UBC Journalism 'On The Beat'
Fourteen women were murdered and ten were injured at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal in Montreal. Marc Lépine walked into an engineering class, asked the men to leave, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at the women remaining. Then he shot himself. This happened on the 6th of December, 1989. Twenty-one years later, in 2010, […]
Outside the Ukrainian Hall in Strathcona, a young woman stood on the sidewalk, quietly playing a vaguely Eastern European-sounding tune. But this was no traditional squeezebox concert geared for a polka-loving crowd. Inside the hall, devotees of the accordion gathered on wooden chairs. Dreadlocked punks with painted faces sat next to young hipsters and middle-aged […]
On Thursday, a small group of parents, educators and community leaders gathered in Strathcona community centre for a meeting about school closures in East Vancouver. The driving rain likely kept many at home, but those that did show up to the small room on the community centre’s ground floor spoke passionately about keeping schools like […]
Steel fences and barbed wire surround the squat warehouses and buildings on Industrial avenue. Distant sounds of metal clanging, loads dropping and radios droning filled the air. At the CN railway yard, a single truck was fork-lifting rusty containers from one spot to another. Eric Jorgens, a visiting manager at the yard pointed to six […]
Andrea Potter stood in front of a row of gleaming jars filled with small green cucumbers. She used her fingers to push down the cucumbers as she poured salty water over them. Elsewhere on the table, a tall beige pot held freshly shredded cabbage and apple, a mixture that will become sauerkraut after a few […]
“Hey girlfriend!” said Michael Harris to a woman seated in the front row. Both laughed, clearly pleased to see each other. Around the room, a similar scene played itself out as new people entered the large gymnasium at Vancouver’s Aboriginal Friendship Centre. Every Wednesday is West Coast night at the centre, with a different First […]
Six giant dumpsters were slumped against the wall, just barely concealing the heaps of garbage that festered beneath them. A broken television was stacked atop some damp furniture and had empty coffee containers perched delicately on top of it. The alleyway was fraught with bits of paper, plastic, and cigarette butts, and reeked of mould […]
Concerned parents and citizens plotted with community leaders and politicians in East Vancouver Thursday on actions to prevent the possible closure of two local schools. The schools are just two of nine in East Vancouver identified by the Vancouver School Board as likely to be shuttered in 2011 to offset an $18 million budget shortfall. […]
The crowd chuckled as Hannah Carpendale delicately held up a drone between her fingertips and continued to explain the social organization of a beehive. Carpendale, 22, was one of the eight youth who, as part of an apprenticeship program with the Environmental Youth Alliance, were taking care of two hives at the Means of Production […]
Blue and red flashing lights, uniformed officers and an explosives detection dog are usually signs that a major incident is happening in East Vancouver. But on Sunday, these were part of the draw to Cops, Kids & Woodland Park, a family-friendly event put on by the Grandview-Woodlands Community Policing Centre. Some East Vancouver communities have […]
