Shard

It's a bit troubling that he is being feted as a celebrity if he is indeed an abuser. Is there hard evidence of it? Given his drunken video (wanting to beat someone up) and the partial allegations of his wife, there seems to be some substance to it, but on other hand why has it not been investigated conclusively?

scrubbedexpat091

Everyone I know that commutes from Surrey, Langley, Maple Ridge and the like do so because they can't afford housing in Vancouver proper.

I think most likely commute out of necessity, more so then choice.

It would help if we could get a decent transit system that doesn't take forever and a lifetime to get from those city's to Vancouver, once outside Vancouver proper, transit just gets worse and worse, and even within Vancouver, unless on a sky train line, transit is slow, unreliable, and a pain in the rear end.

It can easily take twice as long or longer to take transit than to drive, 45 minutes to downtown by bus from my old house by the PNE or 20 minutes by car roughly, and people wonder why so many won't give up their cars.

People have a perception transit is good in Vancouver, and for some area's it is, those on a sky train line, everywhere else it sucks.


As for Ford, I am surprised he is still in office, but he is colorful and makes for interesting news stories, and probably one of the only Canadian politicians known in the US, Ford probably made CNN more times then Harper has...

dbd33

I don't see that at all. No one thinks of, for example, Jim Davidson, Tony Blair, Bruce Forsyth, Kanye West or Bernie Ecclestone as being a pleasant person but they're all undeniably celebrities by the rules of the death pool. I think it more likely that some one feted as a celebrity is a nasty shit than that the average person is a nasty shit. I think we can approach certainty in the view that professional fawners over celebrities, Jimmy Kimmel, Ben Mulrooney, Joan Rivers and so on are not people with whom one would willingly break bread.

caretaker

Some of them are pretty nice.....

ExKiwilass

But what does "afford housing" mean? I know people in Langley etc and they live there because they can get a bigger house, not because they can't afford housing closer in. They could get something closer in, but it would be smaller and they don't want that. I don't have a lot of sympathy for those people, especially when they rat-run through my neighbourhood. It really is about lifestyle for a lot of people - they want that single family detached suburban dream, which is fine, I get it, but don't expect other cities to be excited about taking all the extra traffic.

ExKiwilass

You can bike to the PNE faster than that. I can get to Commercial from deepest downtown in about 15 mins on my bike.

scrubbedexpat091

Affordable means something different to different people and different income levels.

If you have a family, 2 kids lets say and 2 adults, a condo in a high rise isn't really an option.

I could never get past the whole being sweaty and icky arriving to work after riding a bike. There is just no way to avoid sweating when riding a long distance.

I did try it a few times, but I arrived so sweaty, I felt miserable all night at work.

Shard

It's not so much the "professional fawners" that I find troubling, they after all are simply doing their job, it's their audience members and the public at large that seem willing to turn a blind eye to "signals" until things are proven beyond doubt. Surely after the blinded-by-celebrity cases of Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter, etc, the public should be a bit more circumspect about whom they choose to fawn over. All this presupposes their is a grain of truth to the allegations that are sometimes made against Ford, hence the reason I was questioning whether there is any hard evidence.

Oink

"He's drunk, he's fat, he smokes a lot crack, Rob Ford, Rob Ford."

ExKiwilass

ExKiwilass

Not true (for proof, see how popular the Yaletown elementary school is - totally oversubscribed). People choose that over suburban living in Vancouver. Hence this really is a battle of lifestyles and those whose lifestyle depends on driving through other cities should not be surprised when they don't get a lot of support from those cities.

dbd33

I think you're making a false connection between celebrity and approval. The public fawn over people who have a lot of money, especially people who seem to be no more clever or deserving than themselves and yet have a lot of money. Fifty Cent, for example, is a celebrity on the strength of suggesting he's had a life of violent crime. Kim Kardashian is a celebrity because she was in a film in which a man pissed on her (possibly his race is significant in that case but it's not key to my main point). People follow the antics of such celebrities without admiring them or wishing to emulate them.

Ford is a celebrity because he's not good at anything and yet derives a good salary from the public purse. Being an oaf helps him, his voters can identify with that. Doing a bit of crime, be it drugs or violence, provides something for people to talk about, it reinforces his fame rather than hurting him.

scrubbedexpat091

Well Vancouver relies on those commuters to fill jobs, Vancouver can't house everyone who works there and whether you want to admit it or not, Vancouver needs those commuters.

Yaletown isn't exactly inexpensive, and not what I'd call affordable, and just because some choose/can to live there with kids, doesn't make it affordable or doable for everyone.

Same could be said about reverse commuters who leave Vancouver to Burnaby, Richmond, New West for work.

Vancouver is nice city don't get me wrong, but its not affordable and because of this, there will always be commuters.

MillieF

Why does someone privately educated have to be a stuck up toff? I would prefer any elected politician to be well educated, and to have a degree of savoir faire... the fact that this crack smoking gangster might easily be voted mayor again is a cause for deep and profound depression.

Oink

Because they're out of touch, self-serving and devoid of empathy but with Ford, he's man of the people, he has shared our experiences so he knows what our lives are like and he knows how to improve them. We all make mistakes, do things in our private lives that we're not proud of or requires a trip to Causality, but its our performance at work that's important not our recreational hobbies.