Tag Archives: Lower Mainland

History, Transportation

Antique Car Club: Lunch stop at the Cortes Island Museum

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Seven antique cars pulled into Mansons Landing shortly after 12:30 on Wednesday, June 21.

There was a lot of anticipation prior to to their arrival.

Melanie Boyle, Managing Director/Curator of the Cortes Island Museum, explained, “So far as I know, we’ve never had 15 vintage cars arrive here on the island. We as a museum celebrate histories of various sorts and histories of the island, old technologies and looking back at a day when people traveled differently, slower forms of transportation and different speeds in the world. This is really a celebration of that and, I’m sure it takes a special sort of person who has a devotion to restoring older things and a value of not trashing things and always looking for the newest, but respecting something of the past and with it heritage and stories that go along with it.”

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Community

Sex Workers on Making Their Lives Better

By Brishti Basu, The Tyee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Sex work is the most fulfilling job Rae has ever had. Colleagues and clients in Victoria were more welcoming than other professions had ever  been to a transgender and autistic woman like herself.

Her first professional job  after moving to Victoria seven years ago involved discrimination — she  was asked to wear a man’s shirt, for example — low paycheques and  mistreatment. 

“One day, I was just like, ‘Screw this I’m  running an ad,’” Rae said, deciding to explore sex work. The response  was immediate and positive.

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Health

Drug checking shows unpredictable list of additives contributing to death toll

By Alexandra Mehl, Ha-Shilth-Sa, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Vancouver Island, BC – A lab was shut down in late March, stopping $7.8 million worth of fentanyl and cocaine that were meant to be distributed throughout the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.

Vancouver Police Departments launched the Toluene Project in January to focus on criminals manufacturing and trafficking illicit drugs throughout the region. 

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Disaster

CIFFA: Will Cortes Island lose its volunteer Fire Department?

The new President of the Cortes Island Fire Fighter’s Association (CIFFA) is not opposed to having a shared fire fighting service in the SRD. When he was Deputy Manager of Vancouver, Sadhu Johnston led the charge in creating a shared water fire service for the Lower Mainland.  

“We had very extensive consultations with other municipalities that needed services, that had structures along the shoreline. I personally went to those city halls, met with those fire chiefs and the city managers. We created a steering committee that got to shape the service and then we chose which boats to purchase based on that input. It was a multiple year effort and it was done really collaboratively. I think that’s the really important part.” 

In regard to the current SRD initiative, he said, “Perhaps what’s missing right now is just being able to all be on the same page about what kind of shared services are needed.” 

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Energy, Environment, Rivers & Oceans

B.C. will soon decide the fate of four projects with big climate and biodiversity impacts

By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

B.C. Premier David Eby’s newly appointed cabinet is about to decide the fate of a handful of proposed projects,  each of which comes with a slew of implications to biodiversity and  climate. 

While provincial ministers wrestle with the decisions, delegates from across the country and around the world are gathered at COP15,  the United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal. The aim of the  conference is to secure government commitments to slow the global  biodiversity crisis underway — the crisis is sometimes referred to as  the sixth mass extinction and is the first to be human-caused.

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