That Michael Ignatieff really is da shit. No wait, I mean he knows how to hide it. The puffin poop, that is. No wonder he decided to become a politian.

Excrement-hiding bird championed as Liberal symbol

Updated Thu. Aug. 30 2007 1:18 PM ET

Canadian Press

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — The beaver is one of Canada’s national symbols and now a senior Liberal wants to make the puffin the symbol of the country’s self-proclaimed natural governing party.

Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff says the industrious little seabird — with its black and white plumage, distinctive striped beak and orange feet — is a “noble” creature that exemplifies Liberal values.

“It’s a noble bird because it has good family values. They stay together for 30 years,” Ignatieff said Thursday outside a Liberal caucus retreat in the Newfoundland capital.

“They lay one egg (each year). They put their excrement in one place. They hide their excrement. … They flap their wings very hard and they work like hell.

“This seems to me a symbol for what our party should be.”

Ignatieff was charmed by the birds during what was supposed to be a whale-watching tour for Liberal caucus members Tuesday. The MPs and senators saw no whales but did get a close up view of a colony of puffins nesting on a rocky offshore island.

Sam Sullivan wasn’t being particularly prophetic when he started talking about eco-density. It’s been clear for some time that with Metro Vancouver’s limited availability of developable land and rapidly increasing population we need to densify our housing stock.

Up till now, our growing housing needs have been addressed with approaches at two extremes. Eastern suburbs are filling up with sprawling tracts of isolating, clichéd, banal houses. And in the urban cores of our various municipalities unimaginative glass towers are popping up all over–vertical suburbs that are as isolating, clichéd and banal as suburban homes.

Residents of east Vancouver, where much of the eco-densification will take place, are concerned, even afraid, of what will happen to their neighbourhoods when the planners start planning and the developers start developing.

What is needed is affordable and attractive housing that isn’t cheaply constructed, one-size-fits-all, and neighbourhoods that are livable and walkable. Matthew Soules writes about the Battersby/Howat Sun1 project in east Vancouver, a development which supports interaction and community, while addressing both public and private needs sensibly, sensitively, and stylishly.

Steven Truscott, wrongfully prosecuted and wrongfully convicted, was finally acquitted today. After 48 years, the weight is finally off his shoulders. The price he paid is unimaginable.

He will be compensated for his ill treatment by the courts and the justice system, but how do you put a price tag on something so egregious?

“Beggars,” the neo-cons might say, “can’t be choosers,” as they point out the free food available in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, assuming it’s good enough for “those people”, meaning the addicts and mentally ill folk who missed the gravy train.

In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like, Vancouver Homeless Coordinator, Judy Graves, and UBC Director of Social Work and Family Studies, Graham Rich, spent a day standing in line for you.

Forget Olympic cost overruns and the premature burn on the construction contingency fund. Something far more wicked might be coming this way.

Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit is on the lookout for the bad guys. V2010-ISU includes forensic accountants, construction specialists, and undercover officers to protect the Games from what the IOC has described as a constant threat from organized crime: Inflated contracts, theft, and immigration irregularities, topped up with sub-standard services, materials, and labour practices.

There haven’t been any criminal charges so far. The ISU has apparently provided the IOC with “information” although it’s all very secret and hush hush. Hopefully this isn’t because they’re embarrassed about $700 toilet seats or million dollar washers.

WSJ reporter, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, was in Vancouver recently and took a trip from her business district hotel down to the Downtown Eastside, where she saw a lot of “junkies” hovering about Insite’s doors and the surrounding blocks.

It’s clear from her story and the accompanying video that she doesn’t think Canada’s anemic stab at harm reduction is either moral or effective. O’Grady implies that the streets around Insite are stacked with addicts because of Insite’s presence in the neighbourhood, although it was the huge population of addicts who gravitated to the cheap and dirty hotels in the DTES that made that neighbourhood a sensible site for a safe injection clinic.

O’Grady doesn’t mention that Insite was never conceived to be a one-size-fits-all approach to harm reduction, or the imminent opening of Onsite, the 12-bed detox clinic upstairs from Insite. However, as O’Grady points out in the video, detox is not the same as rehab, beds for which remain in appallingly short supply for those who don’t have a spare $25k for six weeks in a private clinic like Edgewood in Nanaimo, BC.

The lazy zen guide to meditation. Go on, it’s Friday.

Junkies not welcome in the City of Love. SFGate writer, C. W. Nevis’ modest proposal that San Francisco consider a safe injection site modelled on Vancouver’s Insite brings out the hate. Online commenters are almost unanimously opposed. No doubt Tony Clement would be pleased.

The man who wouldn’t be mayor, Senator Larry Campbell, seems to have some fixed opinions about who should and who shouldn’t command the microphones at Vancouver city council meetings. Larry’s Raymond Louie PR campaign keeps on ticking, but Gregor Robertson takes a stentorian licking.

Translink to be run by the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Vancouver Port Corporation and the Gateway Council, at least from Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan’s perspective. What Corrigan keeps forgetting is that people just get in the way, along with the democratic process.

U Vic’s Neptune Project will plug the Pacific into the internet. Scientists say that Neptune will improve the fish stock measurement and suggest sustainable harvest levels, enhance climate prediction models, allow for earlier tsunami and earthquake warnings, and identify potential new energy sources.

“…Care, one of the world’s biggest charities, has announced that it will boycott the controversial policy of selling tons of heavily subsidised US produced food in African countries. Care wants the US government to send money to buy food locally, rather than unwanted US produced food.”

The Forastero cocoa bean, native to the Amazon, is considered the equivalent of the robusta coffee bean–cheap, plentiful, and harsh–and is normally eschewed by fine chocolatiers. Not so the house of Pralus, who took on the challenge of transforming Forastero beans into Bresil, one of Pralus’ single origin chocolate bars.

Pralus is recognized for darkly roasted, perfectly creamy chocolate, and this orange-hued bar traded off a bit of snap for softness. It had an honest nose that was neither overwhelming nor seductive and flavours that were a perfect blend masculine and feminine. Grassy notes were quickly replaced with lychee and raspberry, then leather, then a stong, but not particularly long smoky coffee finish.

A very well rounded, good eating chocolate, though at $12.00 for a 100-gram bar from Whole Foods, perhaps not for every day.