Appeared in the North Shore News – May 20, 2016 It’s the classic solution looking for a problem. There is nothing wrong with Ambleside beach that West Vancouver town hall can’t screw up, permanently, irrevocably – starting with the core surrender of delightful Argyle Avenue to the Spirit Trail bicycle lobby and its enablers. To…
Tag: Ambleside
Atop the Christmas list for West Vancouver’s ailing retail sector: some business prosperity
Appeared in Business in Vancouver – December 22, 2014 West Vancouver, the wealthy widow of Metro, might well ask Santa for Christmas: please, how about some nice fresh prosperity for our businesses? Especially for the main business stem, Marine Drive, Ambleside. A former councillor once drily counted something like 13 beauty salons by any name…
Gateway to a revitalized Ambleside in West Vancouver
Appeared in the North Shore News – June 6, 2014 So what would you prefer for the renamed West Vancouver? Grosvenorville? Or Grosvenor City, which sounds classier? Aw, not serious. Just imagining the Londonbased company as the pioneer – surpassing old John Lawson – of the new, new West Vancouver, through its glittering, block-long project…
Fresh thinking needed in West Vancouver’s Ambleside
Appeared in the North Shore News – January 31, 2014 Are Ambleside and other West Vancouver merchants doing enough to fight back at Park Royal, the behemoth on their doorstep? Pay attention to the idea of Leslie Plommer, who is both an insider and outsider: Born in West Vancouver and still closely in touch, she…
West Vancouver arts edifice is monumental mistake
Appeared in the North Shore News – September 27, 2013 It may seem whimsical to urge saving a parking lot and to politely advise an arts centre lobby to look for a site elsewhere. Or get lost. If it’s whimsy, it’s serious whimsy. This is a special parking lot on invaluable land. The aggressive arts…
Clark’s happy illusion trumps dour truths
Appeared in the North Shore News – July 19, 2013 MY spectacular streak of correctly predicting B.C. election results having been snapped at one, what excuses do I have? First, I overlooked that Premier Christy Clark was running not in Metro Vancouver under cynical media eyes, but to get a legislature seat in a bleak…
Christy Clark will win – you read it here first
Appeared in the North Shore News – May 10, 2013 MULTIPLE sparkling, titillating items battling for top spot: Gordon Wilson is a fascinating British Columbia study, a shrewd maverick whose feet stepped into a cow-pie or two – most visibly a marital one – but whose head arguably contains the sharpest political smarts of any…
Poverty is not the mother of terrorism
Appeared in the North Shore News – April 26, 2013 SO I sat down, sucked a thumb, and wrote an ingenious screed that could have been titled The Hinge of Western Democracy: British Columbia’s Provincial Election… Which I’ve scrapped. Important though our election is to us, it shrinks to a local play on a small…
A grandiose West Van plan – with no parking
Appeared in the North Shore News – October 26, 2012 IF West Vancouver council buys the Grosvenor-driven “revitalization” of Ambleside, expect more public hostility. Council will. The fix is in. No shrewd mammoth developer like Grosvenor wades into small ponds like West Vancouver without first calculating its exact depth – and which small-town politicians and…
In changing times, a sad song for Safeway
Appeared in the North Shore News – June 22, 2012 TO coin a phrase, it will be the end of an era. And upsetting for many – especially older – West Vancouverites. It’s the closure, July 1, of the Ambleside Safeway. It will hit home, which is where we all live, for older people who…