Those living in the Vancouver-Burrard or Vancouver-Fairview districts may have received their yellow voting cards in the mail by now. No, this is not for yet another federal election, but as previously outlined, two provincial by-elections will be taking place October 29th.

I have a series of interviews with some of the Vancouver-Burrard candidates, and today’s is with Drina Read of the BC Green Party.

I must admit, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the level of engagement the Green Party has achieved over the last few years. On the federal level, Adriane Carr who was running in this last election for Vancouver Centre, tripled the Green vote.

Drina Read saw Carr speak at the Vancouver Public Library a while back and her talk must have been quite captivating as it gave Read the motivation she needed to leap into the provincial political realm.

“I was always a committed Green voter,” she said during our call today after participating in the only debate of the by-election last night at the library. “I want to do something meaningful and for this I realized we need to change the government.”

Drina Read (left) with Jane Sterk (right)
who is the BC Green Party candidate for the Vancouver-Fairview

I asked Read the same questions I gave to Spencer Herbert of the BC NDP, that were submitted by my readers regarding health care, education, and supportive housing. Continue reading this post ⟩⟩

As most folks in the region area should be aware, there are municipal elections happening very soon in numerous cities.

Those in Vancouver, Surrey, Township of Langley, Coquitlam, New Westminster, Richmond, Burnaby, District of North Vancouver, and West Vancouver will be heading to the polls on November 15th to elect a new city council and trustees.

When you click on many of the links provided above there’s an overwhelming theme: VOTE. These civic elections really are in your back yard and will not be decided by Ontario.

You can also find out what people are saying on blogs about civic politics such as Langley Politics, North Vancouver Politics, Burnaby Politics, Civic Surrey, and The Tyee’s municipal politics coverage on The Hook blog.

As a side note, our Surrey-blogging pal Paul Hillsdon (who is running for city council) is hosting the “Surrey Transport Revolution” this Sunday.

“We’re doing a huge campaign blitz on Sunday. The focus will be on my light rail transit plan which sees $1.1 billion reallocated from 6km of SkyTrain to 43.4 km of light rail. We’ll start at Surrey Central (at 11:30am), head over to Guildford Exchange, rally at 152 St and 104 Ave, and then in Fleetwood at 152 St and Fraser, before ending at King George SkyTrain station! We’re going to be getting signatures of supporters of the light rail plan at the transit exchanges, and also rallying around major intersections in the city.” [Facebook Event]

I know I’m almost election’ed out and our household still has three to go, since John will soon be sending off his US ballot. However, I encourage everyone to get informed about candidates and causes in their area and if you have another blog or city site that I should contribute to this post, please feel free to leave a link in the comments below.

It’s 92 years young and a staple of transit cars in the greater Vancouver area.

The portable, printed, paper newsletters informing you about the latest in transit trends is now online with The Buzzer Blog. I did a quick blogger profile interview with Jhenifer Pabillano who has been writing The Buzzer since January 2008, and now blogging and podcasting over the last few weeks.

Who are you?

Ooh, that’s a very Nardwuar question. Well, I’m Jhenifer Pabillano, and I edit the print Buzzer for TransLink. I’m also the main blogger behind the brand new Buzzer blog.

Are you originally from Vancouver?

I’m a mildly recent transplant to Vancouver. I moved from Edmonton to Vancouver in 2004 to get a master’s degree in journalism at UBC (and I got it in 2006!).

What is The Buzzer? (print version)

The Buzzer is everybody’s favourite transit newsletter! You can find it on all of the transit vehicles in the region—bus, SeaBus, SkyTrain, and the West Coast Express. The Buzzer has been around since June 2, 1916, which means it’s 92 years old this year, but it certainly doesn’t look its age (that’s what I always tell it, anyway). Continue reading this post ⟩⟩

Those living in the Vancouver-Burrard or Vancouver-Fairview districts may have received their yellow voting cards in the mail by now. No, this is not for yet another federal election, but as previously outlined, two provincial by-elections will be taking place October 29th.

I have a series of interviews with some of the Vancouver-Burrard candidates, and the first is with Spencer Herbert of the BC NDP. You can read up on Spencer over on his website or in the bullet points on my last post.

My previous experience with Spencer Herbert was simply in the comments of some of my blog posts about Stanley Park, since he was a member of the Vancouver Parks Board. Speaking with him today, I learned that he is about much more than parks, but his passion for the community in which he lives has definitely stemmed from his involvement with the Stanley Park Ecology Society, the Roundhouse, Harbour Green, and Emery Barnes parks. Continue reading this post ⟩⟩

This evening at Third Tuesday, Mhairi Petrovic lead a talk about “Marketing New Media to Traditional Decision Makers: Overcoming the Challenges“. She had 10 main talking points, which lead to a rousing discussion throughout the group of about 50 attendees. Using your website to do more than list an email address for your company, how to use Google Alerts to see what others are saying about you, joining the conversation online, dealing with feedback and misconceptions about the internet were all discussed. You can read Raul’s post for all of the details (since my MacBook didn’t seem to want to connect to the network).

Earlier that evening I was collecting donations for a Food Bank food drive. As you can see, the 12 boxes I received from the food bank a few days ago are now completely full, and we have 2-3 more cloth bags full of canned goods. It was so nice to see everyone chip in, whatever they could, to support this cause.

Since the silent auction for the Canucks tickets was a little too silent in the bid department, I decided to raffle them off with all proceeds going directly to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society. I would like to keep the raffle going for a little while longer to give others a chance to donate. You can purchase entries, 3 for $5 or 7 for $10. Should you wish to have a chance at these (row 25, section 103, this Saturday versus the Edmonton Oilers) please donate online and send me your confirmation and I will assign you a raffle ticket (exactly like the ones that were given out tonight). I will keep this open until 9:00am tomorrow Wednesday, October 22nd.

These are $100 tickets (each!) and you could have them for $5 or $10. Every $1.00 donated allows The Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society to purchase $3.00 worth of food.

Thank you to Reachd, Kate, Kulpreet Singh, and the Vancouver Giants for donating prizes, to Tanya and Monica for organizing the event, Mhairi for her talk, and Jenn Lowther for giving the donations and me a lift.

I will update this post at 9:05am tomorrow with the winning raffle ticket number. Good luck, and thank you!

Update: By special request from Kulpreet (which he can do since he donated the tickets) this will be held over until 10:00am today. You can still donate and enter to win the tickets until that time.

Update: We have a winner! 548247. And for the record… Cameron is actually not very excited…. maybe cause he didn’t win 😉