The Vancouver Scrum

On the move!

Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.

Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.

Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!

—Ian King, December 13, 2004

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

 
Nuggets from City Hall

Vancouver city council has decided to spend $500,000 a year for the next three years on its "Growbusters" police operation. The spending authorization from last week also includes $20,000 for a forward-looking infrared camera to look into houses. The use of this technology to attemt to ascertain what is happening in a house has been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, although the use of the technology has not yet been challenged in Canadian courts.

The city will also be forcing property owners to remove graffiti from their property within ten days of it appearing, or the city will send a crew to clean it off, and send the property owner the bill. This raises some interesting questions. Who decides what's graffiti and what's not? Should it not be up to the property owner to decide whether to remove the graffiti or not?

What is truly strange is that the city council is dominated by the right-leaning Non-Partisan Association (NPA) who should theoretically be in favour of property rights, and allowing the property owners to manage their own affairs, instead of the "nanny state" doing it for them, even if the government sends the landlord the bill. Hypocrisy reigns supreme among our city fathers...

Odds are they'll go after those who play Ultimate Frisbee next. Now, it seems that the West Side Busybodies have decided to start monitoring players of that frisbee game in a neighbourhood park in the hopes of finding them breaking some rule or another. This reminds us so much of the campaign by Kits Point residents to keep basketball out of Vanier Park earlier this year. At least the hoopsters won out on that one. I thought that we were supposed to encourage physical excercise and recreation, what with the obesity epidemic and all...
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