April 18, 2016 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News
Jaimi Zammit left North Vancouver to escape unreachable rents but they followed her — north along the Sea-to-Sky highway to Squamish, where she and her family found themselves renting a $2,000-a-month house on an income of $2,000 a month.
Photo by John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
Thursday, April 12, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
TORONTO — The battle over whether to give addicts a safe place to inject has moved to Ontario from the West Coast.
When the Supreme Court of Canada handed Vancouver’s supervised injection site a legal victory late last year by denying the federal government’s attempt to shutter it, many observers expected the ruling to give rise to similar sites across Canada.
Not so fast.
Saturday, December 5, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
They can talk about the environment at a United Nations summit, but the action is at your local recycling depot and bus stop, and in your water taps, light bulbs and street-side bike stands. That’s why the real show during the Copenhagen talks might be on the sidelines – at a parallel summit of cities. And there, Canadians are at the forefront.
Cities argue that in an urbanizing world where at least half of emissions are created in municipalities, they are best suited to fight climate change. Just give them the resources and clout.
“We want to show the international community that cities are acting,” says Martha Delgado Peralta, environment minister for Mexico City, once the most polluted municipality in the world.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
VANCOUVER — After an 18-month cocaine and heroin binge, Karmalita Joe was ready to get clean.
She had tried and failed before at detox centres around Vancouver, but the persistent urging of staff at InSite – the supervised-injection site where she says she went to shoot up “repeatedly, daily, sadistically” – prevailed. On a Friday in early July, she asked to be admitted to OnSite, the detox facility upstairs.
But the facility, which has been operating at capacity almost since it opened a year ago, didn’t have any spare beds. Come back Monday, she was told.
In the intervening two days, she was on another trip.
“When you want to quit, you need to quit now,” she said. “If you’re told you have to wait three or four days, that drive to quit … it just goes down, and addiction takes over.”
Ms. Joe was lucky: She was back at OnSite the following Wednesday, got a bed in its detox program and has graduated to its third-floor stabilization room.
“I still, for the life of me, cannot believe I was able to stay clean,” she said.
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
With reports from Justine Hunter in Victoria, Sunny Dhillon in Lions Bay and Cathryn Atkinson in Squamish
VANCOUVER — It almost cost Vancouver the 2010 Olympic Games five years ago.
Now, the narrow and precarious cliff-side Sea to Sky Highway is coming back to haunt the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee a year and a half before the big event.
Thousands of cubic metres of jagged boulders laid strewn 10 metres high, blocking the vital artery linking Vancouver and Whistler, the Games’ two primary venue cities. The rock slide Tuesday night near Porteau Bluffs south of Squamish is the highway’s biggest in a dozen years. It is expected to shut down the road for five days and has conjured disastrous visions of stranded athletes and tourists during the 2010 Olympics. The cliffs above the highway are geologically prone to weak planes of rock.
Commuters, tourists and businesses are girding for a long wait.
a business of misfits 