The Georgia Straight - Report On Real Estate - March 10, 2022

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022 | FREE

Volume 56 | Number 2821

ART MEETS SCIENCE VAG’s deep dive into AI

ROLE REVERSAL

REPORT ON REAL ESTATE

Bunny rewrites usual love story

B.C. Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon offers his housing solutions; plus, mortgage rates, market shifts, and the impact of war KANYE WEST • PINK BOOTS • THE BATMAN • CONVOY TO VICTORIA

CHILL.

Enjoy stress-free reading without the noise on CreatorNews.

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THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

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NEWS

CONTENTS

Convoy plans lengthy visit to B.C.’s provincial capital

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By Charlie Smith Cover photo by John Lehmann

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ARTS

Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Bruce Grenville took a deep dive into artificial intelligence with a new exhibition tracing its history.

By Steve Newton

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MOVIES

Robert Pattinson and Matt Reeves return the caped crusader to his roots as an obsessive detective in this complex, intriguing reboot.

James Bauder played a key role in the recent convoy to Ottawa opposing vaccine mandates.

travel west with stops planned in Dryden, Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, Calgary, Kamloops, and Surrey before heading to Victoria.

According to Bauder, there are already seven semis en route. He also said that there will 16,000 hamburgers available for those who attend Bearhug B.C. “Canada, we really do have to support B.C. right now,” Bauder told his followers.

“It’s one of the hardest hit provinces.”

In January, Canada Unity released a memorandum of understanding calling for the Senate and governor general to peacefully overthrow the Trudeau government. Bauder and his wife, Sandra, were two of the three “authorized” signatories.

The MOU also called on the Senate and the governor general to agree to “cease and desist all unconstitutional, discriminatory and segregating actions and human rights violations”.

The occupation of downtown Ottawa ended after the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act. A massive number of police then cleared out the protest after more than three weeks.

As the Emergencies Act was being debated in the Senate, the Trudeau government decided to withdraw this measure. g

By Norman Wilner

e Start Here

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MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

e Online TOP 5

Here’s what people are reading this week on Straight.com.

1 2 3 4 5

OneCity Vancouver names candidates for council and park and school boards.

Report forecasts Metro Vancouver spring housing market “barnburner”.

Police investigate Vancouver’s fourth pedestrian death of 2022.

Phoebe Rogers plays Vancouver on Saturday, August 20.

Fifty-year-old skier dies in collision with tree on Cypress Mountain.

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GENERAL MANAGER Sandra Oswald

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COVER

B.C. Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon hopes to become premier by promising to help meet demands for affordable housing.

by Charlie Smith

ictoria residents might want to prepare for a lot of trucks coming to their city on March 14 to protest vaccine mandates.

“We’re going to be occupying that area for two to three months,” organizer James Bauder said on Rumble from Mattawa, Ontario. “This is a very intense, deeply rooted NDP-Liberal stronghold down there. And they’ve had their way for too long.”

The Christian activist expects 500 to 1,000 vehicles will travel from Surrey to Victoria for what he’s dubbed “Bearhug B.C.” and “Bearhug II”. B.C. Ferries requires passengers to wear masks on-board its vessels.

Bauder is the founder of Canada Unity and was one of the organizers of Freedom Convoy 2022 to Ottawa.

Now he’s setting his sights on Victoria because B.C. is one of the provinces that still requires people to wear masks in indoor spaces. He said that the event will be funded through social media by Canadians and Americans.

The plan is for “multiple rolling convoys”, between 100 and 200 in size over the course of two to three months. People will register for individual events.

“It’s time that we get down there and show them what the laws are. And not your opinions, folks,” Bauder declared. “There is so many laws that our government has violated. The media is supporting the breaking of these laws—and society has got to start getting back to the right side of the law, and defending ourselves legally, via lawsuits.”

He insisted that “everything that we’re going to do is going to be 100 percent legal”.

“We will not be doing any blockades,” Bauder said. “We will not be doing any occupying movements or anything like that.”

In his social-media post, Bauder said that the convoy to Victoria began in Thunder Bay on Monday (March 7). From there, it will

March 10-17 / 2022

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ART DEPARTMENT MANAGER Janet McDonald GRAPHIC DESIGNER Miguel Hernandez PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR Mike Correia ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES Glenn Cohen, Luci Richards, Catherine Tickle, Robyn Marsh, David Pearlman (On-Leave) MANAGER, BRANDED CONTENT AND MARKETING LEAD Rachel Moore CREDIT MANAGER Shannon Li ACCOUNTING SUPERVISOR Tamara Robinson

EDUCATION

SFU’s Blaney prize goes to U.S. writer on social justice

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by Charlie Smith

.S. social-justice writer and facilitator adrienne maree brown doesn’t devote a great deal of attention to planning how her life will unfold. Instead, she prefers following her passions when they arise.

“I never know what the next positive obsession will be,” brown tells the Straight over Zoom from Detroit. “But I really pay attention to when an idea won’t go away.”

That term, positive obsession, came from one of her major influences, prescient science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who died in Washington state in 2006.

In the early 1980s, Butler wrote a short story called “Speech Sounds”, in which a pandemic caused most humans to lose their ability to read, speak, or write. Many of the afflicted felt tremendous jealousy and rage. In addition, brown points out that Butler created a character decades ago who ran for president of the U.S. as a demagogue on the slogan of “Make America Great Again”.

“She was able to make what feel like these predictions—these prophetic predictions about what was going to happen— mostly because she paid attention,” brown points out. “And when you pay attention to what’s happening around you, you can start to draw conclusions.”

On March 2, brown was awarded SFU’s Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue, which is given every second year to a person who demonstrates “excellence in the use of dialogue to increase mutual understanding and advance complex public issues”. SFU noted that as the writer-in-residence at the Detroit-based Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute and the author of several books, brown was selected because her work “speaks to the ‘how’ of designing social justice movements”.

One of those books is Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.

“So everything in that book is [about] how do we get into the interdependent relationships we need to sustain through changes?

And how do we bring our attention to the very small ways that change can happen in our lives and understand that everything big—and especially every big change—is made up of a lot of small parts and small decisions?” brown says.

Conversations matter, she says, but she also likes communicating ideas through her poetry and frequent blog posts. She elaborates on the idea of emergent strategy by quoting organizational expert Nick Obolensky, who described emergence as “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions”.

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Author adrienne maree brown uses dialogue to achieve social change. Photo by Anjali Pinto.

“Huge cities, whole nations, came from small decisions to travel, to escape, to run away to try to create something new,” brown explains.

She offers a reminder that the pandemic also arose out of relatively simple interactions. “It’s inevitable that an interconnected species, which tries to act as if it is not interconnected, will eventually have to face circumstances together,” brown says.

Quoting Butler, brown says that “the fundamental flaw of human beings is that our intelligence is paired with a commitment to hierarchy”. It’s another example of Butler’s ability to notice things—something that brown also likes to bring to her practice as a writer and facilitator.

Nowadays, one of brown’s positive obsessions is considering how humanity faces and processes grief, including grief over the state of the planet.

“When it’s time to grieve, people are expected to kind of disappear and handle it, and then come back two days later, fine and functional,” brown says. “And that’s not what’s truly happening within us.

“What we grieve is what we love,” she continues. “And what we love deserves our care and attention.”

So what would society look like if grief was properly honoured? “Then we would be much more cautious about anything that created death,” she replies. g

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FOOD / LIQUOR

City’s diversity mirrored in its specialty groceries

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by Charlie Smith

ne way to experience the diversity of Vancouver is through its grocery stores. They range from the tiny Asia Market (326 East Kent Ave. South), which sells a wide range of Thai curry pastes, to the rapidly growing Sungiven Foods supermarkets, which offer Asian goods.

So here’s a whirlwind tour. Let’s start with Sungiven Foods, which sells many herbs commonly used in Chinese cooking.

If you show up at one of these stores before the Spring Festival, as I did, you’ll be blown away by the selection of holiday treats.

Sungiven is a rising rival to T & T Supermarket chain, which was founded 29 years ago in Burnaby and joined the Loblaw empire in 2009. T & T’s flagship store in Richmond’s Lansdowne Mall may have the most extensive selection of Asian baked goods in the region, along with dim sum products at far lower prices than any Chinese restaurant.

There is a multitude of grocery stores catering to the South Asian community, including the Subzi Mandi outlets.

But the granddaddy remains Fruiticana, which offers low prices for its wide range of Indian spices and prepackaged flatbread and naan. Warning: the 6257 Fraser Street

MARCH MADNESS

SALE

Some specialty grocery stores in Vancouver—like Fruiticana (above, with owner Tony Singh) and T&T Supermarkets—have expanded into several outlets throughout the Lower Mainland.

store can be crowded, whereas there’s more room to move in the store in Cambie Plaza, at 4101 No. 5 Road in Richmond.

Those with a hankering for Greece at an affordable price really should stop by the well-maintained Parthenon Market (3089 West Broadway). Not only is there a wide range of Greek goodies, Parthenon also has an excellent deli.

Just down the street, at 2827 West Broadway, is one of the eight Persia Foods stores in the region. This chain offers very

competitive prices for its produce. It’s worth a visit for its baklava, Middle Eastern herbs and spices, and authentic Persian saffron.

For East Side residents, Bosa Foods (562 Victoria Drive) is the go-to destination for specialty Italian and Mediterranean groceries. From biscotti to Italian cheeses to traditional flavoured candies—this local landmark has it all.

Speaking of sweets, have you ever checked out the Celtic Treasure Chest (5639 Dunbar Street)? You’ll find them in abundance at

Odd Society steps up to help out Ukraine

by Mike Usinger

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this little store, which sells groceries and gift items from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Here, you’ll find real Cadbury chocolate from England along with an excellent selection of jams, frozen pies, and candies from across the pond.

There are more than a dozen Filipino stores selling groceries, including Sari-Sari (5191 Joyce Street), Aling Mary’s (2656 Main Street), and Mang Isko (4959 Kingsway).

Kingsway is also home to many other international grocery stores, including African General Market (3543 Kingsway), Alenka European Foods (701 Kingsway), Dong Thanh Supermarket (1172 Kingsway), and Los Guerreros Mexican Food Products (3317 Kingsway). The relatively new Mi Tierra Latina (1104 Davie Street) also offers specialty Latin American groceries in the West End. There are so many others worth mentioning, including the Korean-American chain H Mart and the locally created Japanese grocery store Fujiya, which each have three Lower Mainland locations, as well as the Caribbean Market (804 12th Street, New Westminster). The world is truly in the local grocery aisles—it’s No Frills travel for those who can’t afford to reach these countries by air. g

After sales rose when B.C. Liquor Stores pulled Russian products last month, Odd Society donated partial East Van Vodka proceeds to charity.

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

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f there’s been one positive to come out of Putin’s ongoing war on Ukraine, it’s that countries, organizations, businesses, and ordinary people around the world have been reminded that we’re all in this together. If only, in this case, the circumstances were less depressingly traumatizing.

The world has been quick to hit Russia with sanctions since Putin’s army invaded Ukraine on February 24. Actions have run the gamut from freezing international bank accounts to companies like Spotify closing it offices in a country that’s increasingly isolated.

There’s been action locally as well. In late February, BC Liquor Stores pulled all Russian liquor products from its shelves as a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine. That led to an uptick in vodka sales for East Vancouver craft distillery Odd Society Spirits.

Now, determined to pay things forward, the Vancouver distillery has announced that it will be donating 20 percent of proceeds from its East Van Vodka to World Central Kitchen.

A not-for-profit, non-governmental organization founded by celebrity chef José Andrés in 2010, World Central Kitchen’s mandate is to provide meals for those who’ve been hit by natural disasters.

Or, in this case, Vladimir Putin.

WCK works as a first responder to liaison with local chefs to help solve hunger problems in the wake of a crisis.

The organization was among the first on the ground after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. It’s currently on the frontlines in Eastern Europe serving fresh meals to those who’ve either fled, or are in the process of fleeing, Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on February 24.

Since the start of the war an estimated two million people have left the country, most of them women and children. g

BEER

Big Jan Wears Pink Boots a nicely juicy tribute

by Mike Usinger ON TAP

Stanley Park Brewing Big Jan Wears Pink Boots THEIR WORDS

“Big Jan Wears Pink Boots, is a delicious, sessionable Hazy IPA in tribute to Assistant Brewer, Rachel Young’s mother Jan. Coming in at 6.3 percent alc./vol. and 29 IBU, it showcases the 2021 Pink Boots hop blend, featuring notes of citrus, tropical fruit, and a hint of pine.”

TASTE TEST

Been avoiding IPAs because you still have PTSD from that time you followed up three Green Flash Brewing Palate Wreckers with two growlers of Harpoon Leviathan? Rest easy as Big Jan isn’t gunning for a place on the frontlines of the international hop wars. Instead, get ready for a beer that brings to mind freshly cut Hawaiian pineapple and juicy white grapefruit, which is to say as refreshing as it punchy thanks to the 6.3 percent ABV. As far as the appearance goes, as promised, hazy pretty sums things up beautifully. The long dark winter has finally come to a close. While Big Jan Wears Pink Boots will have you dreaming

Arriving just in time for International Women’s Day, Stanley Park Brewing’s spring-friendly IPA Big Jan Wears Pink Boots pays tribute to the mom of assistant brewer Rachel Young (seated).

of sunsets on the lake this summer, it’s a pretty great way to ring in the spring.

DEEP THOUGHTS

Now that we’ve dealt with what’s in the can, let’s talk a bit about the backstory. Arriving for International Women’s Day, Big Jan Wears Pink Boots is the fourth and latest

in an ongoing series of collaboration brews brought to you by the folks at Stanley Park.

As with previous offerings, proceeds will be earmarked for the Pink Boots Society, which was founded to support women and nonbinary individuals working in the fermented and alcoholic beverage industry.

Rachel Young made use of Pink Boots’

resources when she was starting out in the East Van chapter of the B.C. craft beer industry. In a Big Jan video for the release, she notes “Traditional and economically, it’s been a very male dominated industry and women have always been a little overshadowed in that. Getting more women means more variety because they have a different point of view and they’ll bring different things to the table every single time.”

As for the woman on the label, Young’s mom spent 50 years working in nursing, where she was known to those around as Big Jan. This year’s collaboration tribute starts with a photo-inspired illustrated rendition of her mom, kicking back in a lawnchair with a cold one, a fishing pole, and her dog Norman the Spoodle by her side.

In the video, Young states,” I feel really honoured that I can contribute to something that actually helps inspire and encourage other women; and my family is tickled that this is something that other people get to enjoy and they get to learn about who she was as a woman, because she was pretty damn amazing.”

And, because you want to know, her boots on the label are pink. g

VOTE NOW! MAY 26, 2022 Visit STRAIGHT.COM for details and to vote for your favourites from Vancouver’s thriving culinary scene Thank you to our sponsors: Terra Breads, Rocky Mountain Flatbread, La Belle Patate Vancouver, Water St. Cafe, West Coast Poké, España, Pacific Poke, Cartems Donuts, Pallet Coffee Roasters, Marquis Wines.

Ballot closes March 24 MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

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REAL ESTATE

Exodus from Lower Mainland bumps B.C. prices

A

by Carlito Pablo

n exodus from Metro Vancouver has jacked up home prices in other areas of the province.

As the 2022 spring housing market gets underway, the chief economist with the B.C. Real Estate Association (BCREA) wants to see how this phenomenon evolves.

“We’re still seeing migration patterns out from Metro Vancouver into other parts of the province, and that’s really driving demand in those markets,” Brendon Ogmundson told the Straight in a phone interview.

Between the past two censuses, people were moving out of the Lower Mainland for other places in B.C. at an average rate of more than 1,000 each month.

Based on the official tally by Statistics Canada, a total of 12,245 residents left the region from July 1, 2020, to the most recent count on July 1, 2021.

Ogmundson noted that people normally list a home and then buy in the same area, resulting in an offset between supply and demand.

What has happened (and seems to be continuing) is that property owners in Metro Vancouver take advantage of high housing prices in the region and then buy elsewhere.

“The issue is that all of that demand doesn’t bring in any associated supply in those markets,” Ogmundson said.

He cited Chilliwack as one example.

Between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021, a total of 2,286 people from elsewhere in B.C. settled in the census area of Chilliwack, which includes places like Kent and Harrison Hot Springs. In addition, 422 people from outside B.C. came in, while 17 immigrants from other countries arrived.

Based on official figures from the BCREA, the average price of all homes in Chilliwack as of the end of December 2021 rose to $837,772. This marks a 41.3 percent year-over-year increase compared to the average price of $592,881 in December 2020.

Meanwhile, active home listings in Chilliwack numbered only 264 at the end of December 2021. That’s a 40.8 percent decrease compared to 446 in the same month in 2020.

Ogmundson also mentioned Victoria.

Between the last two enumerations by Statistics Canada, the census metropolitan area, or CMA, of Victoria—which includes places like Saanich, Langford, and Esquimalt, among others—gained 1,664 new residents from intraprovincial migration.

With regard to housing, the average price in Victoria at the end of December 2021 increased to $1,023,241. That’s an annual growth of 32.9 percent from the December 2020 average price of $769,941.

Meanwhile, 2021 ended in Victoria 8

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

The average home price in Chilliwack rose 41 percent in 2021 compared to 2020. This five-bedroom house listed on March 4, 2022, at $1,999,900.

with just 421 active home listings. That’s a 53.3 percent drop from the 902 listings in December 2020.

As for the rest of Vancouver Island, the average price increased year-over-year by 39.3 percent, from $517,203 to $720,345.

The same pattern can be seen in other places in B.C. In Kamloops, the average price of homes in December 2021 increased to $631,657.

This represents a 33.8 percent markup from $472,131 in December 2020.

In Powell River, the average price increased 45.7 percent year-over-year, to

$561,582 in December last year.

“What I’m looking for over the next year is kind of a break in those patterns: are we going to see the same amount of demand in places like Chilliwack?”

BCREA’s Ogmundson said.

Earlier this year, the real estate association reported that 2022 started with a record low of 12,179 January home listings across the province.

“For context,” the BCREA noted in another report the following month, “a healthy level of re-sale listings for the province is closer to 40,000 listings.”

Because of this “listings drought, markets all over the province are seeing significant upward pressure on prices”.

Ogmundson noted that home listings have recently picked up in markets served by the real estate boards in Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. The question now is whether or not sellers are going to buy in the same markets.

Ogmundson feels that the exodus from Metro Vancouver may continue.

“I think a lot of the people that are listing are going to other places around the province,” he said. g

R ate HIKE ADDS $13 PER MONTH TO $100K MORTGAGE

A recent interest hike affects variable-rate mortgages. Photo by Getty/ekaterina79.

d THE BANK OF CANADA has raised its interest-setting rate from 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent.

What does this mean to people with mortgages?

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

Mortgage broker and realtor Gerry Kainth sent out an email blast regarding this matter when the central bank announced the rate hike on March 2.

(Take note that the increase affects only variable-rate mortgages, not those with a fixed rate.)

Kainth explained that the 0.25 percent rate hike means a $13 increase per month in payments for every $100,000 of mortgage.

To illustrate, the broker cited a mortgage amount of $500,000. At a variable rate of 1.55 percent before the increase, the mortgage payment equals $1,736 per month.

Kainth indicated that with a new variable rate of 1.8 percent, the resulting mortgage payment would be $1,796, an increase of $60.

The Bank of Canada is expected to continue raising rates this year and into

2023. So Kainth posed the question of whether or not people with variable-rate mortgages should lock in with a fixed rate.

He explained that locking into the current fixed rate of 3.29 percent would mean that a mortgage payment on $500,000 would increase to $2,180, or an additional $444.

Kainth suggests sticking with variable rates.

“While variable rates may increase through 2022, they are still significantly lower than fixed rates,” he wrote.

Kainth explained that it would take six interest-rate hikes on the variable rate to match the current fixed rate of 3.29 percent.

“Most banks will continue to push fixed interest rates because they make more money,” Kainth wrote. g

by Carlito Pablo

REAL ESTATE

Falcon accuses NDP of misdiagnosing the market

The B.C. Liberal leader says the province focused on demand-side measures when we needed more supply

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by Charlie Smith

he Georgia Straight initially planned to put B.C.’s minister responsible for housing, Attorney General David Eby, on this week’s cover. We were curious to hear how Eby planned to follow through on his previously stated objective to increase the supply of housing when municipalities have so much control over zoning.

We also wanted to hear Eby’s response to arguments by UBC professor Patrick Condon that asset inflation—in the form of higher housing prices—is largely a result of monetary policy set by the Bank of Canada. In fact, the money supply in Canada doubled from 2009 to 2019 as borrowers enjoyed sustained low interest rates.

But Eby chose to decline the request for an interview. B.C. Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon, on the other hand, was willing to field our questions on how he plans to address the high cost of housing. This explains why he, and not Eby, is on the front page of this newspaper.

When reached by phone in Surrey, Falcon made a point of describing Eby as a “disaster of a housing minister”.

“The NDP’s approach has been just completely wrong-headed,” Falcon said.

“And for us to get different results, we have to diagnose the problem properly. The NDP diagnosed it wrong from the outset.”

According to Falcon, Eby and the NDP insisted before forming government in 2017 that foreign Chinese buyers were largely responsible for driving up prices.

As a result of this “misdiagnosis”, Falcon said, the NDP’s solution to affordability was to load a lot more taxes onto housing to curb demand from these foreign buyers.

Falcon, however, maintained that foreign buyers have never been a major part of the B.C. real estate market. In fact, he said, they typically comprise less than five percent of all buyers—and even less during the pandemic.

“Here we are, just five years later, and we’ve got the highest housing prices we’ve ever seen in the history of British Columbia,” Falcon said. “In fact, last year in Surrey alone, prices are up 40 percent.”

After stepping down as finance minister in 2013, Falcon worked in the development industry as the executive vice president of Anthem Capital Corp. He thinks that if the NDP had fully acknowledged the magnitude of the shortage of new housing after 2017, prices wouldn’t be nearly as high as they are today.

“We’ve had constrained supply for far too long,” Falcon said. “The demand continues to grow. And in the absence of supply, there is going to be a driving up of prices. This is simple economics and something that the

B.C. Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon (above, with wife Jessica and daughters Rose and Josephine) described the NDP’s David Eby as a “disaster of a housing minister”. Photo by John Lehmann.

If we don’t have the housing stock, that is just going to push that demand and make it very, very challenging.

– B.C. Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon

NDP completely misread.”

He promised to take a “totally different approach” if he becomes premier after the next election.

“I will make sure through legislation that local governments are doing their bit to ensure that we get the kind of supply and the kind of housing that we’re going to need,” Falcon said. “Young British Columbians, in particular—first-time buyers—will be able to see a credible path to homeownership.”

He insisted that 25 percent of the cost of every new home or condo is made up of taxes. In making this claim, he included everything from the property-transfer tax to the provincial sales tax to the vacant land tax to the school tax to municipal development cost charges and communityamenity contributions.

Falcon said that if a municipality’s official community plan identifies new density in an area, there should be no requirement for a public hearing. Plus, he thinks that municipalities that fail to meet their targets

for population growth under the Livable Region Plan should be convinced to do this with carrots and sticks.

When it comes to rapid-transit projects, Falcon said that as premier, he would “take a much more direct role in determining what kind of density we are going to see around those stations”.

“It is awful that we invest billions of taxpayer dollars in these very expensive transit corridors and then we sit back and watch the municipality do almost nothing to take advantage of the huge demand from people that would love to live near a rapid transit station,” Falcon said.

That prompted the Straight to ask him what goes through his mind when he goes

by Nanaimo Station in an area of East Vancouver dominated by single-family homes.

“It feels like we’re just missing this huge opportunity,” Falcon replied. “Like, how is this possible that we haven’t got the kind of density that we should have in an area like that so close to these stations. It’s mindboggling to me.”

Over the past year, Eby has been talking a great deal about the need for a dramatic increase in the supply of housing. That prompted the Straight to ask Falcon if voters who agree that a low supply is driving up prices can now feel safe voting for the NDP in the next provincial election.

Falcon replied that this is “such an important question”. He then declared that Eby has been spending the better part of the past year getting himself educated about housing. How so? According to Falcon, by “having secret meetings with the large developer association called the Urban Development Institute”.

“While I’m happy that in year six of their mandate, they are becoming alive to the reality of how the marketplace works,” the B.C. Liberal leader said, “I would say to people out there: ‘They fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem from the getgo. I don’t trust him [Eby] to bring about the right kind of changes to get the right kind of results in terms of the proposals he’s been talking.”

Last moth, Eby complained that municipal governments have not approved enough housing to serve a growing population. He has suggested that the province is going to need to be “more prescriptive”, possibly through legislation.

Falcon, however, claimed that Eby “essentially borrowed my idea of bringing in legislation to try and force more supply out of local governments”.

“I’m just concerned that he’ll get it all wrong,” the B.C. Liberal leader added.

Falcon agreed that sustained low interest rates and the growing money supply are contributing factors behind higher housing prices, but he doesn’t think that there’s a lot the province can do to address that.

Nor did he express any eagerness to tinker with the Agricultural Land Reserve to free up more land for residential development.

He also said that B.C. can expect 70,000 to 100,000 immigrants per year because the federal government has increased its targets to more than 400,000 per year. And many of those B.C. immigrants will settle in the Lower Mainland and look for a place to live.

“If we don’t have the housing stock, that is just going to continue to push that demand and make it very, very challenging,” Falcon said. “So my objective, if I become the premier of the province, is to focus like a laser beam on…Canadian citizens that live in British Columbia [and] that have never owed a home before. And I want to make sure that we can create a path to ownership to them that is credible, realistic, and affordable. And I think I can do that.” g

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

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A Better Way Home for British Columbia: BC REALTORS®’ Recommendations for Improving Affordability and Consumer Protection

by Pearl Zhou

(This story is sponsored by the British Columbia Real Estate Association.)

W

hen Natalie Holgerson and her husband unexpectedly got an unsolicited offer on their townhome in Steveston—for well over what they’d paid a few years ago—they couldn’t believe their luck.

In the hopes of moving into a single-family house, they decided to take a chance on the offer. But, unfortunately, things haven’t panned out as they’d hoped.

Today, they’re renting after losing out on several properties despite making subject-free offers. Each time, they found themselves in multiple-offer scenarios where they presented their offer immediately after the showing. Offers were always well over the asking price, and there was never time for any due diligence like a home inspection. Natalie said, “Unless you’re willing to take on a million dollar–plus mortgage, which we are not at this stage in our lives, it’s a super-challenging

situation.” And subjects? Natalie knew their offers would only be considered if they were subject-free.

B.C.’S HOUSING SUPPLY NEEDS TO INCREASE NOW

The fact is that in British Columbia, there’s nowhere near enough supply to meet demand. For example, in March 2021, 67,000 buyers searched for homes across B.C. while only 24,000 homes were listed for sale.

The disparity between housing supply and demand will continue to rise as the federal government resumes its immigration program. This year alone, the Government of Canada aims to welcome more than 400,000 new permanent residents; 70,000 to 80,000 are expected to settle in B.C. The province already has domestic demand that it can’t meet. B.C. is already home to four of Canada’s fastest-growing cities: Kelowna, Chilliwack, Kamloops, and Nanaimo—and BCREA’s research shows that these cities have a $1-million benchmark

for a single-family home or townhome.

As the demand for housing grows while supply continues to lag behind, the pressure on potential home buyers will only worsen.

Moreover, British Columbians, whether home buyers or renters, need options in housing type. Building out middle housing—such as duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, laneway, and secondary suites—can create a much-needed diversity in the housing stock. The diversification and densification of housing are essential in cities and transit-accessible population hubs.

When there’s such a mismatch between supply and demand, it’s no wonder that multiple-offer scenarios and even subjectfree offers are the norms.

BC REALTORS® SUPPORT MORE TRANSPARENCY

That’s why the professional association for B.C.’s 24,000 Realtors, the B.C. Real Estate Association (BCREA), has submitted a white paper, A Better Way Home: Protecting

Consumers in Real Estate Transactions, to the B.C. government with more than 30 recommendations to improve the B.C. real estate sector and better protect consumers.

In our recommendations, we urge the provincial government to make infrastructure investments to local governments conditional on official community plans, housing-needs reports, zoning bylaws, and other local policies to allow for increased density and a mix of housing types. Put simply, to speed up and increase housing diversity and starts.

We have also suggested the creation of a permanent National Housing Roundtable in coordination with the federal government to bring together all housing-market stakeholders to help address these challenges in an integrated manner.

Our other recommendations include making property-disclosure statements mandatory, making all strata documents available upon listing, and giving buyers more insight into multiple-offer scenarios. see next page

BCREA has presented the BC government with more than 30 recommendations on how to meet BC’s long-term housing supply needs and give consumers in the market today more peace of mind.

Evolve the Real Estate Sector

A BETTER WAY HOME:

Improve Housing Affordability

STRENGTHENING CONSUMER PROTECTION IN REAL ESTATE

Improve the Stakeholder Engagement Model

Enhance Consumer Protection in Transactions

Learn more about our recommendations at bcrea.bc.ca/betterwayhome.

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MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

MANDATING A PRE-OFFER PERIOD BCREA believes the BC government should introduce measures that help homebuyers make informed decisions, not backtrack because they regret bad ones.

The B.C. government wants to introduce a “cooling-off period” to allow buyers to walk away from a signed contract. But a solution that protects buyers at the expense of sellers is no solution at all.

INFORMED DECISIONS, INSTEAD OF REGRETS

The mismatch between potential home buyers and available properties means that there are a whole lot of frustrated British Columbians who have been unsuccessful in their home-buying journey so far.

According to a survey of unsuccessful home buyers in B.C. since January 2021, by far the most common reason for an unsuccessful purchase was competition from other potential buyers (49 percent), followed by inadequate financing (31 percent). Similarly, among concerns expressed by successful home buyers, the largest was pressure to make an offer uncomfortably above the list price to be competitive (22 percent).

With fierce competition between buyers, subject-free offers and risky financial decisions are being made without proper due diligence. Often, buyers prepare an offer 48 hours after a showing, and it’s done without an appraisal, inspection, or sometimes even without reviewing strata documents. Like Natalie and her husband, for many buyers, non-subject offers are a must if they want to have any chance at securing a home.

The current real estate market and what it has meant for buyers and sellers have many people worried—from consumers to government to Realtors. The B.C. government, in particular, has taken notice. Concerned that consumers are making increasingly risky decisions, the B.C. government has said it will introduce a mandatory “cooling-off period” in real estate transactions this spring.

A cooling-off period would allow buyers to change their minds and cancel a signed purchase contract with little to no legal consequences—likely leaving the seller in a difficult situation, particularly if they’re buyers in another transaction. A solution that only protects one side involved in a transaction is no solution at all.

PRE-OFFER PERIOD: PEACE OF MIND FOR BOTH SELLER AND BUYER

Another recommendation BCREA has put forward in A Better Way Home is a “pre-offer period”. Unlike a cooling-off

period that protects buyers at the expense of sellers, BCREA’s proposed pre-offer period would give both sides of a real estate transaction peace of mind.

During the pre-offer period, a buyer has time to do their due diligence, review documents and disclosure statements, ensure their financing and insurance are in place, and arrange for a home inspection.

Then, when they’re ready to make an offer, the buyer can make an informed decision on presenting with or without subjects.

When buyers are allowed enhanced market exposure and opportunities for due diligence—before offers are considered and accepted—this ensures that they’re not making risky offers in haste.

On the other side, when the seller receives an offer, they can be confident that the buyer is serious and has the financing in place to make sure the deal goes through.

It also provides greater transparency in the transaction, in that all parties are aware of what due diligence is being undertaken.

REALTOR AND GOVERNMENT COLLABORATION IS IN CONSUMERS’ BEST INTERESTS

Realtors have unique insights into how to improve consumer protection in real estate transactions. BCREA wants to collaborate with the B.C. government to ensure proper measures are in place to tackle the core problem of B.C.’s housing issues: the lack of housing supply. Progress needs be made to improve housing supply and lessen the impacts of future overheated markets. At the same time, consumers looking for a home today need workable solutions that give buyers and sellers peace of mind and that can withstand the tests of changing market conditions.

Buying a home is one of the biggest financial decisions we’ll ever make. Working with government, consumers, and other real estate sector stakeholders, BCREA wants to help find A Better Way Home for all British Columbians.

That’s why BCREA has recommended that government introduce a pre-offer period of at least five business days from listing instead of a cooling-off period.

HERE’S HOW THEY’RE DIFFERENT: A pre-offer period protects buyers and sellers equally. It gives buyers time for due diligence and sellers confidence in the offer they receive.

A cooling-off period brings more uncertainty into real estate transactions. Buyers may make unserious offers on multiple properties just to have options.

A pre-offer period recognizes sellers are often buyers in another transaction and need to know they’re getting a serious offer.

A cooling-off period could raise prices, with buyers making offers on more than one property, knowing they can walk away. A 10% increase in offers could increase list prices by 2-3% A pre-offer period supports consumer choice, informed decision making and more transparency in real estate transactions.

bcrea.bc.ca/betterwayhome

To learn more about the BCREA’s recommendations and white paper, visit bcrea.bc.ca.

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

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REAL ESTATE

BMO: War catches Canadian housing in “crossfire”

Y

by Carlito Pablo

ou may be wondering how the war between Russia and NATObacked Ukraine is going to affect the housing market in Canada.

BMO Economics has this covered.

Sal Guatieri, a senior economist and director at BMO Capital Markets, looked at the issue and released an analysis titled “Canadian Housing: Caught in the Crossfire”.

The short take is that the war is not good for Canadian real estate—that is, if you’re the sort who’s hoping that the market will get even hotter than it is.

Guatieri wrote in his March 4 paper that the “war is unlikely to echo previous crises that only ended up juicing the market”.

He cited the 2014 oil-price crash and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. In both situations, the BMO economist recalled that the crises “led to rate cuts that stoked the 2016 and current mania”.

“As things stand, the conflict is expected to raise more concern about inflation than growth, heightening risks to the rate outlook,” Guatieri noted.

In simple terms, if there had been any chance that the Bank of Canada would slow down its anticipated 2022-to-2023 series of increases in its interest-setting rates that will make mortgages more expensive, that possibility has likely evaporated.

“The Bank of Canada doesn’t see the war as an obstacle to tightening, as it pulled the trigger this week, and it plans to hold tight to the normalization path for the year,” Guatieri stated.

The BMO economist was referring to the March 2 announcement by the central bank of a 0.25 percent increase, hiking its rate to 0.5 percent.

To explain, raising the interest rate is a way of reining in inflation or the growth in prices of goods and services.

Inflation in Canada stood at 5.1 percent in January, which is way higher than the Bank of Canada’s target of two percent.

In its March 2 rate announcement, the central bank stated that the conflict in Ukraine is “putting further upward pressure on prices for both energy and foodrelated commodities”.

“All told, inflation is now expected to be higher in the near term than projected in January,” the Bank of Canada stated.

For Guatieri, the market is hot enough to begin with. “In fact, it’s hard to see the housing market becoming more feverish than it is now,” the economist wrote.

He noted that “benchmark prices posted record gains (going back to 2005) on both a yearly and monthly basis in January, and prices look to have accelerated again in February based on the latest city reports”.

In the Greater Vancouver market, the benchmark composite price, or

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THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

Russian president Vladimir Putin and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, chatting with one another in happier times (at a 2018 peace forum in Paris). Photo by www.kremlin.ru.

the typical price of all types of homes combined, increased to $1,313,400 in February 2022. This represents a 20.7 percent increase over February 2021 and 4.6 percent more than January 2022.

In January 2022, the benchmark composite price in Greater Vancouver was $1,255,200. This price marks an 18.5 percent increase over January 2021 and a two percent addition to December 2021.

Moreover, Guatieri noted that the February 2022 increase in Greater Vancouver is “pedestrian compared with Toronto”.

In Toronto, the price soared 35.9 percent year-over-year in February.

“To put the latter figure in perspective, in a balanced market, house prices would normally rise more or less alongside family income—which rarely grows 4.5% in an entire year let alone a single month,”

T enants’ RIGHTS EXPLAINED

of upholding human rights,” Track said in the webinar, which was hosted by the South Vancouver Seniors Network.

d A VANCOUVER lawyer says that a human-rights complaint can proceed against a landlord at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal even if there was no intention to discriminate. Laura Track (above), director of the Community Legal Assistance Society’s human rights clinic, pointed out in a March 3 webinar that housing and community spaces must be available equally to everyone, except in rare circumstances, such as when a building is reserved for people with disabilities or for those 55 years of age and older.

“Remembering that discrimination can be unintentional is a really important part

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

The B.C. Human Rights Clinic provides free information by phone on weekdays and free 30-minute appointments with lawyers on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Track explained that the B.C. Human Rights Code applies in three main areas: jobs, tenancies, and access to services delivered to the public in B.C., apart from those under federal jurisdiction. She noted, however, that the condition and maintenance of buildings are the purview of the Residential Tenancy Branch and not the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

The South Vancouver Seniors Network is seeking stories and testimonies from older tenants who have experienced abuse, neglect, or conflict in connection with their rental accommodation. Emails can be sent to SouthVancouverSeniorsNetwork@svsn. ca until March 25 at noon. g

by Charlie Smith

Guatieri wrote.

It was on February 24 that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

While rising interest rates may slow down transactions in big markets like Greater Vancouver and Toronto, the BMO economist suggested that some regional markets may “come out ahead even in a rising interest rate climate”.

These are the “energy and commodity producing provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador”.

“Not only have they largely avoided the pandemic explosion in house prices, and thus remain highly affordable and likely to withstand higher rates, they stand to benefit from the soaring price of oil, natural gas, wheat, and potash,” Guatieri stated.

He cited Calgary as an example, where home resales “hit a record high for the month of February, and benchmark prices blasted nearly 6% higher in the month and 16.1% in the past year”.

With interest rates starting to rise amid the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, Guatieri suggested that Canada’s housing market “now faces its biggest test” in recent years.

“Investors, now the fastest growing share of buyers, will be the first to back off,” the economist wrote.

Meanwhile, elevated housing prices will continue to pose affordability problems.

“Many potential buyers will have little choice but to rent as ownership becomes an ever-distant dream,” Guatieri stated.

The Bank of Canada is scheduled to make its next announcement about its interest-setting rate on April 13, 2022.

Guatieri wrote that while central bank governor Tiff Macklem has said that the “uncertainty caused by the war warrants a ‘careful’ approach, any caution will be sorely tested if inflation pushes further beyond three-decade highs”.

“By further snarling global supply chains and sending many commodity prices to multi-year highs (oil and wheat at 13-year peaks and aluminum at all-time highs), the war is an unwelcome guest at the inflation table,” the BMO economist stated.

“The Governor isn’t ruling out the possibility of launching a 50-bp missile if needed,” Guatieri added, referring to the likelihood of a 0.5 percent rate increase on the immediate horizon.

But like any good economist, Guatieri provided a second scenario for such a complex situation as the war in Europe.

“If the conflict escalates and ultimately depresses confidence and financial conditions further, the hit to the economy could dominate concerns about inflation, spurring a slower tightening cadence,” Guatieri qualified. g

ARTS

The Imitation Game brings AI to life at the VAG

A

by Steve Newton

An in-depth exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery examines the development of AI (artificial intelligence). Pictured above: artist Sougwen Chung’s “Omnia per Omnia”, 2018, HD video (still).

software. It was the beginning of COVID when we started to design this, so we actually wanted a no-touch interactive. So, really, the idea was to say, ‘Okay, this is the very entrance to the exhibition—and artificial intelligence, this is something I’ve heard about but I’m not really sure how it’s utilized in ways. But maybe I know something about architecture; maybe I know something about video games; maybe I know something about the history of film.’

“So you point to these…categories of visual culture: video games, architecture, fashion design, graphic design, industrial design, urban design. So you point to one of those, and you might point to film, and then when you point at it, that opens up into five different examples of what’s in the show. So it could be 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Blade Runner, or World on a Wire.”

After the exhibition’s introduction— which Grenville equates to “opening the door to your curiosity” about artificial intelligence—visitors encounter one of its main categories, Objects of Wonder, which speaks to the history of AI and the critical advances the technology has made over the years.

“So there are 20 Objects of Wonder,” Grenville explains, “which go from 1949 to 2022, and they kind of plot out the history of artificial intelligence over that period of time, focusing on a specific object. Like [mathematician and philosopher] Norbert Wiener made this cybernetic creature, he called it a ‘Moth’, in 1949. So there’s a section that looks at this idea of kind of using animals—well, machine animals—and thinking about cybernetics, this idea of communication as feedback, early thinking around neuroscience and how neuroscience starts to imagine this idea of a thinking machine.

“So that’s one of the early ones. Alan Turing’s [“Computing Machinery and Intelligence”] text, that’s another Object of Wonder. That idea of an ‘imitation game’ comes from Turing, as does the whole idea of computational thinking. So there’s a

wide variety of instances of it, but those are the 20 Objects of Wonder, all the way through to emotion recognition—we have another interactive thing where people can sort of explore the way that emotion-recognition software has been utilized today in different contexts.”

While the stated goal of The Imitation Game is to survey the extraordinary uses of artificial intelligence in the production of modern and contemporary visual culture around the world, the exhibition also looks at the abuses inherent in AI, including racial bias.

“It’s interesting,” Grenville ponders, “artificial intelligence is virtually unregulated. You know, if you think about the regulatory bodies that govern TV or radio or all the types of telecommunications, there’s no equivalent for artificial intelligence, which really doesn’t make any sense. And so what happens is, sometimes with the best intentions—sometimes not with the best intentions—choices are made about how artificial intelligence develops.

So one of the big ones is facial-recognition software and any body-detection software that’s being utilized.

“And what happens is that sometimes the decisions that are being made about, like, ‘How do you test this? What’s a face look like? How does that face get mapped?’, these sorts of things are based on both intentional and unintentional biases. And so what became very clear even shortly after facial-recognition software became very present was there were massive questions around privacy. You know, where do these images come from? These are some of the complications of artificial intelligence.

Like, if you’re training a data set to recognize a human face, how is it being trained?

What is the database that it’s being trained on? If it doesn’t accurately identify persons of colour, why is that happening?”

One of the more intriguing—and potentially terrifying—aspects of the AI universe are “deepfakes”, which use techniques

from machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate visual and audio content primed to deceive. Take, for example, the panic that could ensue, especially today, if some bad actor created a perfectly believable deepfake of Vladimir Putin proclaiming that he’s just sent nuclear missiles to Manhattan.

That prospect doesn’t bother Grenville much, though.

“What’s scary about it?” he asks. “Do you think people would make decisions based on somebody releasing a video that says that we’re sending atomic bombs your way?

I think a deepfake is one of those things that we imagine could be something horrible but it’s really more about, like, scarymonster stuff rather than based in fact.

“I think bias is a much more frightening issue than deepfakes,” he adds. “Racial bias in artificial intelligence is a big problem, and unless that’s addressed, we’ve got serious problems. You know, a deepfake of Putin, I don’t think that’s gonna be an issue.” g The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence runs until October 23 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

March 9-12, 2022 | 8pm

Scotiabank Dance Centre Info and tickets: thedancecentre.ca Presented with Photo: Stéphanie Paillet

rtificial intelligence gets taken for granted a lot these days.

Every time you Google something or check out the recommended videos on YouTube, you’ve got your snout firmly entrenched in the AI trough. And then there’s your brainiac buddies Siri and Alexa.

“Hey Alexa, what’s the best way to learn about artificial intelligence these days?”

While we’re waiting for Amazon’s trusty virtual assistant to reply, may I suggest The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery that examines the development of AI, from the 1950s to the present, through a historical lens.

Cocurated by VAG senior curator Bruce Grenville and computer-animation and video-game pioneer Glenn Entis, the indepth exhibition has been three years in the making.

“It came out of a conversation we were having about the incredible presence that was given over to deep learning and machine learning in a lot of the animation field,” Grenville explains on the phone from the gallery. “There was an extraordinary amount of energy and research going into thinking about the uses of artificial intelligence and how it would impact animation, but also video games and the way that they can be produced.

“And one of our streams of activity here at the gallery is to look at the way that film and video, architecture, fashion, graphic design, industrial design, and urban design are all part of a large visual culture that we kind of move through and encounter slightly differently, maybe, or as an extension of some of the ways that we do with visual art. So it’s an opportunity to kind of take on a subject area that we could look at it in a kind of more expansive way and track how it’s sort of really very present in all of our lives. That was kind of the starting point for it.”

The Imitation Game looks at the work of a number of artists, designers, and architects. It features two major artworks

by Sougwen Chung and Scott Eaton, as well as works by *airegan, Stafford Beer, BIG, Ben Bogart, Gui Bonsiepe, Muriel Cooper, DeepDream, Stephanie Dinkins, Epic Games, Amber Frid-Jimenez, Neri Oxman, Patrick Pennefather, and WETA. The exhibition kicks off with an interactive introduction inviting visitors to actively identify diverse areas of cultural production influenced by AI. “That was actually one of the pieces that we produced in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Media,” Grenville notes, “so we worked with some graduate-student teams that had actually helped us to design that

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

GLOBAL DANCE CONNECTIONS SERIES

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

13

ARTS

Search Party’s Bunny upends traditional love story

W

by Charlie Smith

hen veteran Vancouver director Mindy Parfitt chooses her next theatre production, her mind immediately goes to the visuals. The founder of the Search Party says that when she sees a script, certain images pop into her head. And so it went with her newest work, Bunny, a story by award-winning Ontario playwright Hannah Moscovitch about a highly literate woman who awakens to her own desires.

“When I read this play, I felt like there was something really interesting we could do with this piece visually in the design element,” Parfitt tells the Straight over Zoom just before a rehearsal. ”And I think that’s obviously an important part of what the Search Party is bringing to the table: a really strong cohesion between design and text. And I felt like this piece really spoke to me in respect to that cohesion.”

With set design by Amir Ofek, lighting by Itai Erdal, and costumes by Jessica Oostergo, the show reunites key parts of the team behind the Search Party’s first production, The Father, which won six Jessie Richardson Awards in 2020.

Alessandro Juliani provides Bunny’s sound design and composition.

“When I start working with the set designer, especially with Amir, we usually start with an image,” Parfitt explains.

“We’ll have a conversation. Then he’ll usually bring forward an image that he feels resonates with what we’ve been talking about.”

In the case of Bunny, it began with a very still lake in the morning, with a little mist and a dock. To Parfitt, it was very evocative of what Bunny was truly about, conveying a sense of expansiveness, reflection, and space.

In the play, lead character Sorrel, played

by Emma Slipp, contemplates how her life has unfolded.

“So when she reflects back, we find her in many different locations,” Parfitt reveals. “So we wanted to create a space that allowed for and was adaptable to that.”

Parfitt then starts snapping her fingers as she points out that Bunny has a certain rhythm—these transitions had to be made fairly quickly.

“That determines what you can and cannot do,” she adds. see next page

Emma Slipp (above) says that even though her title character has many vulnerable and intimate moments in Bunny, Hannah Moscovitch’s script is also exceedingly funny. Photo by Emily Cooper.

NOW ON VIEW | BOOK TICKETS AT VANARTGALLERY.BC.CA With Generous Support by:

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The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery y and curated by Bruc uce e Gren Grenvill ville e, Senio eniorr Cur Curator ator and Gle Glenn nn En Entis, Gue Guest st C Cur urator ator Image: Scott Eaton, Entangled II, 2019, 4k video (still), Courtesy of the Artist

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MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

This production does something daring: Moscovitch flips what’s normally a male story to a female story.

“In most love stories, a man is pursuing a woman who is hesitating,” the playwright states in a quote on the Search Party website. “In that structure, the man is the protagonist and the woman is the antagonist.

We have two thousand years of that. Bunny is a whole rewriting of the structure.”

Slipp, who is also on the Zoom call with Parfitt, doesn’t want to give away much about the piece, except to say that there is “some real intimacy involved”.

She also spoke about the “raw vulnerability” of her character.

“It feels really exciting to have the permission to talk about the things that this play brings up,” Slipp volunteers.

She also acknowledges that Bunny includes material that isn’t usually explored in theatre from a female perspective, which she finds liberating. Although Sorrel’s character had a childhood that was “eerily similar” to her own, there are also huge differences in their personalities.

“I definitely have some experiences that I can draw on [from theatre], but I have never had a role like this before,” Slipp adds. “It’s huge. It’s my Hamlet.”

MAR

12/13

Steven Page with the VSO Sat, 8pm | Orpheum Sun, 7pm | Orpheum

THIS WEEKEND! Acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter Steven Page returns to the VSO for a heartfelt performance of his solo works as well as iconic hits from his Barenaked Ladies days, as only he can sing them.

Steven Page

Hear it. Feel it.

Mindy Parfitt says that the Search Party brings a strong cohesion between design and text.

MAR

18/19

Rocketman Live in Concert Fri & Sat, 8pm | Orpheum

The critically acclaimed film Rocketman charts the legendary life and music of Elton John. See award-winning actor Taron Egerton take on the lead role, singing his way through Elton’s success with hits such as Your Song, Tiny Dancer, I’m Still Standing and many more. The VSO plays the score live!

I definitely have some experiences that I can draw on [from theatre], but I have never had a role like this before.

– Emma Slipp Taron Egerton as Elton John

Rocketman contains some mature themes and situations.

Parental discretion is advised.

PRESENTATION ©2019 Paramount Pictures LICENSED BY

The Magic Toyshop Both Parfitt and Slipp emphasize that Moscovitch includes some really funny moments in Bunny.

“She’s quite brilliant at making the hard stuff palatable with the soft stuff,” Slipp says.

The script for Bunny resonated with Parfitt because it entails a female protagonist asking important, poignant questions about what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a sexual woman.

“If a woman likes sex, then she’s labelled.

It’s a negative connotation,” Parfitt says.

“But if a man likes sex, that’s just how men are. I think that’s really deeply embedded in our society.”

She appreciates how Moscovitch is able to bring this contradiction to light in a “very generous, funny, accessible way”.

“I don’t think it feels confrontational,” the director says. “It allows the audience to have that conversation and it invites the conversation.”

At that point, Slipp jumps in to say that in the case of her character, there’s an “internalized shame”.

“It’s her own feelings toward her sexuality,” the actor states. “And the shame she’s putting on herself is not necessarily being inflicted by the world. But it’s something

that we are inflicting on ourselves as women in our culture still to this day.”

Parfitt admits that she’s not sure why this is the case but wonders if it’s because women have been seen as “lesser”, historically. According to her, people have become accustomed to hearing the male perspective.

“If you keep being told a specific narrative, then that’s the narrative that becomes commonplace,” she says.

The first showing of the play comes nine days after International Women’s Day, which fell on Tuesday (March 8). Parfitt says this wasn’t planned in advance, that it only happened because those were the dates offered by the Cultch as part of its annual Femme Festival. Nonetheless, Parfitt cherishes what Bunny has to say about the camaraderie of women—something that’s clearly on display during her interview with Slipp.

“I really love the female friendship that the piece has embedded in it,” Parfitt says.

“I think it’s a really lovely part of the play that I gravitated to.” g

MAR

Thu, 2pm | Orpheum

24

Christopher Gaze

This delightful ballet score by Ottorino Respighi was inspired by a set of Rossini piano pieces. Discover a charming and near “perfect” set of dances and tunes made famous by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

The Celtic Tenors MAR

Fri & Sat, 8pm | Orpheum

25/26

The Celtic Tenors

The only tenor group with a truly global audience, The Celtic Tenors will give you a night to remember with beautiful Celtic songs, exhilarating classics, a capellas and popular contemporary songs.

VancouverSymphony.ca MAR 12, 13 & 25, 26 VSO POPS SERIES SPONSOR

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Concert programs are subject to change at any time.

The Cultch is presenting the Search Party’s Bunny at the Vancity Culture Lab from March 17 to 27).

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

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MOVIES

The Batman offers human-scale take on superhero

by Norman Wilner

MOVIE REVIEW THE BATMAN

Starring Robert Pattinson

d HOW DO YOU reintroduce a character who defined and dominated superhero movie culture for more than 30 years?

You do it by wiping the slate clean—yes, again—and going back to first principles, with a movie that remembers the Batman started out as nothing more than a brilliant detective with unlimited resources and an extraordinary tolerance for pain.

What would that look like now? Who would that person be? Here’s the answer: he’s a mess, but he’s Gotham’s only hope.

Directed and cowritten by Matt Reeves, whose impeccable genre credits include Cloverfield, Let Me In, and the two good Planet of the Apes movies, The Batman offers the most human-scaled take on the character to date, trading the polish and scale of Christopher Nolan’s films for a grimy, grotty palette of smeared reds and thick blacks, where Robert Pattinson’s costumed vigilante—who’s been operating for about two years, long enough that some

Robert Pattinson solves riddles as Batman, who encounters a cast of familiar villains that comes to life in Greig Fraser’s muddy cinematography. Photo by Jonathan Olley/DC Comics.

cops know it’s better to have him on their side—fights an endless battle to keep the citizens of Gotham safe from corruption, exploitation, and villainy.

Reeves and Pattinson find a sympathetic take on Bruce Wayne: he’s almost a nonentity, still living in his childhood trauma and only comfortable around people when wearing literal armour—while Jeffrey Wright and Andy Serkis balance out his intensity as Jim Gordon and Alfred, respectively. (In a very clever touch, both actors hit the same

supportive, compassionate notes, instantly showing us why Bruce trusts them.)

As for the villains, there’s plenty to choose from, and once again they’re all introduced as people who are already doing their thing in Gotham; this might be the first superhero movie without a single origin story, and I really appreciated it. No, we don’t even see Bruce’s parents shot dead in that alley; Reeves knows his movie is running long as it is.

Paul Dano trades the stock caricature of

U kraine ON-SCREEN

Sergei Loznitsa’s 2014 doc Maïdan screens at Vancity Theatre at the end of the month.

d AN EVENT in support of humanitarian efforts in war-ravaged Ukraine is set for March 30 at the Vancity Theatre.

YVR Screen Scene For Ukraine will feature a screening of Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s 2014 documentary Maïdan—about the civil uprising against the regime of president Viktor Yanukovych that took place in Kyiv in the winter of 2013-2014—a postscreening reception, and a performance by bandura musician Ruta Yawney.

The evening will be cohosted by podcaster Sabrina Rani Furminger and Ukrainian Canadian actor Adrian Petriw, with all proceeds from ticket sales going to the Ukraine Humanitarian

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the Riddler for a seething, sociopathic energy that becomes part of the film’s shadowy texture, and Zoë Kravitz gives Catwoman an unpredictability and impatience that’s downright feline. Peter Sarsgaard, John Turturro, and an unrecognizable Colin Farrell turn up in key roles, all avoiding cartoonishness for more grounded sketches of depraved scumbaggery that feel right at home in Greig Fraser’s muddy cinematography.

At my IMAX screening, the darkness felt almost blocky, like video noise. It was clearly deliberate, a throwback to early DV moviemaking of the late ’90s and early 2000s, and I’m very curious to see how it plays with an audience used to the clean lines and flat lighting of most modern blockbusters. Michael Giacchino’s minimalist score—built on a simple piano motif that occasionally explodes into operatic fugues—is similarly uncharacteristic for this sort of picture, separating it from the pack in interesting aesthetic ways.

But what really distinguishes The Batman from previous Bat movies is the way Reeves’s vision makes room for both Bruce Wayne and Batman to grow: this is a movie about a nightmare who is learning how to be a hero. g

Appeal established by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the CanadaUkraine Foundation.

“Since Russia’s barbarous and unprovoked aggression began, the world has witnessed the spirit, grit, love, and fearlessness of the Ukrainian people,” Petriw says in a news release.

“They are persevering, taking the fight to a madman who expected a nation to kneel…But they are human beings, and they are facing a humanitarian disaster.

“Over a million people became refugees in the first week of the war,” Petriw adds, “and countless more are displaced within Ukraine. Those who can’t leave, or won’t, lack basic supplies as they face constant bombardment. They need our help, and I can’t sleep knowing there’s more we could be doing.”

Also part of the event is an online auction running from March 21 to April 4 that will feature memorabilia, autographed collectibles, and filmmaking services donated by members of Vancouver’s film and television community.

Tickets for YVR Screen Scene for Ukraine are priced at $25 and you can find them at www.eventbrite. ca/e/yvr-screen-scene-for-ukrainetickets-291027339607. g

by Steve Newton

MUSIC / SAVAGE LOVE

West is becoming more than an attention whore

A

by Mike Usinger

t what point does one go from being a wholly unrepentant attention whore to a misogynistic, petty, deluded psychopath?

Asking this, by the way, not for a friend, but for the man who, depending on the day, answers to Kanye West, Yeezy, Ye, or, lately, the Former Mrs. Kim Kardashian-West.

It’s the latter name that the 44-year-old rapper and mentally unwell human being seems fixated on right now. Along, that is, with a certain Pete Davidson, who is right now dating the woman who is in the process of divorcing the man whose bullshit she spent the last decade putting up with.

Including the afternoon the whole world was laughing at him in real time during a White House visit to Donald Trump.

West seems weirdly unable to process that Kardashian isn’t—and never was— his own personal property. And that, as a 41-year-old woman with a brain that’s possibly the size of her famous ass, she’s allowed to decide who she’s going to shag the living shit out of now that she no longer has to listen to West rail on about the genius of leather jogging shorts while he’s eating his Fruit Loops for breakfast.

America’s most famous sneaker salesman, meanwhile, can’t seem to get over the fact that Davidson is the one now laying in bed next to the woman he once thought he owned. And, even worse, West continues to be an unrepentant bitch about it.

Kanye West’s “Eazy” video has Pete Davidson playing the role of a human rose garden.

The latest example is a spirited defence of his new video, “Eazy”, in which he buries a Davidson doppleganger (as reimagined by Robot Chicken) up to his neck, and then plants a bunch or roses around him.

Some of those roses then end up sprouting from the Saturday Night Live cast member’s head, and because flowers don’t tend to grow out of the noggins of the living....

Quite rightly, the world has suggested that West is entirely out of line with “Eazy”.

A normal person doesn’t want to kill anyone who dates their ex-.

The key word there is “normal”. Predictably, West has responded with an Instagram post that makes it clear that he doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks.

Which is why he made not only Donda, but then chose to follow it up with Donda 2.

Working that return button like an Instagram OG, West posted: Art is therapy just like this view art is protected as freedom of speech art inspires and simplifies the world Art is not a proxy for any ill or harm Any suggestion otherwise about my art is false and mal intended He didn’t specifically reference “Eazy”.

But given his track record with the Davidson-Kardashian relationship, he didn’t have to.

Recall the song “Security” where he raps “Never stand between a man and his kids/ Y’all ain’t got enough security for this.” Or “City of Gods” and the lines “‘Cause I’m losing my lover to the arms of another” and “This afternoon, a hundred goons pullin’ up to SNL (what?)/When I pull up, it’s dead on arrival.”

It hasn’t stopped there.

Earlier this year West got busy with Photoshop to create his own Instagram version of the post for Marvel’s Captain Amer-

ica: Civil War. Instead of Steve Rodgers and Tony Stark, West and Davidson were at the top of the poster with their “armies” below them. For those keeping score, Drake was 1st lieutenant on the Ye side, with Kardashian front and centre on Team Pete.

West’s bad case of limerence also made headlines last month when he reportedly offered to double the salary of Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che if he committed to having nothing to do with Davidson on the show.

Past West posts have also seen him post photos of Davidson with things like “look at this dickhead”.

Seriously, man, it’s fucking over. So stop burying Pete Davidson, stop interfering in the personal life of Kim Kardashian, and stop making the world think you’re even more bat-shit crazy than you already seem.

Not to mention obsessive.

Kardashian isn’t “your” ex-wife—you never owned her.

She’s a grown woman that grew tired of you and your endless bullshit and now wants nothing to do with you. And who can blame her. Except, evidently, Kanye West, who’s one step away from getting his official bunny boiler badge.

There’s nothing wrong with being an attention whore. Or pop music’s biggest clown. Somewhere along the line, West has become something more and it’s scary.

Even if your name isn’t Pete Davidson. g

Self-pleasure after personal loss may cause woe

by Dan Savage

b I LOST MY lover unexpectedly last weekend. He was a longtime friend and periodic hook-up, and things were finally starting to turn as serious as I’d always secretly wanted them to be. I’m writing because I don’t know what to do with my desire for him, because that certainly didn’t die with him. He’s the only person I’ve been with in the past year and a half, and rereading our old sexts and thinking about the last time we were together has been turning me on.

But I feel all sorts of torn up about masturbating to the thought of him.

I want to do it, but I haven’t. We had a trip planned at the end of March that I am still planning on taking, where he was telling me we were going to fall in love. We had been talking (he was on the other side of the country) and video sexting about all the things we were going to do to each other, and I was looking forward to having the best sex of my life with him (we really connected in bed) while on a tropical island.

Now I will be going alone. Is it healthy for me to masturbate about him? I mean, I know he’d love the thought, but it also makes me

Dan says go ahead: rub one out if it comforts you. Photo by Getty/Marjan Apostolovic.

feel so devastatingly sad. Thoughts?

- Too Heartbroken For Witty Acronyms

importantly, THFWA, I’m so sorry for your loss—the loss of your friend and lover, and the loss of the future you might have had with him. My heart goes out to you.

As for your specific question…

Back in my younger days, when I first

First and most

started writing this column, I advised people against masturbating about the dead. Being a gay man who came out just as the AIDS crisis was starting, I would go on to lose friends and boyfriends during that pandemic, including the first man I ever truly loved. Looking back, I gave the advice I did—don’t masturbate about the dead—not because it was good advice for everyone, THFWA, but because sex was so closely associated with death for me that I personally couldn’t bear the thought of doing anything that would make that association any stronger.

When I was in my 20s and early 30s, I could only masturbate about things that were still possible in the future I hoped to have, not about the people and possibilities I’d already lost.

So, as alive as my desire still was for my first true love, I couldn’t fantasize about my time with him. It made me feel his loss too deeply at a time when I knew more loss was coming my way, and soon. And maybe it was easier for me to avoid masturbating about him, seeing as I only had my mem-

ories of him and not a smartphone full of sext messages and dirty videos.

Anyway, THFWA, what I wanted to say— and what I can see now—is that we all grieve in our own ways. If the thought of masturbating about your lover gives you a feeling of peace or pleasure or makes you feel connected to him—if reading those sexts messages and watching those videos comfort you more than they grieve you—you should do it. But brace yourself for the very real possibility that you’ll be overwhelmed by feelings of loss after you climax.

While fantasies have the power to lift us out of the moment, our refractory periods have a way of throwing us back down to earth. You’ll rub one out, then you’ll cry it out. And if that’s what you need, if that makes you feel better, if that helps you feel his presence and not just his loss… There’s more than one way someone’s memory can be a blessing. b I’M A 22-YEAR-OLD straight man. My problem is simple but hard to solve: how do

MARCH 10 – 17 / 2022

see next page

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

17

- Libido Is Brimming, Intense Desires Obsess

Even the hottest people—and by “the hottest people”, I mean “the most conventionally attractive people” (and it needs to be

said that not all conventionally attractive people are hot and not all hot people are conventionally attractive)—don’t get everything they want. Some don’t know how to ask for what they want; some are too paralyzed by shame to ask for it; and some are so out of touch with their own desires that they don’t even know what they want.

So you shouldn’t look at the conventionally attractive and assume their sex lives are better than yours, LIBIDO—which, to be honest, sounds pretty good.

Instead of dumping the girlfriend you’ve got because she doesn’t want to open your relationship, LIBIDO, I would encourage you to live in hope. She may not be interested in opening the relationship now, but she might be open to the idea at some point down the road. Most couples in open relationships were monogamous to start, sometimes for many years. A time may come when your girlfriend is not just willing to open your relationship (fully or just enough to let you explore some of your kinks with others) but excited about the idea herself. In the meantime, enjoy the sex you’re having, masturbate about the sex you’d like to have, and stop contemplating chemical castration. b I’M A 35-YEAR-OLD gay man who spent most of his life in the closet. I’ve been with very few men, and they were all bad hookups. I’ve grown frustrated with the lack of opportunities to meet people, but lately I feel like I need to just be with someone. But I feel like I can’t trust myself meeting people

on apps anymore, partly due to fear of STIs, partly due to bad experiences, and partly due to my fear of meeting someone who is scary or possessive. It’s gotten to the point where my desire to be with a guy is causing me real suffering. All because I can’t figure out a way to meet someone without risk.

I started talking to one guy on this gay app and our kinks are fairly aligned and everything he’s saying sounds good, but he also seems like maybe he does this a lot. He kept referring to himself as a “pig”, which I found kind of hot but I’m not sure what it implies.

When told that I’d like to have a brief chat before jumping into play, he basically said that he prefers to just “jump right in”.

When I brought up my boundaries, he seemed to respect them but again emphasized that he likes to play with a new partner right away. He lives in another town but is willing to drive to where I live to meet me.

That’s the reason I’m writing you. I need to make a decision here and I can’t. Is it a bad idea to play with a total stranger even if I find the idea hot?

- Suffering Newly Out Guy

The world is on fire.

Let this pig come see you. Meet the pig in a public place. If the pig gives you a bad feeling—not the bad feeling you arrived with, but some other bad feeling—you don’t have to go through with anything. But if the pig seems nice and you have a good feeling, SNOG, then you can invite him back to your place and have some of that kinky sex you wanna have. (And all “pig” means in this

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context is, “This dude likes sex and with the right guy or guys he’ll fucking wallow in it.”)

Why is this pig rushing things? Well, maybe he’s been watching CNN and knows the world is on fire—along with at least one of the nuclear power plants in it—and wants to experience the joy and connection of sex with a man he’s attracted to while he still can. And he’s accepted something you’re gonna need to accept if you ever wanna have the sex you fantasize about: there’s no such thing as risk-free sex.

You can minimize your risk for acquiring an STI by getting on PrEP and using condoms or by avoiding penetration and sticking to kink play and mutual masturbation; you can minimize the risk of meeting someone scary or dangerous by watching out for red flags and trusting your judgment. But at theCompanion end of the day… you gotta take a chance.

And this guy’s willingness to take a chance on you isn’t by itself a red flag, SNOG, as it’s not uncommon for gay men to wanna fuck right away, a.k.a. establishing sexual compatibility before making a huge emotional investment in a potential new sex and/or romantic partner.

I can’t promise you this experience will go any better than your past experiences. I can promise you that you’ll never have a good experience if you aren’t willing to take reasonable risks, SNOG, and this guy seems like a reasonable risk to me. g

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My girlfriend doesn’t want to open the relationship, and I respect that. I honestly love her more than my need to have other sexual experiences. Also, I believe that even if we opened the relationship, I wouldn’t have much opportunity to try other things anyway. Seeing as I can’t have all the experiences I’d like to—and I feel like a whiny cishet baby man typing that—what is the best way to cope with frustration? Can I reduce my sexual desire?

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