Karin Litzcke

 I am running for office because I think Jenny Kwan needs a new job. Perhaps in the private sector, where she is not spending taxes, but just paying them like the rest of us.

With Jenny Kwan and the NDP in office in East Vancouver for over 7 elections, combined with left leaning city councils for so long, it is time to change strategies for the good of the area and its people.

We are a divided population that needs to unite around a common vision of lower taxes, better city. No more chaos on the streets.

The provincial NDP caused the chaos to spiral out of control by closing Riverview with no alternative plan for people who truly cannot be safely independent. The solution starts with solutions for those people, and those solutions are not to leave them on the downtown eastside.

And we need to talk about the mental health of young people as they grow up.

I have lived in East Vancouver for over 25 years and I was an involved parent in local schools. I always stood for lower taxes, better teaching, more respect for parents. Jenny Kwan instead supported higher taxes, worse teaching, because she always sided with the teachers’ union against the parents, against kids. 

At one public meeting, I stood up to talk about better teaching, not more funding, and nearly 1000 union people stood up and shouted me down. Jenny Kwan stood with them, shaking her finger at me and yelling. But I was saying what many families, including Chinese families, told me they want. 

I later went to court, self-representing, against the teachers’ union to support parent and family rights

At an all-candidates' meeting held by LOCO and the Strathcona BIA on Monday, October 7th, a question came from the CEO of the Culture Crawl asking what the parties would do to support studio space for artists (paraphrasing here). 

I didn't get the mike for that question, but it's an important one. It's important because there is a fine line between government supporting the arts, and government controlling the arts.

Government should never control what art gets made. 

It's my position on housing (see below) that federal housing dollars should not necessarily flow into the city; that the city needs to do a far better job of handling its real estate markets, and it is not for taxpayers in the rest of Canada to bail Vancouver out of its self-imposed luxury-housing-as-a-commodity trap. We wouldn't bail Moncton out of a similar problem, and they shouldn't have to help us.

And I would extend that to studio space. The arts need to be creative (see what I did there??) about funding while protecting artistic freedom. If taxpayers are paying for it to be made, it's not art, it's a public service. 

From time to time, the government should buy art. The government should commission art. The government can give art vouchers (credit an old associate for that idea). But direct funding of art is a slippery slope that should probably not be embarked on.

I have a long term interest in art marketing, and am an enthusiastic consumer of local art. I live in the community of the Culture Crawl and have attended it since its inception. I see what artists and art organizations need to learn to stay at the cutting edge. 

Government funding is a buffer that dulls the sharp mindset that artists need to have.

The Green Party is all in for "renewable energy." Well, the wind and sun are renewable, but the physical infrastructure to turn them into electricity isn't: solar panels last maybe 25 yrs max, turbines even less. Both use copious quantities of rare earth metals, and these metals come overwhelmingly from China. 

Therefore, a change from fossil fuels, including natural gas, to full electrification will make us fully dependent on China for energy. Being fully dependent on electricity for everything in our homes and offices - heat, light, cooking, refrigeration, communication - is bad enough. When the power goes out, having some gas appliances at least leaves us with hot water, cooking, and heat.

Meanwhile, if China wants our gas, it will find a way to get it, including with political or economic initiatives.

We need to develop our gas resources, including building pipelines, for geopolitical reasons among others. We have the highest environmental standards in the world and can build them best.

  Jenny Kwan’s project about commemorating the war history between China and Japan is divisive for Canada. What kind of Canada will we have if Japanese and Chinese kids growing up here are being taught to hate each other? This is the wrong message in a new country. 

The NDP is tyrannical and intolerant. The NDP leader Jagmeet Singh wanted our PPC party leader, Maxime Bernier, to be kept out of the leaders debates. He wanted to shut him up.

And you will get shut up if you talk frankly about the DTES. The hidden addiction problem on the DTES is an addiction to government money, and an addiction to easy votes that come from promising miraculous solutions. 

The NDP is an enabler: an enabler of addiction, and enabler of letting chaos grow to argue for more funding, and enabler of cheap identity politics that pretends to care but never cares enough to help people succeed.

Federal attention is required to the international flow of drugs and money, but federal funding should not flow into the DTES where it will just draw more people here. The money needs to go where it will reduce the pressure on this area. People who live here deserve a peaceful orderly life like people who live elsewhere in the city. 

Individual freedom, with personal responsibility, fairness, and respect. These are Maxime Bernier’s principles, and those of the People’s Party of Canada. 

Those principles will help ordinary people to have the conversations that matter in Vancouver East.

Tens of thousands of Canadians have self-represented in courts across the country, and been absolutely hammered by the elite insider culture of law as enabled by a judiciary I won't stop short of calling corrupt.

Tens of thousands of Canadians have been put through hell in family courts, had what could be salvaged of their relationships with each other and their children savaged by profiteering lawyers.

Tens of thousands of Canadians have been through the tribunal system, in which administrative decision makers are given the power of judges with none of the constraints and obligations of judicial independence. With tribunal decisions granted far too much deference by the courts, tribunal-manipulation has become an easy way to shape the law, doing an end run around politics.

Litigation has become so expensive that ordinary people can't litigate in the first place, and can't appeal if they get a bad decision, which they frequently do. The appeals process has failed anyway - parochial appeal courts just sing from the same songsheet as the lower courts.

The judiciary has become activist, and captive to ideology, incapable of real independence.

I am the only federal candidate with a plan for legal system reform. The PPC is the only party that offers a realistic chance of reform being enacted. Here is my proposal: https://ctjester.blogspot.com/2019/10/access-to-justice-legal-aid-federal.html

There is a fabulous article in Quillette about handling problems like Vancouver's Downtown eastside: https://quillette.com/2019/10/08/buying-fentanyl-on-the-streets-of-san-francisco-an-interview-with-heather-macdonald/

This article includes all the reasons why policy-making to date has not led to improvements in the area, but rather continued deterioration and human degradation. 

It is almost irresistible to set policies and create agencies that target "the most vulnerable" people; those on the street, in tents, at the bottom of the totem pole. 

But every time you pluck someone from the bottom of the heap, that is where you create a vacancy in the local culture.  Doing this at scale effectively rewards people who have completely lost civility, and incentivizes other people to degrade themselves similarly.

To effectively intervene in a culture, once certainly needs to look at emergency situations, but one also needs to look away from the loudest situations and at those who are coping pretty well. 

Offering services to people who are succeeding, to allow them to move out of the DTES culture, creates space & incentive for everyone else to push themselves to be better. 

Addicts can't be forced to improve, they can only be incentivized to do so. That reality needs to be integrated into DTES planning & management.

"Today freedom has different enemies. It must be fought for in different ways. It will require different qualities of mind and heart to save it."

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.” 

"The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe. Extremists typically want to squash not only those who disagree with them diametrically, but those who disagree with them at all. It seems to me that in every country where extremists of the left have gotten sufficiently in the saddle to squash the extremists of the right, they have ridden on to squash the center or terrorize it also. And the same goes for extremists of the right. I do not want that to happen in our country."

"It's not hate to defend your rights and it's not hate to speak the truth."

“I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.”

"Outrage is a poison YOU’RE drinking, hoping the other person gets sick."