Frankly Speaking

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced Wednesday he will not seek another term as mayor, after 10 years in office. His legacy is mixed, and he has done little to improve the conditions faced by South Fraser residents. Like most mayors, he has been parochial. The region's overall interests take a back seat to their own cities. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced Wednesday that he won't run for mayor this fall, after 10 years on the job. His leadership of the city has been notable, with no shortage of controversies. He vowed when elected to make Vancouver "the greenest city in the world," and it has made some significant steps in that direction. Here's how his announcement looks from a South Fraser viewpoint. His stewardship of Vancouver has been mixed. Vancouver is the largest city in the Metro Vancouver region, gets most of the media attention, and in many ways sets many of the directions for the region. Some of those directions have been very ...

All 12 cars and one locomotive of an Amtrak train travelling from Seattle to Portland derailed Monday morning north of Olympia, with the locomotive and several cars crashing onto the southbound lanes of Interstate 5 and damaging at least five vehicles. Three people were killed and many were injured. The train was the first regularly-scheduled Amtrak train to use the rail line, which has been rehabilitated at a cost of $181 million in the past few years for use by both Amtrak and Sound Transit commuter trains. The crash comes just four days after a study on high-speed rail between Vancouver, B.C.and Portland was released to the Washington State legislature. Photo from startribune.com High-speed rail between Vancouver and Portland got a boost last week – and then suffered a very serious blow on Monday morning, when an Amtrak train derailed south of Tacoma. A study commissioned by the State of Washington was released on Thursday to the state legislature's joint transpo...

Surrey Memorial Hospital has the busiest emergency room in B.C. The fact that there is just one hospital in the 12th-largest city in the country is a damning indication of the shortage of services in Surrey. Surrey had 517,887 residents in mid-2016, according to census numbers released last week. The continued growth makes it the 12th-largest city in the country, not far behind Vancouver, which sits in eighth place with 631,486 residents. Interestingly enough, Vancouver is not just smaller than the two largest Canadian cities, Toronto and Montreal. It also smaller than Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton and Winnipeg, as well as the largest Toronto suburban city of Mississauga, which has 90,000 more residents than Vancouver. The Metro Vancouver area is the third-largest urban region in the country, and it wouldn’t be that way without large suburban cities such as Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond and Coquitlam. Burnaby is the third-largest city in the region, but at 232,755 residents, it is l...

The July 25 introduction of a 15 per cent property purchase tax on foreign buyers by the provincial government surprised many observers, and shocked the real estate industry. In particular, foreign buyers with transactions in progress were caught in a dilemma. If they were able to move the completion date up, they could avoid the tax. Some did so. Others walked away from signed contracts, forfeiting deposits which in some cases were substantially lower than the tax bill would have been. Philip Dumoulin of Sotheby’s International Realty in South Surrey said one realtor lost three buyers and a fourth asked for a referral to Toronto, planning to buy there instead of in the Greater Vancouver area. Foreign buyers have had less direct impact in Surrey than in some other parts of Greater Vancouver, such as the City of Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond and areas of the North Shore. However, there have been a significant number of such buyers in South Surrey and White Rock, and it is like...

Premier Christy Clark has taken to YouTube to announce that her government plans “bold action” on the very significant issue of housing affordability. Clark said, in a video released last week, that the province will be announcing specific measures to make housing more affordable in the coming weeks. On Sunday, Housing Minister Rich Coleman and his federal counterpart announced that the federal government will spend $150 million on affordable housing in B.C. Housing prices have gone from a curiosity to an annoyance to a full-blown problem in the past few years. It’s not a problem for those who have significant equity in their homes, but it is a big problem for everyone else – renters, homeowners with large monthly payments and those who want to buy their first home, or those hoping to relocate from one home to another. Prices have been rising sharply. Many realtors admit that it is very difficult to accurately price homes because of the demand. The supply is not coming close...

Crime has been the dominant issue in Surrey since well before the 2014 municipal election, which saw Linda Hepner succeed Dianne Watts as mayor and the Surrey First slate gain all nine seats on council. Back in 2007, when Watts was mayor, city council adopted a crime reduction strategy. One key element was introduction of a community court, similar to one that has been quite successful in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. However, Justice Minister Suzanne Anton has now put the brakes on that idea. At a recent groundbreaking for an expansion of Surrey Provincial Court – the busiest provincial courthouse in the province – she said “Community court is off the table.” The idea for a community court in Surrey followed a trip by Watts and seven other city representatives to New York. They found that community courts there addressed the root causes of crime and delivered swift justice. In such courts, people convicted of relatively minor crimes resulting from substance abuse ar...