After 11 years of bringing you local reporting, the team behind the Vancouver Observer has moved on to Canada's National Observer. You can follow Vancouver culture reporting over there from now on. Thank you for all your support over the years!

Investigations

Kafkaesque citizenship laws bestow rights, and take them away

Navigating the extensive family of Canadian citizenship laws leaves a paper cut that could shred a moose. There is the son, Bill C–37, (male personal pro-noun intentional); the father, 1977...

Minors, lunatics, idiots...and women

The repercussions of gender based discrimination in Canada’s Citizenship Act was under the radar in most circles until the late 2000's, when the United States government declared that Canadians...

Denying the deserving a right to call Canada home

Paul Martin Sr., the father of former Canadian Prime Minster of the same name, minus the suffix, didn’t know he was on a quest for a symbol to represent "the character of Canada", but he found one,...

Fifty-nine years does not make you Canadian. Papers do.

Today we call it identification, but back then it was simply called ‘papers.’ “When I went to draw out my application for my old age pension and they asked me for my papers, I said what papers?”...

Canadian Sandy Burke's fight for Canadian citizenship, health care and Old Age Security

“The problem is that they have sewn the laws so tight that people like Sandy can’t get through,” Pam Murray said of her mother-in-law who waited her turn to speak on the phone. “Sandy does not have a...

Bill C-37 and the bureaucratic nightmare

The Canadian Citizenship Act has been repeatedly amended but never rewritten. On April 17, 2009, when thousands of people are said to have woken up Canadian (though most assumed they were anything...

Canada's bureaucracy still denies citizenship to children of soldiers

"Why can't they see I'm Canadian?" Jackie Scott opened up her father's war record and showed it to a reporter. Scott, 65, spends six months each year in an R.V. park next to the American border in...

Canada's annual seal slaughter just ended. Should there be another?

Another Canadian seal hunt has come to an end.  On June 15th, it was over. Warm weather made hunting conditions dangerous, Nelson Kalil, media spokesperson for Fisheries and Oceans Canada,...

Shout out for BC Mary and other coverage of the BC Rail trial

On May 18, 2010, the BC Rail corruption trial finally began, over six years after police raided the BC Legislature for government corruption in December 28, 2003. Unsurprisingly, this trial has been...

Olympic Art Freeze Silences Creative Critics

The hand of the Olympic brand is long, but is it long enough to change what artists make on the streets?