Vancouver’s natural beauty is worth protecting. Our children not only need places to play, but also places to enjoy and explore nature. We all need places of tranquil refuge from our busy lives. The animals and birds that help make our city lives enjoyable need places to nest and raise their young.
People and nature in balance is my vision for our parks and recreation system.
The Ocean Wise Conservation Association has filed another legal action against two local governing bodies.
The parent organization of the Vancouver Aquarium has alleged
breach of contract in a lawsuit naming the City of Vancouver and
Vancouver park board as defendants.
Ocean Wise alleges that it has
lost $4 million in annual revenues in each of the past two years as a
result of the previous park board's 6-1 vote in 2017 to ban the display
of cetaceans in captivity.
In its 2017 filings with Canada Revenue Agency, Ocean Wise reported $46,017,194 in revenues.
In
its 2016 filings with Canada Revenue Agency, total revenues were
slightly higher: $46,512,527. Ocean Wise's filings for the 2018 calendar
year have not yet been posted on the Canada Revenue Agency website.
The
revenue numbers from 2016 and 2017 include everything from gifts to
government grants to amounts received from other charities.
It
remains to be seen if the lawsuit could open the door for the city or
park board to obtain information about any subsidiary companies that
might be fully or partially owned by Ocean Wise.
It will be
intriguing to see if lawyers for the city and park board try to
determine whether current and former executives of the Vancouver
Aquarium may have received compensation from those subsidiaries in
addition to what they receive from the Vancouver aquarium.
Two of
the commissioners who voted for the ban—Stuart Mackinnon and John
Coupar—were reelected in 2018. A third, Casey Crawford, was defeated.
Two
others, Michael Wiebe and Sarah Kirby-Yung, were elected to Vancouver
city council in 2018. A sixth, Catherine Evans, lost her bid to be
elected to city council.
The only commissioner to vote against the
majority was Erin Shum, who was defeated in 2018 as an independent
candidate for Vancouver city council.
The board passed this
measure while the Vancouver Aquarium was in the midst of a $100-million
expansion to its footprint in Stanley Park.
In its lawsuit, Ocean Wise has alleged that this has led to a 13 percent decline in attendance in each of the last two years.
None
of the plaintiff's allegations have been proven in court. The city and
the park board have not yet filed statements of defence.
Previous ruling upheld city and park board appeal
Earlier this year, a three-judge panel on the B.C. Court of Appeal unanimously ruled in favour of the City of Vancouver and Vancouver park board in another action filed by Ocean Wise.
In
that case, the court upheld the park board's authority to regulate the
display of cetaceans in Stanley Park, which overruled an earlier
decision in B.C. Supreme Court.
Cetaceans include whales, dolphins, and porpoises.
Ocean
Wise had argued that its licensing agreement with the park board
precluded commissioners from imposing their will in this area.
In the new lawsuit, Ocean Wise alleges that its agreement with the park board allows for the display of cetaceans.
The
B.C. Court of Appeal remitted the case back to B.C. Supreme Court to
issue a ruling on three other grounds brought forward by the aquarium:
* the bylaw amendment "offended procedural fairness";
* the bylaw amendment should be voided for "vagueness";
*
and that the bylaw amendment infringed on the aquarium's right to
freedom of expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
After
the B.C. Court of Appeal issued its ruling, Vancouver park board
chair Stuart Mackinnon said in a media release that the amendment was
"thoughtful and reflective of public opinion".
The aquarium's recently retired CEO, John Nightingale, announced in 2018 that the organization planned to phase out the display of whales and dolphins.
"The
ongoing discussions about whales and dolphins in our care have been a
distraction from real threats to the ocean and have sidelined the
critical work we lead," he wrote on the organization’s website. "We aim
to inspire people in every corner of the planet to participate in
creating healthy oceans, and it’s time to get on with it."
That statement came after the deaths of several marine mammals at the aquarium over a three-year period.
The fatalities included a harbour porpoise named Jack, a dolphin named Hana following bowl surgery, a false killer whale named Chester, and beluga whales named Aurora and Qila.
It will likely be a few years before Vancouver could see any new large-scale events coming to one of the city’s parks.
Vancouver Park Board this week voted to put a moratorium on
introducing any new commercial initiatives until after the board has
updated, and approved, its special events guidelines. Any existing
events, and new events that are considered charitable or non-profit,
will be allowed to continue. However, the park board will not consider
any applications for new commercial events until after the guidelines,
which were last updated and approved in 2003, are revamped.
That means that if events such as last year’s Skookum music festival
and the Vancouver Mural Fest concert in Jonathan Rogers Park, Diner en
Blanc and the annual Lululemon SeaWheeze half marathon were proposed
this year, the board would not entertain the application until after the
guidelines are updated.
Octavio Silva, manager of business development, estimated updating the guidelines will take about 12 to 15 months to complete.
Paul Runnals, an owner of BrandLive, the event production company
behind last year’s Skookum Festival in Stanley Park, among other events,
spoke at Monday’s meeting and urged commissioners to continue to allow
new commercial events while updating the guidelines.
“We support the need for an updated and balanced strategy towards
the hosting of public and private events, which is respectful of the
rich and historical importance of certain sites to the local First
Nations, while still making space available for free and community
events,” he said. “However, this strategy must also facilitate private
events that support the meeting and convention sector, as well as
commercial events that bring in significant cultural, economic, tourism
and employment benefits to the city, to local businesses and to local
residents.”
The park board issues approximately 1,300 event permits a year. Most
of them, roughly 94 per cent, are recurring events that happen on an
annual basis. The remaining six per cent are new initiatives and of
those, 12 per cent were new commercial events last year — Skookum, the
mural fest concert and Bacio Rosso Gourmet Cabaret Cirque in Queen
Elizabeth Park.
Commercial events, with 15 taking place in parks in 2018, make up
about one per cent of the total number of events that take place in
parks annually. However, that one per cent brings in 44 per cent of the
park board’s revenue generated from hosting events — $238,500 last year.
Without parks as possible venue options, many events would struggle to find a home in the city.
“One of the biggest challenges our industry faces is a lack of
suitable venues to host events in and around the downtown peninsula,”
Runnals said. “With the pace of development that has been ongoing
through the Lower Mainland, a number of important event sites have been
lost including… the Concord lands in northeast False Creek, while others
have significant physical or other restrictions that limit their
viability such as the north plaza of the art gallery and Jack Poole
Plaza down at the convention centre.”
The motion passed in a 5-2 vote with NPA commissioners John Coupar and Tricia Barker in opposition. “We sometimes talk about corporate events as if they’re some sort of
evil thing,” Coupar said, adding that many popular attractions in the
city, such as Bloedel Conservatory, VanDusen Botanical Garden and the
H.R. MacMillan planetarium, are the result of corporate philanthropy.
Barker said while she supports the idea of updating the guidelines,
“I also don’t think that they are so broken that we can’t let another
event come in… I think we are reasonable people and we can look at those
events and make really good decisions on whether they’re appropriate in
our parks or not.”
Green commissioner Camil Dumont voiced concern over the effect that events can have on parks.
“There are parks in our system that are really stressed in regard to
how much event activity takes place in them,” he said. “I think
particularly of VanDusen garden and, I think, the botanical and
horticultural priorities of that space are compromised, in my view, by
the amount of events there.”
Board chair Stuart Mackinnon supported the motion, saying it allows the park board to maintain any current events.
“None of those will go away. It simply says that we’re going to hit
the pause button, which I think is a really good idea…” he said. “This
is my third term on the park board and, as a group, we rarely say no to
corporate events and I want to make sure that we know why we’re making
those decisions, what the ramifications are going to be in the future
and that we have the public behind us when we make those decisions.”
Coupar said he is concerned a 12 to 15month pause could take longer than anticipated.
“Things always take longer than we expect at the park board,” he
said. “That’s a given. It’s not because our staff aren’t working hard,
it’s because they have a lot of things to deal with, so 18 months can
become two years, two years can become two and a half years.”
VANCOUVER — Koi are safe to swim again in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen
Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver that was once a hunting ground for
an elusive otter.
Three adults and 344 juvenile ornamental koi were removed from the
pond and kept at the Vancouver Aquarium last November after the otter
began feasting on the expensive koi.
It even killed a 50-year-old fish named Madonna, before it disappeared
again, despite numerous attempts by staff to trap the animal.
The koi that were removed were returned to the pond on Thursday, along with two other adults that had been donated.
Vancouver Park Board chairman Stuart Mackinnon says the fate of the
koi generated concern locally and internationally and he's pleased to
see the fish back in their home.
Mackinnon says the garden staff have added steel plates to the park gates, deterring any other otters from getting inside.
The garden closed for a week during the height of the otter's
destruction and the saga set off a storm on social media among those
rooting for and against the otter.
Koi embody positive connotations for many Asian cultures, from good
luck to abundance and perseverance, and a statement from the garden says
the fish are often an important and symbolic part of classical Chinese
gardens.
For the fifth year, the Vancouver park board has made a high-definition camera feed available to the public to peek into the nests of one of North America's largest urban great blue heron colonies.
The great blue heron is our continent's largest (up to more than one
metre tall) wading bird, and our local subspecies, the Pacific great
blue heron, has been returning to the large breeding colony behind the
park board offices in Stanley Park (2099 Beach Avenue) for 19 years.
The local variant has been deemed a species at risk in Canada.
Records
show that the herons have been nesting in the park for about a century,
at least since the early 1920s, and an earlier colony's large
twig-and-branch nests, now abandoned, once occupied trees near the
Vancouver Aquarium and the former park zoo. Theories for abandonment
range from construction noise to bald-eagle predation of eggs and
chicks.
The herons also constructed nests near Brockton Point and Beaver Lake, according to a City of Vancouver online history of the park colony.
In its 2018 Stanley Park Heronry Report,
the Stanley Park Ecology Society reported that volunteers counted 104
tree nests in the colony area (which stretches from behind the
park-board headqurters to the tennis-courts surroundings), with 85 of
those nests deemed active. (Go here
to download a PDF of the report at the bottom of the page, as well as
to access instructions on how to manipulate the Heron Cam remotely.)
Society observers reported "daily eagle attacks" early in the 2018
nesting season, which starts at about the middle of March. The raids
stopped after about a month, only to resume when the chicks had hatched.
Only two active eagle nests were observed in the park last year.
A March 20 park-board release
noted that more than 180,000 people have used the Heron Cam since its
launch in 2015. "It’s amazing to be able to get a birds eye view of the
nesting, courtship, mating, nest-building, and egg-laying of these
magnificent birds,” Stuart Mackinnon, park-board chair, said in the
release. “Heron Cam supports engagement by residents with nature in the
city as part of our Biodiversity Strategy and Vancouver Bird Strategy
and enables our partner the Stanley Park Ecology Society to better
monitor and protect the health of the colony.”
This year,
according to the release, herons returned to the nesting area on March
11. As well, it notes: "One-third of Great Blue Herons worldwide live
around the Salish Sea and the Stanley Park colony is a vital part of the
[B.C.] south coast heron population."
Stanley Park Ecology
Society representatives will answer questions during a live Facebook
Q&A hosted by the board (date to come), and society volunteers will
host on-the-ground weekly interpretive sessions in the park for
visitors. The society also conducts an "adopt a nest" fundraiser to support its work with the herons.
The
annual nesting season ends in August, when most chicks will have left
the nests. About 100 fledglings were counted in 2018, which was an
increase in numbers from the previous year.
You can view a detailed society timeline of the herons' arrival, breeding, and nesting here.
From April 15 onwards, City Council and Park Board meetings will be broadcast using a new live video streaming system.
Earlier this month, we were notified that NeuLion, the previous video
streaming provider, would be withdrawing their provision of the Civic
NeuLion platform that we use for Council and Park Board meetings.
We have implemented an interim solution to ensure you can still watch meetings online:
All videos of the current Council and Park Board meetings (since November 5, 2018) will be made available on the City's YouTube account .
The full archive of historical meetings will not be available
immediately but we will be migrating archived footage to the new
streaming service as soon as possible.
View meeting progress on Twitter
As well as watching the live stream of online, residents can also
follow the progress of meetings by following the Twitter accounts:
I am asked frequently why the Park Board doesn't just issue the 420 organizers a permit. Printed below is the Province of British Columbia's regulation controls on cannabis. As you can see provincial regulations do not allow cannabis to be smoked in parks. This along with the Park Bylaw prohibiting smoking prevents the Park Board from issuing a permit.
From the Province of British Columbia's Public Safety website:
The federal government legalized non-medical cannabis on October 17, 2018.
With public health and safety top of mind, the Province passed
legislation to provide for legal, controlled access to non-medical
cannabis in British Columbia. The following regulatory decisions are
included in the legislation and amendments:
Cannabis Control and Licensing Act (CCLA)
The Cannabis Control and Licensing Act
is guided by the Province’s priorities of protecting children and
youth, promoting health and safety, keeping the criminal element out of
cannabis, keeping B.C. roads safe, and supporting economic development.
The Act:
Sets 19 as the provincial minimum age to purchase sell or consume cannabis;
Allows adults to possess up to 30 grams of cannabis in a public place;
Prohibits cannabis smoking and vaping everywhere tobacco smoking
and vaping are prohibited, as well as at playgrounds, sports fields,
skate parks, and other places where children commonly gather;
Prohibits the use of cannabis on school properties and in vehicles;
Authorizes adults to grow up to four cannabis plants per household,
but the plants must not be visible from public spaces off the property,
and home cultivation will be banned in homes used as day-cares;
Establishes a cannabis retail licensing regime similar to the current licensing regime for liquor;
Provides enforcement authority to deal with illegal sales;
Creates a number of provincial cannabis offences which may result
in a fine ranging from $2,000 to $100,000, imprisonment of three to 12
months, or both; and
Where necessary, to comply with Charter Rights and human rights
law, exemptions will provide to individuals who are federally authorized
to purchase, possess and consume medical cannabis.
The CCLA also includes consequential amendments to various statutes, including:
Liquor Control and Licensing Act to ensure administrative consistency between that Act and the CCLA;
Residential Tenancy Act and Manufactured Home Park Tenancy Act to
prohibit cannabis smoking under existing leases that prohibit smoking
tobacco and to prohibit the personal cultivation of cannabis under
existing leases, except for federally authorized medical cannabis. For
new leases, the existing provisions of each Act that allow landlords and
tenants to negotiate the terms of leases will apply;
Police Act to set provincial priorities for policing and require
municipal police boards to take provincial priorities and the priorities
of the municipal council into account as they develop their own
priorities;
Community Safety Act to reflect that with legalization cannabis
will no longer be a controlled substance under the federal Controlled
Drugs and Substances Act;
Provincial Sales Tax Act to add a reference to cannabis in the definition of “small seller” consistent with liquor; and
Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act to recognize that the CCLA is a complete licensing scheme.
Cannabis Distribution Act (CDA)
As previously announced, the Province has decided that the Liquor
Distribution Branch will be the wholesale distributor of non-medical
cannabis in B.C. and will run provincial cannabis retail stores.
The Cannabis Distribution Act establishes:
A public wholesale distribution monopoly; and
Public (government-run) retail sales, both in stores and online.
Motor Vehicle Act amendments
B.C. has increased training for law enforcement and has toughened provincial regulations by amending the Motor Vehicle Act to give police more tools to remove drug-impaired drivers from the road and deter drug-affected driving, including:
A new 90-day Administrative Driving Prohibition (ADP) for any
driver whom police reasonably believe operated a motor vehicle while
affected by a drug or by a combination of a drug and alcohol, based on
analysis of a bodily substance or an evaluation by a specially trained
police drug recognition expert (DRE); and,
New drivers in the Graduated Licensing Program (GLP) will be
subject to a zero-tolerance restriction for the presence of THC (the
psycho active ingredient in cannabis).
Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch
The Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch (LCRB) will be
responsible for licensing non-medical cannabis private stores and
monitoring the non-medical cannabis retail sector. Visit LCRB’s non-medical cannabis retail licence page for information about becoming a non-medical cannabis retailer in B.C., as well as information updates.
Liquor Distribution Branch Updates
The Liquor Distribution Branch (LDB) will be B.C.’s wholesale distributor of non-medical cannabis. Visit LDB's cannabis updates page for further information.
Some folks are incredibly passionate about using a golf club to whack
a small ball around huge swaths of publicly owned land in Vancouver.
These recreational golfers enjoy the camaraderie, competition, and peace of mind that come from this activity.
But is this the optimal use of 15 percent of municipally controlled park land in the city?
Especially
when the number of golfers using Langara, Fraserview, and McCleery golf
courses has declined by nearly a third since the late 1990s, even as
the city's population has risen by 20 percent?
Green commissioner Dave Demers hopes park board staff can address these questions in what he calls a "deep dive analysis".
Demers
has prepared a motion for the Monday (April 15) meeting seeking
commissioners' support to direct staff to evaluate "the full spectrum of
realized and unrealized benefits of Park Board land currently used for
golf".
The park board has 187 hectares of land set aside for this sport.
Green
commissioner Dave Demers hopes other park board members support his
call for a "deep dive" into the pros and cons of allocating 15 percent
of park land for golf.The park board operates
the three aforementioned 18-hole golf courses, as well as pitch and putt
facilities at Stanley Park, Queen Elizabeth Park, and Rupert Park.
Demers's
motion seeks commissioners' endorsement for staff to compare past,
current, and expected demands for golf—and the requirements to provide
this—with the rest of the board's recreational system.
Demers also
wants staff to look at ways of aligning managerial, financial, and
planning of golf in conjunction with the rest of the park and
recreational system.
And he hopes that all of this can be occur before the board launches any master-planning process on golf courses.
The motion calls on the report to also be mindful of Vancouver's Playbook, which is a process that's expected to guide recreational planning over 25 years.
According
to Demers's motion, it costs adults $59 to $67 to play 18 holes during
the peak season. In the off-season, adult rates range from $28.25 to
$36.50.
Golf is profitable for the park board, with $9.9 million
in revenue forecast this year. Park board staff have pegged this year's
expenditures for golf at $6.6 million.
Demers's motion
acknowledges that $300,000 per year flows into a golf reserve fund,
which had $516,000 in unallocated expenditures in March.
The park board's annual operating expenditures this year are forecast to be $66.5 million.
Fungicides are only applied to the greens at Langara (above), Fraserview, and McCleery golf courses. City of VancouverThe board's budget
does not include an evaluation of the opportunity cost of allocating a
significant amount of its land to one recreational activity.
"Golf
courses require regular grooming (currently by gas-powered machinery),
irrigation, and maintenance to provide healthy & resilient playing
surfaces (as with all sport playing fields)," the motion states, "and
best practices are employed: irrigation water is provided primarily via
aquifer or storm water, and fungicides are only applied to golf greens
(about 1.5% of the area."
We
would like to take this opportunity to congratulate members of the
False Creek Flats Panel on arriving at a recommended option for an
arterial route.
Late on Saturday afternoon, after eight days of meetings and
deliberations, this committed group residents and business owners
completed a process of voting on and ranking among nine possible routes.
This decision was grounded in a unique process of learning and
dialogue. The top ranked option was National – Charles. Visit the False
Creek Flats Community Panel website for a detailed synopsis of the
process, led by the Jefferson Center at: fcfcommunitypanel.com(opens in new tab).
This best in class democratic process was a first for the City of
Vancouver and Park Board, and we would like to thank the participants
for their commitment to their community and city through a significant
contribution of time and effort on this challenging technical and, at
times, emotional question.
We look forward to hosting the community panel at Vancouver City
Council on April 24 and at Park Board on April 30 to present their
findings.
City staff will then take the significant public input provided by
the report and undertake further technical and feasibility analysis.
They will come back in fall 2019 with a full recommendation for
consideration by Council.
Again, we thank the participants and the convenors, Jefferson Center,
for their efforts in leading and completing this important process.
Balloons and balloon fragments are the deadliest kinds of marine
pollution for seabirds, killing almost one in five birds that ingest the
soft plastic, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Tasmania,
examined the cause of death of 1,733 seabirds, 32 percent of which had
ingested marine debris. Hard plastics — items like LEGO bricks or straws
— accounted for 92 percent of all items ingested. Soft plastics —
including packaging, rubber, foam, rope, and balloon fragments —
accounted for just over 5 percent of items ingested, but were
responsible for 42 percent of seabird deaths. Balloon fragments,
specifically, composed just 2 percent of ingested plastic, yet the
scientists found that if a bird ingests a balloon or balloon fragment,
it is 32 times more likely to die than if it ingests a hard plastic
fragment.
“A hard piece of plastic has to be the absolute wrong shape and size
to block a region in the birds’ gut, whereas soft rubber items can
contort to get stuck,” Lauren Roman, a marine scientist at the
University of Tasmania and lead author of the new study, told ABC News in Australia.
Seabirds, which represent a shrinking portion of bird species around
the globe, have been shown to consume large amounts of plastic waste,
mistaking it for prey such as squid and small fish. Roman and her
colleagues say their research could be used to shape future waste
management strategies, as well as seabird conservation programs. —Emma Johnson
More than 180,000 people have
checked out the Heron Cam since it was launched in 2015. It’s amazing to
be able to get a birds eye view of these magnificent birds. Stuart Mackinnon, Park Board Chair
March 20 2019
The long-legged Pacific Great Blue Herons are nesting again in Stanley Park for the 19th consecutive year!
They began returning March 11 to a colony located at the Park Board
offices on Beach Ave. It’s one of North America’s largest urban heron
colonies.
The Park Board Heron Cam
is again live-streaming with a birds-eye view of 40 nests until the end
of the breeding season in August. Viewers can take control of the
camera, zooming in on multiple nests, using different angles.
Birds eye view
“More than 180,000 people have checked out the Heron Cam since it was
launched in 2015. It’s amazing to be able to get a birds eye view of
the nesting, courtship, mating, nest-building, and egg-laying of these
magnificent birds,” said Park Board Chair Stuart Mackinnon.
“HeronCam supports engagement by residents with nature in the city as
part of our Biodiversity Strategy and Vancouver Bird Strategy and
enables our partner the Stanley Park Ecology Society to better monitor
and protect the health of the colony.”
In 2018, there were 85 active nests and an estimated 98 fledglings
raised. This was a higher success rate overall for the colony compared
to slightly lower numbers in 2017.
Nest success in 2018
The SPES Stanley Park Herony Annual Report 2018 says last year’s return to normal amounts of nest success is likely due
to decreased bald eagle predation. While not necessarily directly
related, in Stanley Park there were only two successful bald eagle nests
last year compared with four successful nests in 2017.
This year, we will offer a moderated Facebook Live Q and A, where partners at the Stanley Park Ecology Society (SPES) will answer questions about the herons. SPES will set up a weekly in-person interpretation at the colony to answer questions.
The Pacific Great Blue Heron is unique because it does not migrate.
Their natural year-round habitat is the Fraser River delta which is
under pressure from urban development, resulting in the loss of feeding
and breeding grounds. One-third of Great Blue Herons worldwide live
around the Salish Sea and the Stanley Park colony is a vital part of the
south coast heron population.
Heron Cam is a collaborative effort between the Park Board and SPES,
who have an Adopt a Heron Nest program which supports efforts to
educate, monitor and maintain the herons and protect their home in
Stanley Park.
