Chris Thoreau would rather spend time growing pea shoots than convincing city hall to make the practice legal.

One of the UrbanDigs plots in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver in 2011 (Photo by Julia Smith)

Thoreau owns a small agricultural business called My Urban Farm from his home in East Vancouver, where he grows sunflowers, buckwheat, and pea shoots year-round. He also runs Your Local Food Peddlers, a company that connects customers in Vancouver with other urban farmers in the city and the Lower Mainland. He sells to farmers’ markets, restaurants, and a few small grocers.

Business is booming. But in order for Thoreau to get a license and insurance for his food-growing business, he would have to move production out of Vancouver.

Commercial farming on residential plots remains illegal in Vancouver, despite the fact that local food production forms a key pillar of Vancouver’s plan to become the world’s greenest city by 2020. Insurance companies don’t cover operations that contravene municipal by-laws.

It’s a by-law the city’s commercial urban farmers say needs to be changed.

How local farming works in Vancouver

Julia Smith doesn’t remember ever deciding to become a commercial farmer.

Smith's front yard in 2011 after she caught what she calls the "virus" of food production (Photo by Julia Smith)

After moving to a new Vancouver house with a lot of lawn space that needed tending, she noticed an ad on Craigslist posted by someone looking for land to cultivate. Hoping to reduce the time she would have to spend mowing the lawn, she answered the ad, and soon a woman came over and sowed some seeds.

After watching how it was done, Smith started growing her own food, soon growing so much that she had extra left over. “I ended up selling some food to some people, and they wanted more,” she recalls.

But with her own yard maxed out, Smith found herself looking for landowners who wanted their yards turned into vegetable gardens.

“Next thing I knew, I was an urban farmer.”

Most land cultivated by urban farmers in Vancouver is owned by private residents, according to Marc Schutzbank, a graduate student at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC. The landowners allow urban farmers to cultivate their yards in exchange for a tended garden and a weekly box of fresh produce during the growing season. Contracts are usually informal but farmers often request a commitment of three years in order to amortize the initial commitment of time and resources.

The farmers then sell their produce to pre-paying customers as part of a community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) program. The first CSA in Vancouver started in 2007, when a few like-minded individuals put their green thumbs together and created a network of farmers across the city. By 2011, there were 13 CSAs operated in the city, according to a not-yet-published study by Schutzbank.

“It’s not reasonable for us to operate without insurance,” says Smith.  ”We’re growing people’s food.”

According to Schutzbank’s research, in 2010, Vancouver’s urban farmers tended an average of seven donated residential plots. Farmers rarely solicit for land, as the demand for farming services is high.

Smith’s own experience echoes Schutzbank’s findings. “The demand is there,” she says. “The biggest issue for urban farmers right now is making it legal.”

Push for changing policy

Like commercial farms within the city today, just over a decade ago, farmers’ markets in Vancouver were illegal.

A woman shops at the Winter Farmers' Market at Nat Bailey Stadium (Photo by Julia Kalinina)

“When we started, we were always in contravention to by-laws,” says Roberta LaQuaglia, operations manager at Vancouver Farmers’ Markets, a non-profit society that fought for direct market access in Vancouver for B.C. farmers. “We were squatting on private property.”

However, because of high demand for local food, the city first turned a blind eye to the markets, and then changed by-laws to make them legal.

Last year, the City of Vancouver donated $10,000 to support the Urban Farmers’ Forum, which brought urban agriculture stakeholders and public officials together to discuss policy change.

“They essentially paid for the forum,” says Thoreau, who helped to organize the event.

And while commercial farming remains illegal, many urban farmers also say that tacit support comes from a lack of by-law enforcement.

“Most of us are carrying on as if it’s legal,” says Thoreau. “The city has turned a blind eye.”

According to City Councillor Andrea Reimer, council recognizes the role of local food production in Vancouver’s sustainability goals, but notes that policy change takes time.

“The issue of commercial activity happening in residential areas is a challenging one, because where do you draw the line? If we’re going to allow food production to be a legal commercial activity in a residential zone, then why not making bread?

“We have to assess all the impacts — the noise, trucks, everything.”

Creative solutions while waiting for change

While waiting for a change in policy, farmers who cannot insure the commercial production of food on residential property find creative ways of managing the problem.

Emi Do and a volunteer weed one of the Yummy Yards plots in Kitsilano (Photo by Julia Kalinina)

Emi Do, who works closely with Smith, says that she added a landscaping arm to her urban farming business after signing an insurance agreement and then expanded commercial production outside of Vancouver.

“I come in [to residential properties] and set up a food production site,” says Do, who grows everything from herbs such as tarragon, oregano, rosemary, mint, and thyme, to salad greens, like kale and mustards, to root vegetables and cherry tomatoes. “And [the owners] pay me like they pay any landscaper.”

“Instead of getting cut flowers or your lawn mowed, you get a basket of produce on your doorstep.”

Others grow food and ignore business insurance entirely.

Demand for a better food production system

Producing food locally reduces greenhouse gas emissions and stimulates local economies by re-circulating money and creating an income multiplier effect, according to research done by Chris Hild, a policy adviser for the city’s food system.

Such findings are perhaps the biggest reasons for cities to make commercial urban farming legal, says Hild, “provided it is conducted in a way that is fair as well as safe for human consumption.”

For Vancouver farmers, producing on small plots in the city means lower costs and the advantage of selling directly to customers, thus avoiding handling fees.

Despite these benefits, locally produced food is often criticized as overpriced and unaffordable. But growers say that the higher price reflects environmental and health externalities and producers receiving a fair income.

“There are subsidies in the lower price,” says Thoreau. “You’re not seeing the cost of environmental degradation or abusive practices. Even organic food is probably priced lower than it really is.”

According to Schutzbank, a large part of the work that urban farmers are doing is changing attitudes toward local food production.

“[They are] changing the idea that it’s just for rich foodies. It’s for everybody,” he says.

A farmer from the Lower Mainland at the Winter Farmers' Market near Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver (Photo: Julia Kalinina)

Some signs indicate that minds are changing.

Since Vancouver’s first farmers’ market at the Croatian Cultural Centre in 1995, traffic rose from 1,000 weekly customers and $50,000 in annual sales to 10,000 customers a week and almost $5.5 million in 2011.

Ultimately, however, many urban farmers say that sustainability depends on consumers.

“It’s the consumer who’s going to make the choice to pay the prices that will make [the urban farming model] sustainable,” says Smith. “We all have to take responsibility for our food system.”

Thoreau says that the economic situation might be a barrier to increased demand for local produce.

But, he adds, “We are trying to promote the bigger picture.”

How CSAs work

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs are a distribution method that farms use to manage risk by establishing a reliable source of demand for their products.

First, farmers estimate how much food their land will yield. They then divide the total expected yield into shares, each share calculated to feed one family.

CSA shares are then sold to customers. In other words, people “buy-in” the growing season.

One CSA share entitles consumers to a weekly box of fresh produce for the duration of the growing season, usually 17-20 weeks. Each box feeds 2-4 people.

Vancouver’s CSA shares sell for $500-$720, a price which often includes delivery of the produce.

In times of abundance, CSA produce often comes to consumers at a discount, as farmers increase supply in order to avoid waste.

Observing a moment of silence on the anniversary of Japan's 3-11 earthquake at UBC (Photo by Alberto Mendoza Galina)

“An earthquake in Japan is an earthquake in British Columbia,” said John Oakley, the province’s emergency manager for the Vancouver area. “They would be very similar.”

The misfortune of the Japanese after the 2011 Tohoku quake could help to save thousands of lives in B.C. — but only if the example and lessons from Japan’s so-called “3-11” disasters are heeded.

In the year that has passed since 3-11, Vancouver-area scientists and disaster planners have been ramping up efforts to prepare the region for a similar catastrophic earthquake.

Most experts say a Tohoku-sized quake will inevitably occur somewhere along the fault that runs from B.C. down to California, but no one can say exactly when. Geological evidence shows a pattern of record-setting earthquakes hitting this side of the Pacific every 300 to 600 years. The last one struck in 1700.

“In Canada, we’ve been very fortunate in that we haven’t had a catastrophic event in living memory,” said Oakley. “We’ve had disasters, but not on the scale that Japan and other countries have gone through. We need to wrestle with that; how will we react as a society to that?”

Catastrophic Kinship

The giant earthquake of January 26, 1700, centred just off of the coast of Vancouver Island, caused tsunami damage 8,000 kilometres away in Japan (Image courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey)

Although the territories were left blank on colonial maps, hundreds of thousands of First Nations people in what we now call British Columbia felt the effects of the 1700 earthquake.

“There was a great earthquake and all the houses of the Kwakiutl collapsed,” recounted Aboriginal elder La’bid to an anthropologist in 1930. “[Soon after], the tide…rushed up at a fearful speed.”

No written records of the event exist in North America.

However, in the Japanese coastal town of Kuwagasaki, the rush of the sea upended cargo boats, flooded fields and sparked fires, causing chaos in a society that kept meticulous records. The waves struck during the night of Jan. 26, 1700.

Modern-day scientists eventually linked the oral accounts from western North America to the Japanese historical records from along that country’s coast. Dead trees and debris deposited on both sides of the Pacific confirm that the devastating wave that hit Japan was birthed 8,000 kilometres away by a giant earthquake in B.C.

A rift the length of California had split open just off the coast of Vancouver Island, at the Cascadia subduction fault zone, where two large, mobile chunks of the Earth’s crust collide.

The Japanese coast and western North America both share the rare geological configuration that produces ‘mega-thrust’ quakes — the most powerful type. Each region has produced earthquakes that caused tsunamis on the opposite coast more than a dozen times since humans settled along the Pacific Rim.

“We do know that a magnitude 9 earthquake is imminent,” said UBC Earth and Ocean Sciences professor Michael Bostock. “The worst-case scenario is something similar to the [9.0-magnitude Boxing Day earthquake] off Sumatra in 2004.”

Scientists now say there’s a one in 10 chance of a quake the size of Japan’s in the next 50 years. Those odds rise to one in three for a magnitude-8 quake.

Related: To see how geologists make these predictions, explore some of the data they use

As the nature of the threat to the Pacific coast of North America becomes clear, local governments are rushing to prepare for massive earthquakes and tsunamis just like the 3-11 disasters in Japan.

Those efforts received a boost in the past year, a time of invaluable learning for local residents and the officials entrusted with their safety.

Lessons from Tohoku

On 3-11, nearly all of the students of Kamaishi Higashi Junior High School, 200 kilometres north of Sendai, and the neighbouring elementary school escaped to safety before the tsunamis destroyed their schools and 70 per cent of the students’ homes.

Headlines from Japanese newspapers describe the 3-11 disasters (Photo by Hayley Dunning)

Hirokazo Tatano, from the Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University, recounted these events to a conference marking the anniversary of the Tohoku quake and tsunami. He said thorough and realistic disaster education laid the foundation for the so-called “Kamaishi Miracle.” For eight years, a curriculum produced by Tatano’s colleagues had been taught in Kamaishi schools, reinforced by monthly drills.

“The people of Kamaishi later told journalists, ‘It was something brought about by our routine efforts, and there’s nothing special about it,’” said Tatano. “Our teachers told us, ‘As long as you make a habit of doing the drills properly, when the crucial moment comes you’ll be able to harness extraordinary strength.’”

“It was the result of such activity, not a miracle,” said Tatano.

The story makes very clear the enormous value of the extensive planning and preparation that preceded the 2011 Japanese quake and tsunami.

“We look to Japan as one of the best models around the world for public preparedness,” said Emergency Management B.C.’s Oakley. “We’re not there yet.”

“One of the challenges here is that we don’t share the same kind of cultural memories as in Japan,” said Peter Anderson, who studies pre- and post-disaster communications at Simon Fraser University. “Because we haven’t experienced it personally, it’s more difficult to get people to understand the danger.”

Planning for a huge disaster that could occur at any time in the next 300 years can be off-putting to those holding the purse-strings. But local public-safety and disaster planning officials know that close study of international disasters can increase the efficiency and impact of disaster preparedness, saving money as well as lives.

“We’d rather learn than to go through these catastrophic events like in Japan,” said Oakley. “We’re constantly learning and adapting, but my personal feeling is that we aren’t learning fast enough.”

Planning for the “Big One”

Oakley says major changes in the province’s planning for disaster followed the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Before that, the 1989 temblor in the San Francisco Bay area highlighted several unexpected dangers that could strike modern cities in North America in seismically active zones.

“That 14-second earthquake opened up a lot of eyes in North America,” said Oakley.

The process of organizational change following these previous international disasters was further intensified in 2011. Regional public-safety officials have put “the Big One,” the worst-case scenario for the Cascadia fault, at the centre of their preparations.

Candles light an altar at UBC with a display of photos showing damage from Japan's 3-11 disasters (Photo by Hayley Dunning)

“There’s a strong emphasis now on being better prepared for a catastrophic event,” said Ron Holton, the chief risk officer for the University of British Columbia. “We aren’t the only ones who have had that shift in focus; the province of British Columbia and the city of Vancouver have done the same.”

The province has begun a major revision to its Emergency Response Management System, and the Emergency Program Act has been rewritten in the months following the Japanese disasters. Some experts attending the conference marking the anniversary of Japan’s 3-11 quake called for an update to the B.C. building codes and redoubled efforts to seismically retrofit older buildings to cope with a Tohoku-sized quake.

UBC’s Holton feels it’s essential that the university prepare for the worst. If a catastrophic earthquake were to occur at certain peak times, more than 60,000 people would be trapped on campus.

“We need to get real, so to speak,” said Holton. “We’re going to need initial food supplies and drinking water. We have to figure out how to manage volunteers. We’ll have to deal with fighting fires and hazardous waste. We need to secure fuel for the emergency generators.”

“We’ve been told by Metro Vancouver and the city of Vancouver: Don’t expect any help from us,” said Holton. “We are going to be dealing with so much damage in our areas that we won’t be able to spare any help for UBC.”

UBC takes charge of its own fate

Luckily, there’s a long history of emergency preparedness at UBC. But the focus until recently has been on conventional emergencies, not catastrophic disasters, according to Holton.

A public service announcement for Shake Out B.C.

Before the Japanese quake, UBC held a campus-wide “Shake Out” drill, anticipating a giant earthquake in the area. The simulation was held on the anniversary of the 1700 Cascadia disaster, to drive home the looming risk.

After the March Tohoku quake, the campus was spurred to hold a second Shake Out event in October, coordinated with schools and municipalities all along the Pacific coast of North America.

Apparently, the repeated drills have helped to prepare the student body. A recent survey found that more than 85 per cent of students knew the best way to react to an earthquake: “Drop, cover and hold on, and wait 60 seconds after shaking stops before leaving the building.”

In addition to the careful study of big earthquakes around the globe, the campus extensively examines their performance during such drills for lessons to learn.

“After the June and October 2011 simulations, we realized we needed to make some changes,” said Holton. “For example, we need to make much greater use of social media, but we also need low-tech means of communication in place.”

Low tech was also the theme of one unexpected discovery among the province’s emergency planners, who ran their own large earthquake simulations after the Japanese quake of 2011.

“One of our saving graces in a large earthquake is that all 22 municipalities in Metro Vancouver are accessible by water,” said the province’s Oakley. “With damage to our roads and bridges like we saw in Japan, the waterways will be critical to moving resources and people.”

“Who knows, maybe we need to build a dock off of UBC that we can use for that,” said Holton, who later emphasized that it was a serious proposition.

Never-ending preparedness

Holton called the campus’ efforts to apply lessons from distant disasters to their current emergency planning and practice a work in progress.

“Some important aspects of it — the awareness campaigns, the exercises, the drills — are never-ending,” he said.

Local disaster planners are also heeding the warnings of those who lived through 3-11 and saw things for which even Japan, with its constant drills, wasn’t prepared.

“We had drills, but the drill is just ‘escape from the building.’ That’s all,” Masashige Motoe, architecture professor at Tohoku University, told attendees the conference marking the 3-11 anniversary. “Everybody was wearing their helmets, they escaped from the buildings and gathered in the streets. But after that, no one knew what to do.”

Even after a serious look at how overseas disasters can inform B.C.’s own preparations, local planners know they’ll run up against the wisdom of the old adage: “You can’t plan for the unexpected.”

“We can do a lot of pre-planning before, but there’s always the surprises,” said Oakley. “This is what we found in Japan. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I have a lot of respect for Mother Nature.”

Earthquakes are a nearly constant feature of British Columbia

Each point on the above map marks a significant earthquake magnitude felt in the province since the year 1700. The data are much more precise after 1985 and therefore the total number of quakes for the past 300 years is likely much greater. Each quake is clickable and will display the date and magnitude of that event.

British Columbia’s geological context

This map shows a geological summary of the patterns of earthquakes observed in the clickable map above. The Cascadia subduction zone represents one of the Earth’s tectonic plates being forced under the other: in this case, the Juan de Fuca plate under the Pacific Ocean is being pulled beneath the North American plate. The melting of this plate causes lava to push up through the crust, creating the Cascade volcanoes. Farther north, the Queen Charlotte fault marks where two plates slide past each other. This fault is also capable of large earthquakes. The Rocky Mountains to the east still experience some small activity.

Even in years with more quakes, pressure on the Cascadia fault grows

This graph shows the number of B.C. quakes per year since 1985. The number of quakes of each magnitude range is shown by the different coloured bars. The bars are stacked so the bar shows the total number of earthquakes for the year of any magnitude. The smaller the magnitude, the more likely a quake is to occur.

It may seem like common sense to assume many small earthquakes in a year will alleviate the stress and make a larger earthquake less likely, but UBC geologist Michael Bostock warns against this.

“Many small earthquakes don’t add up to one big earthquake,” he said. “It takes 30,000 magnitude 6 earthquake to equate to a magnitude nine. Smaller earthquakes, even a magnitude 6 which could cause considerable damage, is not going to do much to reduce the likelihood of a magnitude 9.”

Because of aftershocks following the magnitude 6.8 earthquake that struck Seattle in 2001, that year had an especially high number of earthquakes. There have been many earthquakes in the past five years and 2012 is shaping up to be another shaky year.

All data is from Natural Resources Canada Earthquake database. Data records all “significant” earthquakes from 1600 – 1985 then every earthquake above magnitude 2.5 thereafter.

Nikpay: Children gain whatever their parents teach them

Sara Moghadamjoo is a young well-educated Iranian-Canadian, who recently graduated with two masters degree from Simon Fraser University and is only a year away from getting her PhD from the University of British Columbia.

She decided to stand in the upcoming municipal elections for the district of West Vancouver as she wanted to represent the thousands of Iranian immigrants who live in the area.

But after only three weeks of campaigning, she withdrew her candidacy, disillusion at the lack of support from the community.

“I wanted to be their voice,” she said. “But when I saw that they had very little interest in seeing what I was trying to do, I figured that I could use the time I was spending on my campaign to do my own work.”

The triennial municipal elections will be held on Saturday the November 19th. This would not be the first time Vancouver has Iranian-Canadians candidates for council, but it could be, however, be the first time having someone elected within this community.

Listen: Moghadamjoo on why she decided not to run

A wariness of politics

An estimated 30,000 Iranians live in and around Vancouver according to the 2006 census. The figure today could be over 50,000, estimates Behshad Hastibakhsh, an award-winning political scientist who is senior director of public relations at   TIO Networks.

Many immigrated to Canada after the 1979 Islamic revolution and many brought with them a mistrust of politics.

“The first generation of Iranian immigrants are more likely to be skeptical towards politics and politicians,” said Hastibakhsh, “because they come from an environment where basic human rights are denied, corruption is common, democracy is non-existent, and elections are fixed.”

“People can’t break the old mold,” he said.

Hastibakhsh believes that the ethnic media can help change attitudes.

“I envision a positive role of Persian newspapers, radio, television stations, and online media in explaining the rights and privileges of active participation in the democratic process,” he said, “by creating clear distinctions between the theocracy in Iran and the democracy in Canada, the mass media can help newcomers overcome their fears, phobias and mistrusts towards politics.”

This wariness of politics appears to have been passed onto the children born or raised in Canada.

“Children gain whatever their parents teach them,” said Max Nikpay, a council candidate for the district of West Vancouver. “Most of those parents come from a place where people are unable to use their voice.”

Another is Araz Rismani, an Iranian candidate in Coquitlam, who is grateful for the support from the community.

“I have a team of 50 people helping me with my campaign and there are a lot of Iranians among them,” he said. “At a fundraiser held in Red Robinson Show Theatre, a lot of people showed up and I think 80% of the were Iranians.

Yet even he acknowledges that Iranians who were raised in Canada remain detached from politics.

“We should understand that the reason Canada has stayed a democratic country is because of these elections and we shouldn’t take that for granted.”

There are many Iranian-run businesses in Lonsdale.

Local politicians point to a more concrete reason why Iranians should care about civic politics.

“Lonsdale wouldn’t do this well if it wasn’t for successful Iranian businesses,” said Darell Mussatto, the mayor of city of North Vancouver. There is at least one Iranian-run business at every intersection in Lonsdale.

Reaching the young

Encouraging young people to vote is not just an issue in the Iranian community.

Advocacy groups like Get your Vote On say there is a gulf between the youth and politicians.

“The biggest problem is that young people feel that politicians don’t speak to them, and politicians, on the other hand, don’t see that youth as voters,” said Adrian Sinclair from Get Your Vote On. “It is really a cycle,” he added.

One young Iranian-Canadian who is considering whether to vote is Afra Jashanivand, a 24-year old artist attending Capilano University.

“I am interested in getting involved,” she said. “But sometimes I need to focus on my studies and my own work.”

She says that she tries to participate in different events and elections around the campus and believes that this involvement is a good practice for her.

Even though she is no longer standing the vote, Moghadamjoo maintains that the Iranian community needs to be political active.

Listen: Moghadamjoo on changing attitudes to politics

“I think for the sake of their own businesses and their own lives, Iranian people should participate in these elections.”

“People who care about their environment should take action in the process. We can’t just step back and wait for someone else to do the work,” said Moghadamjoo.

“This is a very important issue and I think we all have a certain responsibility to help create a new culture which would fit our new lifestyles,” she said, “and I think is really important to educate people about this issue.”

A rezoning application sign for 1754-1772 Pendrell Street, West End.

The Short Term Incentives for Rental Housing (STIR) program offers incentives to housing developers in order to encourage the construction of market rental housing. But it has met with particularly strong opposition from residents of the West End, who say it only profits the property developers.

The Vision Vancouver party, though, considers it a success. “It was our first delivery of an election promise,” said City Councillor Geoff Meggs.

If Vision Vancouver is once again handed a majority in city council in the upcoming municipal elections, the party will propose that STIR be extended past its Dec. 15^th expiration date, according to Meggs.

A new program, if approved, would be put in place for January 2012, said Meggs.

A lack of housing

Mayor Gregor Robertson was elected to office in 2008 in part because of his promise to deal with the city’s lack of affordable housing. The following June, the Vision Vancouver-led city council voted in STIR.

Under the program, developers can receive incentives such as the expedition of permit processing, waived fees, and increased density, if they construct apartment buildings whose individual suites are rented, not sold, for at least 60 years. They are not required to cap rents at a certain level.

Rental signs are not a common sight in the West End.

Some West End residents say STIR doesn’t address the area’s high rents or low vacancy rates. More than 81 per cent of the people living in the West End, one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in North America, are renters, compared to 52 per cent in the rest of the city, according to Vancouver Economic Development Commission.

“Generally speaking, I’m not opposed to a program that would encourage affordable housing rentals,” said Michael Geller, an adjunct professor of architecture at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Sustainable Community Development.

Geller previously worked as a real estate consultant on the Beach Towers project in the West End. He said that STIR was rushed through city council without any policy guidelines, and that as a result, it’s failed to deliver the affordable rentals for which many of the neighborhood’s residents had hoped.

Randal Helten, the former president of West End Neighbors (WEN), calls the program “a perfect case study” for what’s wrong with city politics. “The neighbourhoods get projects forced on them that dramatically alter the character of the neighbourhoods,” he said.

With that in mind, Helten recently entered Vancouver’s mayoral race, representing Neighborhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver (NSV). “[STIR] should be terminated immediately, or at least allowed to expire, as planned, this December,” Helten said.

But ultimately, that decision will be left up to voters on Nov. 19th.

A wooden model shows the proposed development at the heart of Mount Pleasant.

The Residents Association Mount Pleasant (RAMP) called one of the first meetings for Oct. 26^th at south Main Street’s Heritage Hall. The group’s goal is to get council hopefuls to clearly state to what degree, if elected, they will use neighbourhood-level input to guide city planning and land use decisions.

RAMP and Rize

RAMP was formed in response to a July 2010 rezoning application by Rize Alliance Properties. The building proposed by Rize at the corner of Kingsway and East Broadway includes a mix of retail and residential units and would rise to 19 stories at its highest point. Fifteen of the 241 dwellings would be rentals proposed under the city’s Short Term Incentives for Rental program.

The group believes the development threatens the neighbourhood’s current character. On its website and in regular Facebook and Twitter posts, RAMP argues that the project doesn’t fit with the vision that emerged from the 2007-2010 Mount Pleasant community planning program.

“Generations of residents, planners, and politicians have created the current environment in Mount Pleasant,” said Stephen Bohus, RAMP’s director. “Now, an opportunistic developer has come in and they have a different vision: high rises.”

Mount Pleasant residents who attended community consultations held by Rize in March and April 2011 expressed little support for the project. RAMP has gathered nearly 2,000 signatures on a petition opposing it.

The public hearing and council vote on Rize’s rezoning application is unlikely to occur before Nov. 19. Bohus believes the outcry from angry constituents about the project has spooked the election-minded council.

“I don’t think Council will want to look at a public hearing of a few hundred people right before the election” he said. “That’s not a politically expedient thing to do; you don’t want to have a hot potato in your hands.”

Sandeep Johal posts a flyer advertising RAMP's all-candidates meeting.

Citizens call council candidates on the carpet

RAMP proposed the upcoming all-candidates meeting as a way to force council candidates to take a stance on the Rize project and other development projects across the city that are facing local opposition.

“It’s sort of a litmus test,” said RAMP volunteer Sandeep Johal. “Citizens can really decide who is espousing their values and supporting their communities.”

Other citizen groups have adopted a similar strategy, and a series of all-candidate meetings pack the calendar in the weeks leading up the the 2011 municipal election.

Randy Helten, a candidate for mayor with the Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver, tracks the events on his blog CityHallWatch. He says the pre-election forums grow out of a frustration with the current Vision Vancouver majority on city council. Helten estimates neighbourhood groups have dedicated “tens of thousands of hours” organizing letters, emails and calls to council that are critical of projects in the city planning process, to seemingly little effect.

“Vision Vancouver has absolute power on city council, with 8 of eleven votes,” said Helten. “They vote as a block, with almost no exceptions, against the wishes of the community.”

New media, new activism

The large number of pre-election forums reflects the growth of a relatively new network of citizen bloggers and Internet-savvy neighbourhood-based organizations, according to Helten. He says few such candidate debates occurred before the 2008 election.

In the coming weeks, these groups will use social media tools and other means of Internet-based publication to distribute records of the candidate’s meetings.

“We will be filming, Twittering, and live streaming our event,” said RAMP’s Johal. “It will be right there in black and white. People can see exactly what’s said; it can’t be misinterpreted.”

Johal hopes the records of the candidate’s statements will inspire voters and inform their choices on Nov. 19, an exciting prospect for Helten, as well.

“This election will be really interesting to watch, because it puts the information into the hands of the citizens,” he said. “It’s a new stage in our democratic system here in Vancouver.”

It is part of a larger history of systematic racism and sexism that has been working to silence the voices of marginalized women for decades.

Aboriginal women say racism is a key factor in the inquiry

“I think it’s why we are allowed to go missing,” said Baptie, a member of WESC (Women’s Equality and Security Coalition), a coalition of women’s organizations that was granted standing in the inquiry.

“It’s why our voices are not heard in the justice system, because we’re not valued, because all we have is our lived experience and somehow that doesn’t count as anything.”

A number of women’s groups, including WESC, withdrew from the inquiry when  funding for legal representation was denied. They cited unfair process and a lack of support as reason for non-participation.

While some families of the missing and murdered women are still participating in the inquiry, which began Oct.11, WESC, The Coalition of Sex Worker Serving Organizations, The Assembly of First Nations, as well as the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) have all withdrawn.

Baptie said that in order to participate in the inquiry, groups and individuals must have legal representation and, while the VPD and the RCMP have both been provided with funding for legal representation, these women’s groups have been denied the same support.

Street protests

Corinthia Kelly, a member of the Women’s Memorial March Committee, said the police are the subject of the inquiry about how 69 women could go missing and “are protected by a team of 14 lawyers.”

Protesters stop outside 701 West Georgia, the site of the inquiry

“The people who would be most likely to be able to give information about what went wrong during those years have no legal representation… The members of the community who are [most] affected by that inaction by the police and who are most likely to have information that will reveal what went wrong [have been denied funding].”

Since the inquiry opened, members of these groups have remained outside 701 West Georgia, where the hearings are taking place, in protest. They plan on remaining there until Nov. 1.

While the inquiry was initiated in order to interrogate the reasons police did not take action in regards to the women who were disappearing from the Downtown Eastside, it points to issues that go beyond the Downtown Eastside and beyond common stereotypes.

Kelly said it’s not only women who are addicted sex workers, “it’s about women going missing across Canada…the thing they have in common is being Aboriginal.”

‘This is to do with racism’

Since the 1960s, women have gone missing from the Highway of Tears, a 700 km section of Highway 16 in Northern BC that runs between Prince George and Prince Rupert, named because of the number of women who have disappeared from that deserted stretch.

Most of these women were Aboriginal, and most of these disappearances and murders remain unsolved.

Kelly said this is nothing new and is about more than simply material conditions: “It’s not to do with transportation issues, like we need better bus service and then everything will be ok. This is to do with racism. This is to do with Canadian history, from the very beginning…This country is built on the blood and the bones of our people.”

Baptie said the inquiry needs to be scrapped. “I don’t think we’ll get anything out of this inquiry that we were asking or that needs to happen. I think it needs to stop today. [We need to start over again] and create a respectful and level playing field for everyone.”

For Kelly, it comes down to history repeating itself. “The inquiry does look a lot like the power is in the hands of the same old people.”

Carol Madsen has worked at Pathways since it opened in 1993.

Pathways Information Centre, which provides employment and information assistance to residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, has embarked on a campaign to raise the $400,000 it needs to keep its doors open for another year.

The B.C. Ministry of Social Development, which currently funds Pathways, is rolling out a restructured employment service program in April 2012 that will include providers such as Open Door Group Social Services Society. Pathways, however, didn’t make the cut, so it is losing its provincial funding in March 2012.

According to the centre’s program director, Carol Madsen, its staff and supporters are determined to make Pathways’ fate public in the hopes of attracting the money it needs.

“I want to get as many people talking about this as possible,” she said.

Ross Gentleman, executive director of Tradeworks Training Society, whose organization oversees Pathways, said at this point the staff feel like they have “nothing to lose.”

More than just employment

Madsen insists that Pathways, which was founded in 1993, is more than just an employment centre. “We use employment as (the) carrot that brings people in the building,” she said.

More than 250 DTES residents use Pathways’ services each day, which include phones, computers and a lounge area. The centre’s more than 14,000 members have access to employment counsellors and case managers who help them search for jobs, fill out welfare forms or refer them to agencies that deal with homelessness, drug addiction or mental health.

Perry Joyce, a passionate supporter of Pathways, gets together petition signatures

Pathways also runs www.dtes.ca, which contains information on an additional 170 social service agencies in and around the neighbourhood.“Any closure of Pathways will impact residents and homeless people alike,” said Al Mitchell, the manager of outreach services at Lookout, which offers support to the homeles.

“[T]here has been a growing trend of ‘process’ and ‘applications’ that are not always street-friendly, let alone ‘minimal barrier,’” Mitchell said. Residents of the DTES need someone who can “inform, guide or even assist” them with those processes, and “Pathways has been more than just helpful in that regard.”

Perry Joyce, a DTES resident, knows firsthand how helpful Pathways can be. Among other things, he’s put together résumés and cover letters with the help of the Pathways staff.

Such aid has made Joyce a passionate supporter of the centre, and has motivated him to sit outside the building on the corner of Main St. and Hastings, gathering signatures for a petition to keep the centre open.

Fellow DTES resident Damian Bonnell expressed his support in a letter addressed to Pathways itself: “The damage which would be inflicted on the community at large will not be easily fixed or the centre duplicated if shut down,” he wrote.

New government oversight, new program

The federal government oversaw six of B.C.’s employment programs until February 2009, at which point it transferred those duties to the province. The provincial government spent the subsequent two years, in consultation with the various employment groups, coming up with a new, more streamlined approach that combined the six programs with the four it already administered.

Allison Bond, the assistant deputy minister of employment and labour market services, said the new program will create accessible, flexible and ultimately more efficient employment service centres.  The “one-stop shop” centres will be able to provide individuals with all of the services for which they qualify, said Bond, and will be able to reach out to “specialized populations” like those in the Downtown Eastside through partnerships with community-based services.

Gregg Taylor, president of the B.C. Career Development Association, which has acted as a liaison between the province and agencies, thinks that a streamlined approach that provides B.C. residents will all available employment services is a great thing. His concern is that many of the centres providing niche, specialized services like Pathways are going to be forced to close.

“We went from 300-400 contracts running a variety of programs with a wide range of agencies and service providers across the province, to a new model where the (same amount of) funding is funneled through [85] employment resource centres,” he said.

The new program will also partially operate on a “fee-for-service” basis. This means the employment centres will have to bill the Ministry of Social Development for each service provided to a client.

Bond said this will allow staff to provide better-tailored programs, while Taylor argues that it “makes the system less flexible per client and more restrictive on the nature of what you can refer them to.”

‘Wal-Marts of employment services’

Our big fear is that residents in this community are not going to have the services they need.

Back at Pathways, Madsen believes the provincial contracts will establish what she calls “Wal-Marts of employment services” that will completely exclude the poor and the marginalized.

She insists that it’s not just Pathways she’s concerned about, but the erosion of services in the DTES in general. “Our big fear is that residents in this community are not going to have the services they need.”

The Vancouver Eastside Educational Enrichment Society (VEEES), which partnered with Pathways to apply for one of the provincial contracts, appears to share Pathways’ fate. According to executive director, Hendrik Hoekema, “After 25 years, it will not be operating in the Downtown Eastside.”

Other agencies who partnered with Pathways were unwilling to comment on the new program, but BCCDA’s Taylor expects many more of them will also be shutting their doors. “It’s going to have a much bigger impact than [the government is] willing to admit.”

Led by the controversial Imam Fode Drame, the Zawiyah Foundation has recently moved into a commercial property off Southeast Marine Drive in Vancouver.

Imam Fode Drame: The whiteboards filled with Arabic text from his lessons.

In 2005, The BC Muslim Association fired Drame from a prominent East Vancouver mosque. The highly educated and multilingual Islamic scholar from Senegal believes he was dismissed to his inclusion of women in Qur’an classes and his efforts at interfaith dialogue.

The BCMA did not comment on the reason for the decision.

Shortly after his dismissal, Drame and his followers established their own organization.

As the new Zawiyah Foundation spent the past half-decade attempting to plant roots in Vancouver, they moved among many temporary and borrowed locations in the Fraser Street area.

Drame says many other Muslim groups in the city are facing similar challenges.

As of the 2006 census, Vancouver was home to 72,000 Muslims. Statistics Canada projects that immigration will triple Vancouver’s Muslim population in the next 20 years, reaching over 230,000 by 2031.

One option for newcomers is to blend into Vancouver’s major Muslim associations. The other is to find real estate in Canada’s most expensive city.

Prayers from behind the Quiznos

After six years of struggling with terminated leases, environmental damage and unsuccessful bids to purchase, the Zawiyah Foundation has now leased on a commercial space off Southeast Marine Drive near the Knight Street Bridge.

From the exterior, it appears to be nothing more than a delivery door behind a Quiznos restaurant. Inside is a busy place of worship.

The walls are painted entirely black, a remnant from the previous occupants. “We found it here!” Drame says of the colour. He says he would have preferred green, the symbolic colour of Islam, but there will be time to paint later.

Many members conveniently work in the nearby industrial parks. “Their jobs are here,” says Drame. “They are happy that this place is here. It is easy for them to come from work, pray and go back to work.”

Technically, the space cannot be called a “mosque” until it is a permanent establishment. For now, they call it a centre.

Drame’s goal is still to eventually buy a property in Vancouver, a city where the price of an average home currently exceeds $750,000. He hopes to raise the funds over the next few years.

Common ground

Derryl MacLean does not foresee an increase in splinter groups or religious conflicts, even amidst the cultural and ethnic variations in Vancouver’s growing Muslim community.

The new meeting place of the Zawiyah Foundation: An inconspicuous door behind Quiznos.

MacLean is the Director of the Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures at Simon Fraser University.

He identifies a particular tendency for Vancouver’s major Muslim groups to embrace Canada’s ethos of multiculturalism and “look for commonality” among the many cultures represented.

MacLean says Muslim newcomers to Vancouver will encounter a religious culture that focuses on “shared experiences of Islam” rather than “ethnic or localized interpretations.”

“When conflicts do arise,” says MacLean, “they often coalesce around individuals rather than interpretations, although they may subsequently be framed in ‘Islamic’ terms.”

Where two lines meet

Despite his controversial exit from the BCMA, Drame has many supporters in the city.

One is Mohammed Naseer Pirzada, managing editor of Miracle, a Surrey-based Muslim community newspaper. “I respect him a lot and his vision,” said Pirzada.

Drame descends from the Jakhanke tribe in West Africa, a group known internationally to produce exceptional Islamic scholars. According to him, African cultures will often have a less regulated, more spiritual approach to the faith.

He blames “narrow views” on the part of the BCMA for his dismissal but holds no grudge. “It’s the same Islam but people have different takes on it,” he says simply.

Drame says he chose to call his group a foundation because it represents solidness, or “something that has roots.” The word Zawiyah is a Maghrebi term that he says literally translates to “corner,” or more philosophically, “where two lines meet.”

Merzetti disgusted the crowd with the cigarette butts from a prior two-hour clean-up.

On a recent sunny Saturday morning, some 35 West End residents in Vancouver donned yellow vests and blue rubber gloves and proceeded to scour their neighbourhood’s streets in search of cigarette butts.

They were there at the behest of John Merzetti, who started getting locals to pick up trash as part of his “West End Cleanup” group back in in 2007. Since then, he said, “cigarette butts have increasingly become the bane of our existence.”

Merzetti had convinced more than just concerned West End residents to search the streets that day; they were joined by a number of politicians running for office in the upcoming municipal elections. He’s appealed to them by way of a digital campaign carrying the tagline “Don’t be a butthead.”

He hopes that after spending a few hours picking up the butts by hand, those who got elected would take action to prevent the discarded cigarettes from being left on the street in the first place.

A simple ask

Before going off to pick up butts, Merzetti stood in front of the crowd on a bench in front of the Community Garden at the corner of Davie and Burrard, holding a container overflowing with the fruits of his group’s labour. “This was only collected over two hours,” he yelled.

The laws the current administration had passed so far, such as the smoking ban in public parks and on beaches, were obviously not working. “The parks are littered,” he said. Nearby Nelson Park “is disgusting.”

Jason Lamarche, City Council candidate from the Non-Partisan Association (NPA), said the clean disposal of cigarette butts wasn’t currently a priority on his agenda. But he promised that if elected, he’d make time to address it.

He also brought along a cameraman to film him picking up the butts, which he later on posted on YouTube and on his website.

“I don’t pretend to have all the answers and am definitely open to suggestions,” said Aaron Jasper, member of Vision Vancouver and chair of the Vancouver Park Board. “Cigarette butts are a huge issue.”

However, Jasper refused to admit to any mistakes in the current legislation. “The bylaw itself,  the rationale and the scope of the bylaw, I stand behind it 100 percent,” he said.

As a public figure, Carr gladly helps raise awareness on green initiatives.

Adriane Carr, candidate for City Council for the Vancouver Green Party, said she’d participated in the West End Cleanups before and promised that if elected, she’d address the issue within three to four months.

“I can’t see how the city would not be willing to move on putting in some more garbage cans and ash trays,” she said. “It’s a simple ask.”

It’s up to them

The West End Cleanup has been fighting for this “simple ask” for years. Driven by a deep appreciation for the neighbourhood, Merzetti has been able to rally volunteers to pick up trash on the second Saturday of every month since the group’s inception; some have even adopted their own block whose cleanliness they oversee.

The candidates’ participation on one of the last Saturday cleanups before votes are cast in the upcoming municipal election left him hopeful but realistic about the prospect that his hard work may finally pay off.

“We got a good turnout from all the different political groups today and I tried to drill it into them that something has to be done,” he said.  The next step will be to contact the councillors after the elections, around the New Year, and remind them of their promises.

“It’s not going to be a piece of cake,” Merzetti said. “But we’ve presented this [issue] to them on a silver platter. And now it’s up to them to do something with it.”