces the opportunity we have for this event to benefit all people. Health care before Olympics? Too bad, you didn’t win and they’re coming. Next up? Deal with it and create an opportunity from what we have based on your belief. Your suspect landlord booted you out to capitalize on higher rents in February 2010? Ban together with others who see your cause and create a solution. These Olympics are giving us a massive opportunity to express our creativity and work with governments, businesses and other leaders to do things we’ve never done before. Anyone who lives here knows we have seemingly insurmountable issues with drugs, gangs, politics, poverty, homelessness – you name it and we pretty much need to fix it – the answers need to come from the bottom-up because the “up” only cares about what affects them at the top. Some people are fortunate in that they will directly benefit from the Olympic presence – for the rest of us, we need to get creative. Who will be the next Lululemon and create an opportunity??
People who want to throw tantrums on an international stage demonstrate to the world that their only mode of helping themselves is to create childish spectacles in feeble attempts to show that our governments lack heartstrings on which to tug. Surprise! Everyone knows those heartstrings don’t exist, particularly in this province. Solutions don’t come from simply making a governing body do a 180º turn on their heels – they come from consideration of where we’re really at as a group, agreeing on an ideal outcome, for ourselves and others, then moving forward. The whiners who are not able to work within the framework provided by the inevitable do not speak for the majority when it comes to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and those not able to actually protest in favour of solutions will never speak for me.
Last week during a martial arts class with my teacher, Jamen Zacharias, and two outstanding people in Michael and Navid, an attribute in team learning became apparent to me. Martial Arts isn’t something one really thinks of as the ultimate team sport, but serious practitioners realize that the entire reason for martial arts is to understand relationships: Relationships with the environment, other people, and ourselves.
On this particular Sunday, we were practicing some energy training. It was probably something of a hybrid of these two videos (first is short; 30s of the 2nd will give you the jist and features my training partners):
Those videos set the stage for the content, but the context is much different.
Jamen is the subject matter expert with hours well beyond some multiple of mine, Michael’s and Navid’s combined in jeet kun do (not that we’re slouches by any means). Michael and Navid are talented martial artists and it’s always a pleasure to train with them for the lessons they’ve taught me over the years.
On this day, Jamen gave us an overview of what needed to be done and let us explore – some punches, traps, pulls, parries, and any other activity we could cram into that range. What I found was that each one of us brought entirely different attributes to the skills we shared and that within the context of the most subtle aspects of jeet kun do, we played. We learned from one another quickly and although Jamen provided us the framework, I learned as much from my partners as I did from our teacher. The entire forum seemed like the most habitual way to learn and evoked the most natural collaboration I’ve ever been a part of.
As a student of organizational behaviour, I began to consider how this type of learning can function, and help people excel, in a workplace. I imagined a workplace where people with varied levels of skill come together and are thrust into using their training and natural attributes to rapidly learn from one another under a framework determined by experience and precedent; where the only feedback comes in the form of encouragement and rapid fire stimulus. I’m not sure if this is a specific style or if it’s been published by anyone as of yet, but like many of the lessons I learn in martial arts, this one will stick with me for a long time.
I haven’t written very much about procurement, but working with professional buyers and professional sellers is a large part of my work. I help them communicate. Often times, I’m helping them communicate via proposals that I’m constructing at all hours of the night or thousands of miles from home (most recently from Tampa, Florida) – it’s good times… to me, at least.
Sometimes organizations know what they want to buy, sometimes they just have a problem and need a solution. So they put up some form of Request for Proposals (RFP) that basically outlines what they need and anyone who is able, or eligible, to respond, can go ahead and write a proposal to address whatever is needed. I work in recruitment and I write proposals – if organizations need people, I can tell them how we can help them with that – very thoroughly, on paper in a very strict format.
Working in business services like I do is a luxury. Most of our proposals can be fairly creative, but, at other times they are not. Quite often, the organization that would like to buy something dictates exactly what they want a proposal to be and exactly what services or goods they expect. This can be helpful for them because they get what they are looking for, but hinder the ability for some firms to put together a creative response that’s actually more helpful to the organization than what they originally asked for.
After announcing on Twitter that I was attending a seminar on procurement today that was managed by some great people at NECI, Shane Gibson posed an interesting thought: ”I’d
like to know if they think RFP’s quell innovation?”.
I didn’t get to pose the question during the seminar, but I do have some thoughts on this after responding to over 80 RFPs since 2003. I’ve found that organizations sometimes prohibit innovation by virtue of the RFP (whether this is intentional or not, is beyond what I’d like to write here), but I don’t have a yes or no answer.
Sometimes the pricing structure isn’t the structure that will give them the best options, but they don’t know any better or don’t particularly care. Sometimes they don’t know what they want, but by being as specific as possible they feel a certain comfort level because the responses can be expected to be less open-ended. I think that their comfort level is misguided and really closes the organization’s mind to what may be the best solutions.
I find that every once in a while though, an organization will know that they don’t know, make the assumption that someone out there does know and can give them the solution. I tend to see this with organizations looking for new software solutions, but not quite as much with staffing, specifically. It’s my belief that unless organizations leave these doors open wherever possible, not where comfortable, but where possible, they won’t receive the most innovative solution. The RFP process provides some accountability and formal basis for a prospective relationship, but too often an organization will mistake this for a rigid solution or service.
Without innovative solutions, an organization is really quelling innovation in their own space, in their industry and ultimately making them less competitive one RFP at a time. It’s a real slippery slope in my mind.
Here they are on the big day! On July 23rd, 2009, Premier Gordon Campbell and Deputy Premier and Finance Minister Colin Hansen decided to save the British Columbian economy and ease unemployment in one fell swoop. In fact, this announcement had such a pronounced effect, that unemployment eased the very next week (see cbc.ca article here). Great job! That last bit is almost too good to be true.
This harmonization is going to put $1.9b into the government’s pocket and ease any concerns about deficit due to a recession. It’s just great. Where on earth does the praise end?
Oh, I think it ends right about…. here. ”B.C. revolt against harmonized sales tax growing.” That’s the headline. Why would there be revolt if we all have jobs and have all of this extra money in the bank?
This tax is the biggest affront to the “little guy” that we’ve seen since the GST implementation. Let’s start with small business. Steve Tannock puts in a very simple analysis on his own blog. In short, his business-to-consumer business just became more expensive. If you work in web development or marketing, or any other business where your margins are modular, you’ve probably just sold less modules. If you work in restaurants – well, they are speaking up just fine.
The “medium-sized little guy” has his challenges, too. If you want to buy a home or condo over $400,000 – you are going to be eating a huge tax bill on the order of $48,000. We can all watch our prices rise in May-June 2010 as people try to squeeze in under the deadline. Then we can watch the market fade next summer when people are hesitant to make a move. I’m not a real estate person, but these guys, Kye Grace and Tom Everitt, are and they have a fair bit to say in the opening segment of their video:
Let’s look at the “littler little guy.” Families must be absolutely relieved that kids’ clothes and basic groceries are still exempt and will follow the same basic rules as PST. According to this StatsCan report (c. 2008), you can say that a family with a single parent and two children is at the poverty line somewhere between $25,000 and $33,000 depending on location and specific circumstance. That’s a fairly large gap, but the bigger the gap, the more difficult it’ll be to take flack on my position. I’d surmise that, for a family of 3, if you make less than $33,000 gross income in British Columbia, you spend most of that to survive. In order to alleviate hunger, it’s much easier for those with stretched incomes to chase the cheaper food which means most of the more expensive, whole foods are off the menu and are replaced with processed or fast foods. Just by scratching the surface, the Liberal Government of British Columbia has made it that much more difficult to be part of the working poor in this province. Single parents making $8/hr (~$16k/year for 2000 hours worked) will be behind a bigger 8-ball than they are already.
This tax puts $1.9B into government coffers by preying upon British Columbia’s most vulnerable. Gordon Campbell has just put BC’s poorest citizens last in line to recover from the recession.
I’d like to qualify my point of view. I’ve lived in Point Grey and voted for Premier Campbell. I’ve lived in New Westminster and voted Liberal against overwhelming odds in an NDP-dominated riding. I like to personally think that Campbell’s first term in office created as many waves because of poor change management for all stakeholders of government services as for the changes he brought into affect. I don’t agree with the implementation of the HST.
It has its pros. It will save capital-intensive industries in BC a fair bit of cash and it’ll help exports. Most of these industries, such as forestry, are fading on their own accord and it remains to be seen how exports will fair in an environment that features higher transport-energy costs. The PST is a pain to administer in your own small business. I’ve done this and it’s terrible – the GST, soon-to-be-HST, is much easier to manage.
Lindsay Meredith, an SFU professor specializing in consumer behaviour says that “Whenever you see anything introduced by a government while the house is not sitting and there’s no consultation, get worried. This is something that probably deserves a little discussion in the house, and that hasn’t happened.” He believes this is a regressive tax and any opposition has to occur now, because once a new tax is implemented, it’s not likely to go away.
And why now? Steve Tannock touched on this briefly, but apparently if Colin Hansen had been up on the Ontario budget back when it was announced in March, the HST would have been an election issue. Really? Apparently the Liberal government wasn’t tipped off to the groundbreaking news made public in March. If you don’t take him at his word, we’re looking at a bad tax and bad politics. That can only bode well.
One thing I don’t understand is how it will affect health care. For example, if a BC Health Authority must pay HST to its vendors, does it receive a break on its budget? Or did all of our government services that pay external vendors become that much more expensive to maintain?
For more, check out the recent article at straight.com as well. If you’re so inclined, check out the No HST Facebook page, but most of all, contact your MLA and make this Legislature earn those hefty pay increases.
Tonight I checked out The Hurt Locker. I’m not in the business of writing movie reviews (no spoilers!), but this movie left me moved in a way most movies don’t.
One thing that was done really well with this film was simply the realism. Quite frankly, it got me as close to war as I’d ever imagine myself wanting to be. There were several deliberately psychological aspects to this film (comparison: GI Joe), but there was one that was more subtle and more personally relevant so I thought to explore it.
We often take for granted our freedom of choice. The Hurt Locker had me reflecting on the fact most of our parents tell us we can “do whatever we want” when we grow up. A number of us never figure out what it might be that we really want. The point most salient for me was simply that in a ravaged space, in this case Iraq, survival is all you really want. Objectives beyond survival, survival of the self or the team, are desirable, but they aren’t exactly mandatory. An interesting aside is that all parties directly involved in conflicts seem to have the same goals from this perspective (I say “directly involved” because I believe those indirectly involved are simply counting the spoils or longing for them back).
Missions are set out quite clearly for people in war more often than not. For the rest of us, we’re left to choose and then execute our own missions every single day. To believe we can do anything other than execute our own conjured mission borders on denial, in my opinion.
Our commercial system, however, is entirely geared towards reinforcing this denial. As an example, we can choose from over 30 different pre-made breakfast cereals. Why do we need this much choice? Why might we give this choice even a second thought? Quite simply, it’s in other people’s best interests for us to do so. By reinforcing our need to feel as though we are fulfilling some fundamental goal rather than just consuming well beyond necessity, companies win. People at the ‘top’ who might otherwise be fighting over the spoils of war, where we spend our money, are winning.
It’s really up to us to use our freedoms to define our mission in life and execute it to the best of our ability. For most of us, it’s not a matter of physical life and death – a lucky few realize it’s really much more than that.
Have you ever biked in Critical Mass in Vancouver? It’s actually fairly fun. My only ride, myself, was in 2001 and was then the largest to date. I don’t suppose that was too difficult back then. As a young UBC student, riding a bike and causing a bit of inconvenience for traffic seemed like a great idea. There was this clever mantra everyone screamed: “We’re not blocking traffic! We ARE traffic!” There were great people to meet. UBC students were commonplace, but there were also a lot of hippies, some advocates and a hell of a lot of activists. I really thought that it was about the ride and about the awareness created by banding all these cyclists together.
As we snaked through downtown we went to the Woodwards Building and blocked Abbott Street for an impromptu pro-housing anti-poverty stint. It wasn’t about cycling anymore, it was about another cause I really knew nothing about at the time. As we eventually continued our journey, I started to look around at all the signs carried by cyclists. There were signs prompting us to consider God and all Her graces, pro-Choice, anti-poverty, anti-government – you name it. I wasn’t at a cycling rally, I was part of an exhibition where a bunch of activists were getting together to draw attention to themselves. I never went back.
Fast-forward 8 years and not much has changed with Critical Mass except that the mass of people has increased to where it’s now… critical. More drivers are upset (there’s a case to be made that more drivers today are more entitled than ever, too). But the cyclists have been winning battles all over the place. We have cycling infrastructure that we cannot take for granted and the city’s (not the council, but the city) willingness to try out a bike lane on Burrard Bridge might be heavily tried by the media coverage Critical Mass is now receiving. Why is it just now receiving this coverage?
Two closely-related reasons. There’s a nifty piece here in the Georgia Straight by Mike Cantelon where he argues that there’s a Critical Mass scheduled for February 26th, 2010. That’s two days before the closing ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Cantelon points out that this is an issue for the city. Unfortunately, the issue is much bigger than this inconvenience and pissing match between the Olympics and a bunch of professional activists.
Via Twitter today, I received a note about an article from @VanPoverty linking to a Vancouver Sun Blog here by David Eby. He wrote about a recent Freedom of Information Request from the BC Civil Liberties Association where it was discovered that in 2003, then-Mayor Larry Campbell and then-City Manager Judy Rogers:
‘…promised the IOC and VANOC in clause 47, that the City would “ensure that the provisions of the Olympic Charter relating to propaganda and advertising are strictly observed …[and] shall ensure that no propaganda or advertising is placed within the Olympic venues or outside the Olympic venues in such a manner so as to be within the view of the television cameras covering the sports at the Games or of the spectators watching the sports at the Games… [and] shall ensure that no propaganda or advertising is allowed in the airspace of the City…”’
So if you wonder how Gregor Robertson can go from a willing participant in this event to demanding some reform and route destinations, I really think it’s easy to find the real reason. He has to.
He’s now part of the machine quietly switched on in 2003 that committed to altering our right to free speech for a period in 2010.
I’m not a fan of Critical Mass – I really think it served its purpose and needs to be altered to keep the integrity (and safety) of regular cyclists that it helped enable.
As for the Why Now? question – there’s something much bigger going on.
Critical Mass Photo with Mayor Gregor Robertson
(Travis Ford via Georgia Straight, Creative Commons License)
This afternoon the Vancouver Board of Trade presented a talk on the Business Case
Philip Mangano (photo from boardoftrade.com)
for Homelessness by Philip Mangano – a man dubbed a “homelessness ‘czar’” by Vancouver’s Mayor, Gregor Robertson. Mr. Mangano seems to be very well-connected in civic circles across North America. Two of his mantras really jumped out at me.
The first lesson is that homelessness is not a crisis – it’s a disgrace. If I personally expound on that for a moment – we’re talking about how we allow our most vulnerable citizens to live and how we brand our city to the rest of the province, the country and the world. From 2003 to 2007, I lived near Kitsilano and watched more and more homeless move in. They were primarily good people and I enjoyed my conversations with those I met, but to watch more and more people who “live outside” come into the neighbourhood in a booming economy left me wondering about the limits of our moral obligations and the simple desire of these people to find work. Regardless of how these people are homeless, it reflected poorly on our ability to provide the right opportunities for these citizens to succeed.
The second lesson is that in order to abolish homelessness, you need a leader who wants it to occur. In Canadian cities, this leader is the Mayor and Mangano did not rest until we were fully indoctrinated with the idea that @mayorgregor is our champion. I wasn’t living in Vancouver when Gregor Robertson was elected, but there was a no shortage of optimism behind his campaign and I hope it has proven true by the end of his term.
Homelessness is a complex issue. The title of “homeless” is an umbrella title for people who may have any one, or combination of: bad luck; laziness; addiction; mental illness or; challenging circumstances of some kind. I’m certain the actual list is infinitely long. Mangano reminded us that Vancouver probably has the most complex homelessness issue on the continent.
With regards to the talk, I had different expectations than Mangano in terms of what would be discussed. I was hoping to learn about building a business case that tied for-profit organizations (The Vancouver Board of Trade’s primary membership base from what I understand) into the cause of abolishing homelessness. What we actually received was a loose treatise on the financial implications on city and, in our case, provincial coffers.
I work in a for-profit organization and I wondered why we might care about homelessness (on paper). If our moral obligation was absolutely minute (it’s not), we need to start looking at ROI and general branding. In this context, what is the real “business” case for abolishing homelessness?
It would be great to abolish homelessness and it’s one of the most noble goals any citizen could ever undertake. The city’s commitment seems legitimate and if the Vancouver Board of Trade doubted that commitment or the work of the Vancouver Foundation or Street to Home, two organizations with vested interest in this issue, today’s talk simply would not have occurred. Is there a “business” case for regular businesses to be involved? This is the stuff of real Corporate Social Responsibility and I would love to hear thoughts on an actual business case for this level of participation.
On June 6th, I had the good fortune of attending a talk at UBC Farm by Michael Pollan – author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. It was a beautiful day out at the farm – the sun could have come out and burned us, but stayed nicely behind the clouds.
I’ve yet to read either of Pollan’s books, but his talk resonated with me in several ways I’d like to share. Food is a complex issue – on all of industrial, societal, and even psychological levels. Discussing food as a system, seemingly without variation, is painting some fairly broad strokes, but the key to this, if I read Pollan correctly, is through culture.
Pollan began by stating his premise: That you can’t have a healthy population without a healthy diet and that you can’t have a healthy diet without a healthy food system. This makes sense on an intuitive level and even he admitted that the latter is a point that will take some convincing.
Assuming Pollan is correct, there’s a chicken-and-egg paradox here: In order to have a healthy food system, producers need to be providing healthy, sustainable food options to consumers. But producers are not currently providing these options to consumers in any large number, so without these options, how does this all start on a meaningful scale? Because they act in the interest of sales and profits, it’s really not likely that producers will change their models for the sake of sustainability. In fact, I would speculate that most traditional food providers would not be able make these changes even if they wanted to because they are so deeply rooted in their strategies, supply chains and general processes that any change would be entirely profound and beyond the capacity of most. The onus is unfortunately pushed onto the “eater” to be diligent.
This is where I have the most concern – we’re asking the masses to act independently and there’s no obvious compelling case to convey that there is a tipping point for most; that is, a reason that appeals to people’s pocketbooks and sense of value, to ensure they act responsibly. Appealing to intellect, values, and the general sense of what one ‘should’ do, versus corporate decision making on the scale of a half trillion dollar industry is a gargantuan task.
Looking at a larger system, roughly sketched out below, there’s a significant vested interest in parties representing economic sustainability and growth to keep things as they are.
There is so much money being made at all these different layers, that no one has an incentive to change beyond the leap of faith related to what is generally good. Pollan notes that $283 billion in revenue is generated in the US thanks to food-related health care. I am someone who depends heavily on the British Columbia health care industry for my own sustenance and the thought of losing that scares me. Where’s my ROI for the right choice?
I’m not certain that the people on the planet today are facing the most hardships seen on the planet in history, but I am sure there’s a case to be made for that. We certainly have one of the most difficult choices in the history of the planet – to take action against the corporate earnings per share mentality from 20 years ago and force change in supply chains we don’t even fully understand. It’s an interesting leap of faith, indeed.
I don’t usually write much of a political nature. In general, I prefer to encourage thought without forcing my opinion, but today is a different day.
A lot of people are wondering what BC-STV (Single Transferable Vote) is. This video is a decent summary for those who either don’t know much about it or don’t quite get it:
The idea can be complex to explain, but fairly easy to demonstrate.
The proponents of STV will tell you that you’ll get proportional representation and a better democracy. Its opponents will tell you the odds are that it won’t provide any different results than in a first past the post system that we have now (David Schreck discusses this in the Georgia Straight). He’s got some good points, but his examples are very carefully chosen. For more on STV in the Straight, go here.
STV paves the way for Green candidates to gain seats in the legislature and it’s easy to see why they back it. Like the Greens or not, they do have some element of representation in BC.
For me, I like the idea of a more accurate determination of our legislature, but that takes a back seat. The first reason I’m voting for it is that under our current system, potential solutions to environmental issues have been compartmentalized by party. Carbon taxes, water management and run of river projects, hydrogen power… all have been politicized in this province and made mutually exclusive in a way our environment just can’t afford. We could elect the Greens, but a single platform party is scary to me.
Two elections ago, simply having an environmental platform was considered a bonus and a way to ensure your vote against the Green candidate – now neither the Liberals nor the NDP have a consistently sound environmental platform. If there’s an opportunity to force accountability in administering our environment before something tragic occurs, I really think that STV gives the best opportunity.
For whatever election promises are worth:
BC Liberal Environmental Platform (there’s a fair bit here, but I tried to find the part about selling our rivers off to organizations such as Plutonic Power and other independent power projects, but it didn’t seem to be there so figure out what you can with whatever’s here)
NDP Platform (PDF) (Pages 40-43 are about the environment. Well, Page 40 is a title page. Page 41 shames Gordon Campbell… their environmental platform is pretty much 2/3 of a page crammed into two pages on 42 and 43)
Every protest against the Olympics, every exhibition of public idiocy, reduces the opportunity we have for this event to benefit all people. Health care before Olympics? Too bad, you didn’t win and they’re coming. Next up? Deal with it and create an opportunity from what we have based on your belief. Your suspect landlord booted you out to capitalize on higher rents in February 2010? Ban together with others who see your cause and create a solution
think it’s easy to find the real reason. He has to.
