Pete Fry

At the 2016 Green Party of Canada policy convention in Quebec City a policy to formalize a position of Boycott, Divest and Sanction of Israel was proposed and enacted. I explain why I opposed this policy, which was later and ultimately overturned. Read More

At long last, the City of Vancouver has hired a Chief Planner, Mr. Gil Kelley.

Kelley comes with a solid background of West Coast urban planning experience: two years as head planner in San Francisco, fourteen years as director of planning for Berkley, and ten years as the lead in Portland. I’ll admit, as a Portland-o-phile that last bit piqued my curiosity, I’ve long admired the PDX approach to community involvement, human scale density, multi-modal transportation, sustainability, and placemaking.

So can we expect Portlandia-style planning in Vancouver’s future?

Of late, the City of Vancouver has been notoriously secretive about its hiring process, as such it’s anybody’s guess what the specific hiring criteria might have been: but former Director of Planning, Brent Toderian outlined five big fixes the new Chief Planner needs to achieve, (to wit: independence, good design, transparency, community engagement, and innovative leadership) all of which are noteworthy aspirations for the planning department. Ironically, Toderian was the last Director of Planning our city had — hired by the NPA, turfed by Vision Vancouver — the position of Director was re-engineered into two separate positions: Chief Planner and General Manager of Planning & Development (of eyebrow-raising note, those last two placements and the recent hire of City Manager earlier this year mean three of the most powerful five bureaucrats in our city are US citizens).

As far as Portland, we share a lot of similarities with our Cascadian sister city:
Logging towns birthed in the crucible of railways, gold rush, and Western expansion; ugly histories (and legacies) of racism and displacement; former backwaters thrust into the limelight of desirability and imagination in the Pacific age. Both cities are experiencing rapid growth in population and housing costs. Portland’s rate of growth far surpasses our own, though not nearly the rate of housing unaffordability. Sadly Read More

pressingly long, and given the role that the real estate industry can play in that equation — you might be surprised to learn that the City of Vancouver have absolutely no rules or regulations to govern the licensing of realtors doing business in the City of Vancouver.

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The incredulity that greeted last week’s announcement that residential-build-focused Concord paid over three times the assessed value for the protected industrially-zoned Molson Brewery site at the southeast end of the Burrard Bridge needs a bit of circumspection. You don’t get to be one of BC’s largest new home developers by making cavalier and reckless business moves, so at the request of Vancouver Green councillor Adriane Carr, I looked a little deeper.

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Disussion points in VanMag on BC by-election running for Vancouver – Mount Pleasant

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As Greens, how we treat our planet and its inhabitants reflect our fundamental values.
As a Green MLA, I will fight to push those values into provincial decisions and lend my voice to those who have none.

An Endangered Species Act for B.C.
Currently, our conservation efforts here in B.C. are woefully inadequate, and reflect a last-century mindset towards resource extraction and the environment. Our current provincial Wildlife Act is too weak — B.C. has the greatest biodiversity in the country, yet we have no stand-alone law to protect endangered wildlife. Along with Alberta, B.C. stands alone as the only province without an Endangered Species Act. Limited federal protection applies to only 210 of the approximately 1900 species of flora and fauna at risk in our province. As MLA I will join biologists, ecologists, and environmentalists in calling for an Endangered Species Act for B.C.

In our province, interference from industry has weakened protection for species at risk, while habitat destruction and irresponsible resource extraction has led us to the point that we are struggling to protect critically threatened populations like the Southern Selkirk caribou herd.

The price for our mismanagement of the South Selkirk? Wolf packs in the area will be slaughtered by aerial gunning, neck snares and poison. The caribou survival is far from guaranteed though, as their herbivorous diet destroyed by logging won’t recover anytime soon. A failure on all counts, that deserves a more proactive method of wildlife management and environmental stewardship.

Compassionate Conservation
As MLA, I will champion the emerging school of wildlife and habitat management known as Compassionate Conservation — ostensibly a program that offers less cruelty and more protection to wildlife than our practices currently afford. Compassionate Conservation recognizes the value of animals beyond just resources to exploit or control, as well as our own role in climate Read More

On Tuesday (February 2), voters in Vancouver-Mount Pleasant will head to the polls and mandate a big change for our riding.

The big change coming to Vancouver-Mount Pleasant isn’t just the replacing of Jenny Kwan’s 20-year career as MLA since she stepped aside six months ago.

The big change will be electing me as Vancouver’s first Green MLA, and sending a strong signal that East Van is ready to do things differently.

There are other changes coming like the removal of the viaducts, the relocation of St. Paul’s Hospital, Broadway Subway, eastern expansion of downtown Vancouver, vanishing Chinatown, or even the ever-increasing property values that threaten to displace many long-time residents.

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development has come at the expense of housing affordability and led to extreme property speculation, even in advance of actual city re-zonings. It is critical that the Broadway Subway development is not a trigger for massive displacement, and that transit-oriented development is concurrent with senior government investments in publicly owned housing stock.

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— NDP’s Mark dreams of minister role, while Greens’ Fry keen to surprise in long-orange riding.

Active in civic politics, Fry won 47,000 votes when he ran for city council in 2014. Not quite enough to win a seat, but he noted he was the top vote-getter in the Strathcona, Mount Pleasant and Britannia neighbourhoods, all of which are within Vancouver-Mount Pleasant. “I know I have solid support in this riding,” he said.

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Currently, MSP premiums are charged to anyone who lives in B.C. for six months or longer and requires them to pay monthly premiums for health care coverage. If you earn $30,000 a year in British Columbia, you are paying the same rate for MSP Premiums as someone who is earning $3,000,000 a year, making MSP premiums a regressive tax on British Columbians.

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