Category Archives: Emergency

Another low-income building threatened with closure

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Pivot Photograph 

Vancouver – The relentless assault on low-income housing in Vancouver continues in August as the American Hotel, a 37-unit low-income residential hotel on Main Street in Vancouver issued illegal eviction notices to all of its tenants demanding that they leave by September 30, 2006.

“This is beginning to look more and more like Expo 86,” said David Eby, lawyer for Pivot Legal Society. “The eviction notices are illegal, but the process for appeals under the Residential Tenancy Act is so difficult that most tenants will probably get kicked out nevertheless.” 

The reason given by the American Hotel on the eviction notices for evicting all the tenants is that renovations they are planning cannot occur with tenants in the building.  However, no City permits have been obtained, a requirement before evicting a tenant to make renovations under the Residential Tenancy Act.  In addition, the forms used were invalid.  When the representative of the American Hotel was advised of this fact, he told lawyer David Eby: “I don’t care.  I’m going to change the locks at the end of September anyway.  If you want to help, get some money together to pay rent for these tenants to go somewhere else.”

Under the Residential Tenancy Act, a tenant who wishes to appeal an illegal eviction notice must go to Burnaby to obtain an arbitration decision, a process which can take up to 6 weeks.  If the landlord ignores the ruling and changes the locks anyway, the tenant must apply to Supreme Court for an enforcement order.  This entire process can take up to two months, is complicated, involving multiple court appearances and multiple trips to the residential tenancy office – an almost insurmountable challenge for many low-income tenants. 

“The temptation for owners of SRO hotels to find ways to evict their tenants and make a quick dollar is only going to increase as the Olympics approaches,” said Eby.  “If the City of Vancouver and the Province of BC do not begin to make good on their commitment to protect low-income housing, the world will arrive on our doorstep in 2010 to witness a major homelessness crisis.”

The impending closure of the American Hotel (37 units) by the owners of that building follows the slow-motion closure of the Lucky Lodge (61 tenants as of July, 2006) by the City and the Province where 9 units are now vacant due to welfare’s new policy to refuse to issue rents to prospective tenants of that building. These closures in progress follow the dramatic closures of the Burns Block hotel (18 units) and the Pender Hotel (36 units) in March, 2006, and the closure of the Marble Arch hotel (148 units) and St. Helen’s hotel (100 units) to low income tenants through renovations and rent increases.

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Further Comment:     David Eby (778) 865-7997 – Pivot Legal Society

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The 2010 Inner-City Inclusivity Commitment to protect low-income housing and ensure that people are not made homeless was part of the Vancouver Bid Book, the formal application to host the Olympic Games. 

To read the Inclusivity Commitment Statement, visit: http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/commsvcs/housing/sra/pdf/statement.pdf .

About Pivot Legal Society
Pivot’s mandate is to take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins.   We believe that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such opportunity, respect and equality are strongly rooted in the law. 

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the Pivot Newswire, just send a note with that subject line to newswireatpivotlegaldotorg.

the only funny story about the War on Lebanon

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No, really. I don’t care WHICH side you’re on, this is hilarious! I can just see all the soldiers of other armies, trying to convince the higher-ups that it should be mandatory for all female personnel, for defensive purposes. But seriously, what are they putting IN those things? Kwik-Kast?

Be all you can be...double D!

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – An Israeli woman’s breast implants saved her life when she was wounded in a Hizbollah rocket attack during Israel‘s war with the Lebanese group, a hospital spokesman said on Tuesday.

Doctors found shrapnel embedded in the silicone implants, just inches from the 24-year-old’s heart.

“She was saved from death,” said a spokesman for Nahariya Hospital in northern Israel. The woman has been released from hospital.

Funbags, not sandbags!

Lebanon by Latuff

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Another good cartoon from Latuff. Stolen from Cold Desert.

Lebanon will survive

welcome back, don’t unpack

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your bivouac’s back in Iraq.US soldiers are screwed

Fark passes on the bad news from Reuters that 300 American soldiers who just last week returned to the US from a year’s tour of duty in Iraq, will be shipped back over to compensate for the short supply of recruits. Nobody wants to wear the red jersey.

About 300 U.S. soldiers who just weeks ago returned home to Alaska after a year in Iraq are being ordered back to try to help bolster security in Baghdad, the U.S. Army said on Monday.

The soldiers are part of the 3,900-strong 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Wainwright in Alaska. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on July 27 ordered the unit to remain in Iraq for up to four months past its scheduled departure.

The order provoked anger and disappointment yay?among some of the soldiers’ families in Alaska. It also made clear that any significant reduction in the 135,000-strong U.S. force in Iraq was unlikely in the immediate future.

The brigade was so far along in the process of flowing out of Iraq after its yearlong tour that 380 soldiers had returned home to Alaska and 300 had arrived in Kuwait en route home, the Army said…

Pentagon policy is for Army units to serve 12-month tours in Iraq and Marine Corps units to serve seven-month tours. Army soldiers kept longer than one year in Iraq get an extra $1,000 in pay per month, the Army said…

After some troops and families complained earlier in the war about lack of predictability in the length of tours in Iraq, the Pentagon instituted the rules on deployment duration. This was intended to reduce emotional stress for troops serving in a hostile and unpredictable environment…

The Army said the brigade has not received any assurances it will not be extended even further, but said Rumsfeld would have to approve any such move.

US Soldiers in Iraq

Sploid on T.W.A.T.

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Now doesn’t that just sound filthy? Wait till you read it.

Give me liberty or give me a pressure-resistant shelter

Lock Up Everybody!

The monstrous cretin who runs America’s “Homeland Security” is now publicly calling for new fascist laws that would make the Bush Administration’s domestic-spying crimes totally legal.

Michael Chertoff — who many say looks just like an undead version of Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin — says the United States needs more constant surveillance of everybody so he can lock up more “possible terrorists.”

It’s just the latest outrage from an administration desperately trying to turn last week’s phony terrorist scare into justification for more fascist laws before the bogus scare is completely forgotten by Americans.

“It’s not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants,” the little totalitarian said Sunday on one of those political talk shows.

“We’ve done a lot in our legal system the last few years, to move in the direction of that kind of efficiency. But we ought to constantly review our legal rules to make sure they’re helping us, not hindering us.”

Chertoff, who presided over the horrific drowning of more than 1,500 citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is very excited about the opportunity to put anybody in jail for no reason at all.

While the White House and the administration’s henchmen in Congress rush to pass new laws that will make everyone a potential terrorist and Halliburton builds the new concentration camps that will soon hold hundreds of thousands of “political prisoners,” Chertoff is pursuing a two-pronged assault on Americans.

First, his goons at airports around the nation are methodically getting Americans “comfortable” with constant fear, harassment and intimidation. Second, his outrageous public statements are intended as a “trial balloon” to see just how much the White House can get away with.

The lack of outrage over Chertoff’s latest insane proclamations will be used as “proof” that the administration can move ahead with the next phase of canceling the “g-ddamned piece of paper” known as the U.S. Constitution.

Proving the “U.K. terror plot” was manufactured fearmongering, U.S. airports have already been told the “threat level” has been reduced to the usual constant hysteria rather than the top-level hysteria enacted last week.

Also revealed this weekend was the fact that the “U.K. terror plot” was just that: Cops encouraging young Muslims to entertain fantasies of striking back at Britain, not the United States.

Remarkably, it was Chertoff himself who admitted this Sunday on CNN.

This kind of gonzo journalism doesn’t come along very often. When it does, you gotta know who it calls to mind. Not only is it absolutely non-objective, thus allowing it to report the facts and the context as they stand, but it’s also deeply sourced, totally jam-packed with links. This is good work.