This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

This week; Richard Leblanc and finding a home for the Woodwynn Therapeutic Community; Ingmar Lee and Zoe Blunt on the continuing battle to save the dwindling wild lands around Victoria; Janine Bandcroft brings us up to speed on good local goings-on in the coming week. 

 

 

It's called "homelessness" and it's a growing problem for Canadian society. No government, neither federal, provincial, nor municipal has yet come up with a formula to address the situation. While these actors point fingers to the failure of other departments and jurisdictions to come up with solutions, none are yet prepared to tackle the fundamental economics underpinning the crisis of affordable housing: availability.

 

While doling out building permits for luxury condominiums in the city centre, as Victoria boasts it is doing at record rates, nothing is being done to replace the low rate accommodations these behemoth downtown towers are built upon, or defend the working poor from the ever upward rising property evaluations making further development irresistible to landlords.

 

It's a self-perpetuating process that requires inspired leadership, imagination, and innovation to come to terms with; all qualities woefully lacking in Victoria's City Hall, the provincial legislature, and the many municipal halls around the province, and around the country.

 

Richard Leblanc is a Central Saanich land-holder who believes he has a partial solution to this burgeoning dilemma, but are we ready for it?

 

Richard Leblanc and getting the Woodwynn Therapeutic Community off the ground in the first segment.

And; as highrise development in the city displaces more and more people, rampant urban sprawl is destroying the habitat necessary for the survival of the rare and common wildlife surrounding Victoria.

 

Nearly a year ago, a group of concerned citizens got together to protect just such a rich refugia area slated to be bulldozed for the construction of a highway overpass.

 

Ingmar Lee is a longtime island activist and friend to Gorilla Radio who along with journalist and activist, Zoe Blunt are two of the citizens dedicated to stopping the so-named Bear Mountain Interchange. That effort was dramatically challenged by the RCMP last week.

 

Ingmar Lee and Zoe Blunt on the continuing battle for the forest in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week.

 

But first, Ricard Leduc and finding a home for Woodwynn.

 

 

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, Rhoda Berenson, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Glen Ford, Susan George, Stan Goff, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Scott Horton, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Chalmers Johnson, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, David Robb, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., and many others.

Pacific Free Press is a new sister site to Atlantic Free Press (already a Google News Source). Like AFP, PFP is not a simple news aggregator. All of our writers have been contacted, have joined the site and said they will contribute their editorials that appear on their own blogs or are syndicated elsewhere - and - some have stated they will provide original work that will be initially exclusive to Pacific Free Press. The sheer amount of writers working with Atlantic Free Press has brought us to the point where we felt we need to divide some of the material by starting a new site.

Using our Open Source content management system (CMS), Joomla, our writers use a WYSIWYG editor to contribute their submissions and images and we publish upon review - it's cutting edge participatory journalism.

We have set up an Author's Guide which is used for training the writers on Joomla, podcasting (yes we podcast), and other emerging methods to communicate their media.

We don't comb the net, hunting down articles, that we would 'like' to appear in our publication and have been working for over a year to put together a core team of people to work with us.

The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press. We have over a dozen PHD's on our writer's list - from all parts of the globe.

Key writers who are onboard and will provide original work include:

Some of our other writers include Andrew Bard Schmookler, Anwaar Hussain, Chris Floyd, Craig Murray, Dave Lindorff, David Swanson, Doug Mitchell, Frank Pitz, Ingmar Lee, James Kunstler, James Petras, Jason Miller, Jennifer Matsui, Jeremy R. Hammond, Joel S. Hirschhorn, Joshua Frank, Katherine Hughes, Kevin Harris, Larry C. Johnson, Linda Milazzo, Manuel Valenzuela, Mark Crispin Miller, Mel Seesholtz, Michael Wills, Mickey Z, Mike Whitney, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Nicola Nasser, Norman Solomon, Paul J. Balles, Paul Lehto, Paul William Roberts, Phil Rockstroh, Ramzy Baroud, Richard Kastelein, Richard Marsden, Robert Jensen, Rod Amis, Rosemarie Jackowski, S. Artesian, Sam Welch, Seth Sandronsky, Shahid Alam, Shepherd Bliss, Stephen Lendman, Tom Chartier, Tom Engelhardt, Walter Brasch, Weldon Berger, Will Durst, William Bowles, William A. Cook, William Blum, Winter Patriot and many others found here.
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/component/option,com_comprofiler/task,usersList/Itemid,35/

Our strategy for Pacificfreepress.com is to provide pennings from dissident and alternative writers (Libertarian and Left) whose work does not appear in Google News due to the lack of solid, reputable sources for work of this kind. Google News is a rather fair and level playing field - with mathematical algorithms as it's objective editors rather then inherently subjective humans. Hence the importance of us being part of the roster at Google News.

We feel that creating another vehicle for the West Coast and East Asia Region (as opposed to Atlantic Free Press) will allow more direction towards producing works from a variety of Asian and Pacific West Coast voices which would be a great resource for Google News and an outlet for alternative and dissident journalists that don't normally get mainstream media coverage.

Best

Richard Kastelein
V.O.F. Expathos, The Netherlands
www.pacificfreepress.com
www.atlanticfreepress.com
www.chris-floyd.com
 

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