Ban on uniformed police at Pride goes against its ethos
I can’t believe that Vancouver Pride officials have banned uniformed police officers from future parades. As a gay man who came out in the early 1970s and who has been part of the community who has worked for years to have the cops relate to the community in a co-operative and respectful manner, I’m appalled.
The Vancouver Pride Society directors should be ashamed of themselves for adopting a policy that isn’t widely accepted by the city’s gay community. If anyone should be banned from future Pride Parades, it’s the Black Lives Matter bullies.
If you don’t like the “all-accepting” policy of the parade, go have your own parade and quit forcing your agenda on ours.
Police need to address institutional discrimination
If the Vancouver police or any other police department can’t sit down and even acknowledge the issue of institutional discrimination that the Pride Society is addressing, how can we expect change?
Pride is banning the uniform, which represents an institution the most-marginalized members of our LGBTQ community find threatening. Pride is not banning our police allies from attending. They’re welcome to come, listen and acknowledge that there are still problems that must be addressed.
Governments helped increase prices
A recent letter by Doug Marsden blames the previous Liberal government’s “inaction” for our housing prices and rental shortage.
True, its tax on foreign buyers was loathsome and ineffectual, but there’s enough blame to go around. NDP Premier Dave Barrett’s rent controls of the 1970s killed any incentive to build rental stock and, for nearly five decades, almost none has been built.
Now we have limited supply and high rents. What did the NDP expect? The provincial government’s property purchase tax adds ten of thousands of dollars to the cost of each home. Does that lower prices?
Vision Vancouver and other municipal governments charge exorbitantly for all new density, further restricting supply and driving up costs. Does that lower prices?
If politicians want to give us real action, let them jettison rent controls, the property purchase tax and their exorbitant charges for density. Until they do, their crocodile tears over home prices are simply hypocrisy.
Will heads roll?
Reporter Sam Cooper has written excellent stories on money-laundering through the River Rock Casino and the associated criminal activity and possible political corruption surrounding all of it.
B.C. Attorney-General David Eby seems serious about rooting it all out. It’ll be interesting to see how far it leads. How many more casinos were involved, how far into the previous Liberal provincial government did it all go and how many heads will roll?
While it’s a shame that it may end up seriously affecting the government’s bottom line, I think it must be done. Getting in bed with gambling was never a good idea. Bingogate cost the NDP a good premier and an election. This should have cost the Liberal government a premier and an election a long time ago.
I’ll buy some cheap wine
Amy Chang — whose parents are jailed in China on smuggling charges related to imports of wine from their Richmond-based Lulu Island Winery — maintains that her parents did nothing wrong in declaring the value of his icewine at $2 per bottle to Chinese authorities. Could she please advise me how I can buy two six packs of her icewine at $2 per bottle for Christmas?