Ideas from board at Luminara visioning. Image Credit: ICA
With Luminara 2010 not happening in July, Luminara host organization the Inter-Cultural Association, have organized a series visioning sessions to gather ideas for the future, of which the first was held a few Saturday’s ago. Attended by about twenty people, there was a good mix of volunteers, staff and representatives of various community groups and organizations such a the City of Victoria, the Downtown Victoria Business Association and the James Bay Community Project. Many other organization sent their regrets as they were unable to attend.
Why is the ICA re-imagining Luminara? It simply grew too big, much like the 2008 Illuminares festival in Vancouver or the formerly ICA-run Folk Fest here in Victoria. With the 2009 budget around $160,000 plus five months of time by five staff paid through the federal government’s Job Creation Partnerships program, Luminara was not inexpensive. What prompted the crisis this year was the funding needed either outright disappeared or was pushed back into the fall, making it hard to run a summer festival.
Cube from board at Luminara visioning. Image Credit: ICA
The idea of the day’s activities was to drill down to the core of what makes Luminara and it quickly became clear that creativity and community pervaded nearly every single suggestion or idea that people came up with. Many organizations were suggested as potential partners, from the municipal governments to local community associations to schools to service clubs, some of whom have already expressed interest in being involved.
As Karin Scarth, the Festival Director noted at the beginning, this is merely the first of many sessions and there were a lot of interested parties who couldn’t be there. You can follow the Luminara 2010 visioning page, the conversation on Facebook or email Karin directly to get on the update list. It should be an exciting few months.
Courtesy of a good friend, a bunch of us went over on the weekend to see Canada’s Women Hockey Team play Slovakia. It was the game where the poor Slovakians lost 18-0 and were outshot 67-9.
At the end, handshakes. Photo credit: Joanna Sanders Boblash
To start off, I have to give massive credit to the Slovakian goalie, who really did try. She made some amazing saves but in the end it just wasn’t enough. At one point they had literally just finished announcing who had scored the last goal when the next one went in. The Slovakians also had some good chances, mostly because the Canadians were incredibly sloppy while passing in their own end. The crowd was pretty amazing, applauding the Slovakian goalie every time she made a great save (she made a lot of those) and at the end of the game giving the entire Slovakian team a standing ovation. The Canadian team was also gracious enough to simply skate off at the end, without receiving the same.
But before we even sat down for the game, we already had a bit of fun with venues. The website listed both Thunderbird Stadium at UBC and Canada Hockey Place (ex-GM Place) as the venue, so when we arrived at Thunderbird Stadium for the game we were rather rudely surprised to learn we had gone to the wrong place. Amazingly, there is no direct bus connection between the UBC and Hockey Place. So off on a quest we went, one bus and two Skytrain rides later, arriving shortly before the 5pm start. Or was it the 4:30pm start. The website and our tickets disagreed on that too.
Which brings us to security. The reason we were two hours early in getting to UBC was for the expected security, a saving grace and it turned out. Processing 18,000 fans into a stadium in a short period of time is hard but it ran fairly smoothly, even if it took the better part of 45 minutes standing in the concrete jungle that is the Georgia/Dunsmuir Viaducts and Skytrain line. After the game we set off to see the Olympic torch, which was by that point very neatly blocked off with an elegantly-designed barrier of 10′ of chain-link fence and concrete. Gulag chic was definitely in.
Transit was one of the bright spots of the whole day. The bus was busy, but not overly so. Of the many Skytrain trips we took, on all three lines, there were usually seats. I shudder to think what it would have been like without trains running on 90 sec headways and all those new cars that Translink purchased recently for the Expo/Millenium Lines. However, I really wonder just how much VANOC paid Translink for all the extra service. Too bad VANOC is beyond FOI reach. They claim they are going to release their budget after the games, so we will know eventually.
Olympic Line streetcar. Photo credit: Flickr user tc_terencec
Aside from seeing the game, I also wanted a chance to ride the Brussels- and Bombardier-supplied streetcar running on the new track between the Olympic Village Canada Line station and Granville Island. Thanks to the good transit connections, I managed it. It was smooth, clean, and quite busy even at nearly 9pm when we rode it. Apparently earlier in the day it had been packed. The car also had a pleasant odour of brand-new leather, coming from the hanging straps. Made a nice difference from the usual smells you can run into on older transit buses and trains.
We were fortunate enough to have a relative of one of my friends to stay with in Vancouver, so we didn’t have to find some of the very scarce hotel space available. They also lived in a decent place for transit, so we could get to and from their place without too much difficultly. Attempting to drive down would have been insane and impossible and there are few park-and-rides anywhere on the Skytrain system.
I am glad I had a chance to go and see the Olympics and all the effects it has had on Vancouver. I really hope that the City of Vancouver finds some way to keep the Olympic Line running, although they will need to find new vehicles. Not reopening the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts would also go a long way to making the downtown a better place. As for the rest of the legacy of the games, that remains to be seen.
The CRD Regional Pedestrian & Bicycle Master Plan (PCMP) is having its next public event on March 11. The event will cover the completed first phase of the plan, including the unveiling of the Bikeway Inventory Map. The plan, which launched last year, has already gone through some initial collection of public input. As has been the case with previous events, project consultants Alta Planning + Design and CRD staff will be on hand to discuss the next steps. I strongly encourage you to come, for which you need to register on the CRD PCMP page.
First of all, full disclosure. I come from a family of teachers. My mother was a teacher, my maternal grandfather went from school principal to deputy minister in the Dept. of Education here in BC, both my maternal grandmother and aunt taught nursing and my father has taught university biology classes. Suffice it to say that the likelihood of me ending up in a teaching career is extremely high.
Back to merit pay. The Globe and Mail has a recent article on it, which is what got me thinking. In principle, I like the idea of merit pay, as I suspect most people do. It strikes to the heart of our sense of fairness and reward. Do better and get rewarded for it. Which brings us to the big problem with merit pay for teachers. What the heck do you reward them for?
The most common reward seems to be students marks, either through not having them fail or through getting higher grades. But are grades the be all and end all of teaching? No, schools are important places of social and creative learning, neither of which are especially well tested by any standard method. Nor can whether little Bobby or Sue or Rajinder is going to be a well adjusted person in later life be determined from a multiple choice test.
So if you cannot easily test whether or not a teacher is truly succeeding at all they are supposed to do, not just whether or not their students do well in standardized tests, you cannot fairly apportion merit pay. Because to do so would be to reward those teachers that “teach to the test” and not teach the student, and teaching to the test is precisely what a school should not be doing. Rather than use that money to reward teachers on some arbitrary system, why not use the money to pay for a few school breakfasts and lunches? Well fed students learn better and are more attentive, regardless of whether they are in a Math, English or Drama class.
On the eve of the Olympics, right on the front page of BBC News is a story about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The story is lovingly titled Vancouver: ‘Drug Central’ of North America and recounts many of the horrors of the DTES including rampant drug use, homelessness, and prostitution. It also brings in the gang wars in the suburbs of Surrey and other places, quite correctly tying those drug wars into what is happening in Vancouver proper. With that little show known as the Olympics coming to town, expect a great deal of stories like this in the near future. And on a hopeful note, the BBC story ends with this little tidbit:
Vancouver’s problems will last long after the Olympic spirit has left.
It occurs to me that if Vancouver were a politician or a sports celebrity, right about now is when they would be making their tearful apology to the world, as we realize they are not so holy than thou after all.
Saanich has recently launched a project to rethink the Shelbourne corridor, or at least the section from the Victoria border to Feltham Rd. in Gordon Head. The project is partial update to the venerable Shelbourne Local Area Plan, last changed in 1997. To kick off the whole thing off, Saanich held an open house to ask for people’s opinions on what they think should be done. I managed to make the last hour of the open house and collected a few notes.
Clearly evident was that Saanich is still very much in the information gathering phase. Of the nearly two dozen large boards spread around the room that showed everything from traffic volumes to population densities and average ages to zoning, only one of them had a recommendation on it. That was the proposed Bowker Creek Greenway project, which confusingly does not follow the path of the now-culverted Bowker Creek beside Shelbourne. Not surprising, this was the board that attracted the most interest and more comments. All of the rest of the boards were about the current state of the corridor today, to help people with context for their suggestions.
To hep run the event, Saanich had invited members of the two community associations that overlap the study area, Mount Tolmie and Camosun. They had also generously given space to a number of community groups including the Bowker Creek Initiative, who have just launched their draft 100-year vision which partially overlaps with the Shelbourne corridor, and the Shelbourne Memorial Tree Project, who seek to remind people that Shelbourne was planted with trees in 1921 as a memorial to the lost soldiers of the First World War, designed to deliberately invoke memories of France’s leafy avenues. Also in in attendance was UVic’s Office of Community Based Research, who have been working with Green Map project around Victoria. OCBR’s Maeve Lyndon, who came to talk to Oak Bay Rotary about the CBR and the Green Map, Theresa, and Ken Josephson, who recently worked on the Oak Bay Green Map, due for launch tomorrow evening were all in attendance.
Beyond providing information, Saanich was also interested in collecting people’s visions for the corridor and thus the questionnaire they handed out not only had a few questions about where you live and how often you use the corridor and how, but had a large map of the corridor on the other side, for free form drawing and collecting of ideas. I don’t envy the planners who now have to decipher hundreds of people’s scribblings and make a coherent report out of it.
One of the groups clearly missing was Hillside Mall. Although they are wholly within the City of Victoria, much of the traffic that comes to the mall drives on Saanich roads. They also recently finished a new plan, although the details of that haven’t been released yet. Their Renovations page still says “Watch this space”. I also understand from talking with the Bowker Creek people I have talked to that their plans don’t involve daylighting the creek, which currently runs on the western edge of the mall, by Doncaster Road and Thrifty Foods.
If you want to give them feedback, they sadly don’t have the PDFs of the boards they had up online yet, but the Shelbourne Corridor page on Saanich’s website lists contact information for the planner in charge of the project.
As I have mentioned here many times, BC Transit is one of the few transit agencies in North America not currently cutting service. How bad are those cuts? Here is a map of US transit cuts compiled by Transportation for America:
What about Canada? Calgary is cutting service, but that was only the one I could find good information about. Ottawa narrowly avoided cutting services, as did Vancouver & Toronto, while Montreal is staring potential cuts in the face. Those that didn’t cut service often did so by raising fares, which will drive ridership away just as surely as cuts will. Overall 2010 looks to be a pretty grim year, although public outrage will likely not appear, as the Transport Politic points out. Transit cuts that were avoided this year will likely come next year, as rising gas further drives cost up. Get ready for a bumpy ride.
