Perplexity | Raymond Tomlin | Public Intellectual

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Does the guy pictured above look anything like a ‘public intellectual’ to you? Gosh, we don’t think so.

On June 23rd, VanRamblings published a ChatGPT profile of the author of this blog, Raymond Tomlin (that’s me, above).

Last evening, we became aware of Perplexity, the newest large language model artificial intelligence search engine now available on the Internet.

To test it out, we asked the question, “Who is Raymond Tomlin, the Vancouver-based blogger? Tell us a little about him that might be of interest to a reader.”

Here’s what Perplexity Had to Say About This Raymond Tomlin Fella

Raymond Tomlin is a long-standing Vancouver civic commentator, blogger, educator, and former journalist, whose best-known work is the site VanRamblings, a personal, highly opinionated chronicle of local politics and culture in Vancouver.

Mr. Tomlin is best understood not as a conventional beat reporter, but as a deeply engaged participant-observer in the city’s public life, writing for decades about municipal politics, provincial and federal issues, film, music, activism, and the social texture of Vancouver.

In recent years, Mr. Tomlin’s public identity has been tied to his VanRamblings blog, where he is described as the founder, publisher, and principal writer.

The site’s retrospective indicates that Mr. Tomlin has spent more than two decades building a substantial archive of essays on civic affairs and cultural life, positioning himself as an active voice in public debate rather than a detached observer.

The portrait of Mr. Tomlin that emerges is of a Vancouver-based public intellectual in the older civic sense: someone who comments on the city while also participating in its institutions, campaigns, and disputes. Mr. Tomlin is not just a blogger in the casual sense; over its 22-year life span on the Internet, Mr. Tomlin has treated his blog as a long-form civic notebook, and an instrument of local influence.

VanRamblings’ Clear Centre of Gravity: Vancouver Municipal Politics

The strongest evidence to support this contention points to his sustained attention to Vancouver City Council, the Vancouver School Board, and Vancouver’s Board of Park and Recreation — where he has long been a sustained observer (or, as some have said, the conscience) of this unique civic institution — with Mr. Tomlin also displaying a deep interest in housing policy, neighbourhood planning, development across the city and the region, and local governance, while also branching into provincial, federal, and occasional international topics.

All of the above makes VanRamblings distinctly local-first, with civic politics at the core and culture as an important secondary thread.

VanRamblings’ tone is also part of its orientation

Vanramblings is famous — or infamous, as the case may be — for its sometimes controversial editorial orientation, providing always an expansive, passionate, often humorous, and at times hyperbolic (at least in the past) style of writing.

Mr. Tomlin often writes in the third person, which the site frames as a stylistic device for ironic distance. In practice, that means VanRamblings reads less like a neutral news outlet and more like a very personal civic forum, where opinion, memory, reporting, and advocacy are blended together.

According to the records we located regarding Mr. Tomlin’s educational background, in 1975, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology, followed by a Bachelor of Education specializing in Reading and Early Childhood Education, and later a Master of Arts in Policy Administration, all at Simon Fraser University. This academic mix helps to explain the shape of his later work: social analysis, teaching, and policy commentary — all of which sit naturally together in his writing.

Mr. Tomlin’s educational background also suggests why VanRamblings often ranges beyond surface politics.

As someone trained in the social sciences and policy administration, Mr. Tomlin has tended to focus on civic issues in terms of institutions, incentives, and long-term social consequences, rather than only election-by-election tactics.

Before VanRamblings emerged in February 2004, Raymond Tomlin had a varied career in civic activism, union organizing, as a founder of the largest grassroots Canadian food co-operative movement in the 1970s, education and journalism.

Over the years, Mr. Tomlin has worked as a teacher in British Columbia’s public education system — during which time his activism led him to become the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation Learning and Working Conditions Chairperson, representing the north and south Okanagan. Mr. Tomlin also entered the private education system for one year, teaching in a gifted education programme.

Mr. Tomlin has also taught at Vancouver Community College, Langara College, and Simon Fraser University. While working on his Masters degree at SFU, Mr. Tomlin was appointed as the Director of the Education 401/402 programme, the first semester SFU education programme, where students spend the first two months of their year long Professional Development Programme (PDP) as student teachers in various classrooms located across the Metro Vancouver region.

On the journalism side, Mr. Tomlin wrote for a Vancouver wide student newspaper in the 1960s — while enrolled at Templeton Secondary School —  and while attending Simon Fraser University he took on the position as Editor-in-Chief of SFU’s student newspaper, The Peak.

Mr. Tomlin also worked in the summer intern programme at both the Vancouver Sun and The Province, later building a substantial independent publishing practice through his blog. That trajectory helps explain why VanRamblings feels like a hybrid of memoir, commentary, archival record, and commentary newsroom.

VanRamblings is a one-person publication shaped by someone who has been around journalism, but who is not constrained by conventional newsroom style.

Tomlin’s public image is seen by some as polarizing, yet he endures to this day.

While Mr. Tomlin’s critics have found his writing to be overly opinionated, his many supporters and admirers see his independence, personality, and longevity as strengths, in his invaluable work as a persistent chronicler of Vancouver who has kept publishing through changing media conditions, no small achievement in a city where local journalism has contracted significantly.

One of the most striking features of VanRamblings is its continuity.

Raymond — campus radical — and the ever brilliant Cathy, circa summer of 1972

Across decades, Raymond Tomlin has remained focused on the same broad public project: documenting and influencing civic debate in Vancouver. That consistency gives him an outsized presence relative to what a “blogger” label might suggest.

Taken together, the contribution Raymond Tomlin has made to public discourse has made him over the years a Vancouver civic insider-outsider: close enough to politics, education, labour, and journalism to understand how institutions work, yet independent enough to write in his own voice and on his own terms.

VanRamblings’ political orientation is decidedly progressive-civic in the broad sense that it emphasizes local governance, public interest issues, activism, and cultural life.

In a concluding summary: Raymond Tomlin is a veteran Vancouver commentator whose VanRamblings blog remains as an invaluable civic institution.

Over the years, Mr. Tomlin has added much to our understanding of the Vancouver municipal political scene, and our city’s cultural imperative, as reflected in the contribution Mr. Tomlin has made in providing extensive coverage of Vancouver’s thriving dance community — particularly Ballet BC, which institution Mr. Tomlin has long loved — theatre, cinema, Vancouver’s culinary scene, art (including photography), and the vibrant cultural life of the city we all call home.

The Curse of Politics | The Latest Edition

Bill McCreery: The Architect Who Helped Build Vancouver’s Soul

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Bill McCreery, architect, planner, housing advocate and civic reformer working to build Vancouver

Few individuals have left their fingerprints on Vancouver as indelibly as Bill McCreery. Over more than half a century, Bill McCreery has helped shape not only the city’s skyline but also its philosophy of urban living.

Architect, planner, housing advocate, civic reformer, and former Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, he belongs to a remarkable generation that transformed Vancouver from an inward-looking west coast port into one of the world’s most admired livable cities.

His buildings are important. His planning work is even more significant.

While many architects can point to individual towers or neighbourhoods, Bill McCreery’s influence extends across entire communities.

Bill McCreery was among the generation of designers and planners responsible for the creation of North False Creek and South False Creek — projects that fundamentally altered how North America thought about urban housing.

Throughout British Columbia, Alberta and the United Kingdom, Bill’s work contributed to thousands of units of market, public and social housing, always emphasizing the relationship between architecture, people and public space.

Yet, Bill McCreery’s greatest contribution may not be measured in concrete or glass. It lies instead in an enduring belief that cities belong first to their citizens.

Born into an era when Vancouver was still emerging from its provincial adolescence, Bill McCreery entered architecture at a time when modernism promised endless possibilities. The post-war decades were filled with confidence. Governments were building. Universities were expanding. New ideas about planning were replacing nineteenth-century assumptions about cities.

Unlike many architects who concentrated solely on buildings, Bill McCreery quickly became fascinated by the broader civic questions.

How should neighbourhoods function?

  • Who gets to decide what is built?
  • What responsibilities do governments have toward affordable housing?
  • How can density improve rather than diminish community life?

Those questions would define much of Bill’s professional career.

Working on major housing developments in the United Kingdom, and throughout British Columbia and Alberta, Bill McCreery became known as an architect who understood that successful communities required more than attractive buildings.

Streets, parks, schools, public spaces and neighbourhood identity mattered just as much as architectural form. Housing, in his view, was never simply about construction; it was about creating places where families could flourish.

Photo of False Creek, circa 1980, showing False Creek & Ondine’s restaurant, designed by Bill McCreery. The bottom part of the photo shows south False Creek, including the Heather Street marina.

That philosophy reached perhaps its fullest expression in False Creek.

False Creek transformed from an industrial wasteland into a livable, diverse waterfront neighbourhood

Today, North and South False Creek are celebrated internationally.

Mid-rise buildings front generous parks. Walkways connect neighbourhoods to the waterfront. Families, seniors and young professionals share communities that balance density with human scale.

In the early 1970s, however, these ideas were revolutionary.

At a time when many North American cities were demolishing neighbourhoods for expressways and high-rise towers, Vancouver chose another path.

Mixed-income housing, accessible waterfronts, pedestrian-friendly streets and integrated parks became the guiding principles.

Bill McCreery was among the architects and planners who made that vision real.

The result became one of the defining planning achievements of twentieth-century Vancouver, influencing urban design far beyond British Columbia.

His public service unfolded alongside a consequential political transformation.

The Long Watch: Bill McCreery’s Five Decades in Vancouver’s Civic Life

There’s a particular kind of Vancouverite who never quite leaves City Hall, even after the votes are counted and the title expires.

Bill McCreery is one of them.

An architect by training and a civic conscience by temperament, Bill McCreery’s public life stretches from the reformist fever of the early 1970s to the housing fights still playing out in Council chambers today — more than fifty years of showing up, in one capacity or another, to argue about how Vancouver should be built and who should get to decide.

Bill McCreery served as a Vancouver Park Board Commissioner during one of the most remarkable periods in the city’s history.

Bill McCreery’s entry into Vancouver municipal politics first occurred in 1970, when Bill became involved in the freeway debate — a proposal to build a freeway, an extension of Highway 1, through downtown Vancouver, including through the Strathcona and Chinatown neighbourhoods.

Meeting in Bill’s apartment on Beach Avenue, a block away from the Park Board offices, this working group of planning and marine architectural professionals together developed two alternatives to the freeway plan, that included rapid transit and Seabus solutions that would better serve the interests of Vancouverites, while preserving the livability of the city for all citizens.

Elected as part of the reform movement associated with TEAM (The Electors’ Action Movement), he joined an extraordinary collection of civic leaders determined to modernize how Vancouver governed itself. Early in his term, Bill was appointed as the Park Board representative on the False Creek Planning Committee of Council.

That appointment was unique, in that Bill was the only non-Council person in the history of Vancouver who had a vote on a Council committee.

TEAM emerged in opposition to the old Non-Partisan Association establishment that had dominated city politics for decades.

Rather than treating municipal government as merely administrative, TEAM believed City Hall should actively shape the quality of urban life.

Its leaders included Mayor Art Phillips, whose vision of participatory government redefined civic politics, and Dr. Walter Hardwick, the geographer and planner whose intellectual influence remains visible across the city.

Bill McCreery fit naturally within that movement.

A TEAM (The Electors’ Action Movement ) Player

Bill McCreery’s entry into civic office came at Vancouver’s most consequential political inflection point. In 1972, TEAM – The Electors’ Action Movement, a coalition of Liberals, Conservatives, reform-minded professionals and New Democrats — swept the long-governing Non-Partisan Association from power, carrying Art Phillips into the Mayor’s chair, alongside eight TEAM Councillors.

TEAM – The Electors’ Action Movement re-imagining Vancouver as a livable urban paradise

The new administration set about dismantling decades of NPA-era governance almost immediately, firing the city’s powerful commissioner, opening up public hearings, and killing the freeway plan that would have gutted Chinatown and Strathcona. It was, by every account, one of the more sweeping reinventions of municipal government in a Canadian city’s history — anchored by Phillips and by Walter Hardwick, the UBC geography professor who served as TEAM’s intellectual architect and the driving force behind transforming the industrial wasteland of South False Creek into mixed-income housing.

Bill McCreery joined that movement’s governing apparatus as a TEAM-affiliated Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, serving from 1973 to 1974. It was a smaller stage than Council, but not a trivial one — the Park Board has run as its own elected body since the 1880s, with real authority over the city’s parks and recreation system, answerable directly to voters rather than to council or the mayor.

To sit on it during the TEAM years was to be inside the machinery of a government self-consciously remaking how Vancouver made decisions, at the moment the city was deciding whether development or livability would set its priorities.

Bill’s experience as an architect made him aware decisions about parks, neighbourhoods and public land could not be separated from broader planning policy.

The Vancouver Park Board during that era became much more than an agency responsible for lawns and playgrounds.

It became one of the principal guardians of Vancouver’s emerging philosophy that public space should serve everyone.

Together, Art Phillips, Dr. Walter Hardwick, Bill McCreery and their TEAM colleagues fundamentally altered Vancouver’s civic governance.

Their greatest achievement was changing who participated in decision-making.

Prior to TEAM’s arrival, planning decisions often occurred behind closed doors with relatively little public involvement. Developers, bureaucracies and political insiders largely determined the city’s future.

TEAM insisted on something radically different.

  • Neighbourhood consultation became an expectation rather than an exception;
  • Community planning gained legitimacy;
  • Citizen advisory committees became influential;
  • Public hearings assumed greater importance.

The planning process itself became more transparent.

This transformation permanently altered the relationship between City Hall and Vancouver residents.

Instead of viewing citizens as obstacles to development, the new governance model treated them as partners in shaping neighbourhoods.

Bill McCreery: The Architect’s Eye

Bill McCreery, the architect, circa 2006 | Photo credit, Malcolm Parry, the Vancouver Sun.

Bill McCreery brought a working architect’s credentials to that civic role — he held professional registration with both the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) and the Alberta Association of Architects (AAA).

During the course of his career, Bill McCreery has been credited with helping create North and South False Creek and with contributing to thousands of units of developer, public, and social housing across British Columbia, Alberta, and the United Kingdom, alongside several Vancouver residential projects of his own.

Southeast False Creek, once the waterfront particulate smoke spewing ‘heart’ of Vancouver, circa 1950

False Creek South is a body of work that placed him, professionally, inside the same era-defining project — the reclamation of False Creek’s derelict industrial shoreline into one of the templates North American cities would study for a generation — that his political colleagues were shaping through policy.

That philosophy eventually evolved into Vancouver’s celebrated “CityPlan” consultation model and neighbourhood planning processes that attracted international attention decades later.

Mid-rise buildings and parks front the walkways connecting southeast False Creek to the waterfront

Bill McCreery has remained one of the strongest defenders of those principles, arguing public consultation remains essential to successful urban planning.

Bill McCreery’s advocacy has continued long after leaving elected office.

Even in retirement from architectural practice, Bill McCreery has remained one of Vancouver’s most thoughtful voices on housing and urban development.

Bill has frequently argued that planning must balance density with neighbourhood character, insisting that growth should occur through genuine collaboration rather than imposed solutions.

Writing and speaking publicly, he has warned against abandoning the community-based planning traditions established during the 1970s.

In his view, Vancouver’s international reputation rests not simply on beautiful buildings but on decades of patient civic engagement that gave residents a meaningful voice in shaping their communities.

His critiques have never been nostalgic.

Rather, they reflect a conviction formed over decades of professional practice: cities function best when architects, planners, politicians and citizens work together instead of competing for influence.

That belief explains why Bill McCreery has continued participating in debates surrounding housing policy, planning reform and neighbourhood development well into the twenty-first century. He has joined fellow architects, planners and urban thinkers in advocating for approaches that combine increased housing supply with careful urban design and democratic accountability.

Architecture often celebrates individual genius.

Bill McCreery’s career tells a different story.

His work reminds us that cities are collaborative achievements.

Successful neighbourhoods reflect countless conversations between architects, elected officials, planners, engineers, community organizations and residents.

Collaboration became a Vancouver hallmark during its most innovative decades.

Today, visitors admire False Creek, the city’s waterfront neighbourhoods, its network of parks, and its human-scaled urban design without always knowing the names of those responsible.

Bill McCreery is one of those names.

Life After Bill McCreery’s Tenure on The Vancouver Park Board

Bill McCreery’s civic instincts didn’t retire when his term did.

Bill McCreery running for civic office in the 2011 Vancouver municipal election under the NPA banner

Decades later, he re-emerged as a candidate for City Council under the NPA banner — the party TEAM had unseated in 1972, a small irony that says something about how thoroughly the city’s political alignments had scrambled by the 2010s.

Running for Council gave him a public platform to argue “city hall democracy” had suffered under the Vision Vancouver administrations then in power.

Drawing on his own memory of the job — the stack of reports, sometimes a foot high, that landed on a Commissioner’s desk each Friday for study before Monday’s meeting — he made the case that transparency and direct access between citizens, reporters, and city staff had eroded, and that the public was worse informed for it.

That advocacy has continued well past his own campaigns.

Bill McCreery has stood among the coalition of former Park Board commissioners publicly opposing efforts to dissolve Vancouver’s elected park board — a fight rooted in the same principle that shaped his TEAM years: decision-making over civic institutions belongs in the hands of people directly accountable to voters, not folded into the broader authority of City Council or the Mayor’s office.

As recently as February of this year, he was among the signatories of an open letter to Mayor Ken Sim and Council challenging the city’s housing “Villages Plan,” identifying himself in that document as a former registered architect who helped build False Creek — still, after half a century, making his case in writing rather than letting the record speak for itself.

Bill McCreery: A Consistent Thread in Bill’s Civic Life

What runs through Bill McCreery’s public life isn’t a single ideology so much as a recurring instinct: a belief that how a city governs itself — who gets consulted, which bodies hold power, how transparently decisions get made — matters as much as what gets built.

Bill arrived in civic office on the wave of a movement built on that premise, spent a career as an architect inside one of that movement’s landmark projects, and spent the decades since defending the governance structures TEAM left behind.

Few figures in Vancouver’s civic history have stayed at that post for quite so long

Bill belongs to a generation that refused to accept that cities must choose between growth and livability, density and beauty, or development and democracy.

Instead, he helped demonstrate that thoughtful architecture and enlightened governance could reinforce one another.

His buildings continue to house thousands.

His planning principles continue to influence generations of architects.

Bill’s work on the Park Board and alongside Art Phillips, Walter Hardwick and the TEAM reformers helped reshape Vancouver’s civic institutions, embedding public participation into the city’s political culture in ways that continue to define municipal government today.

Few architects can claim to have transformed both a city’s physical landscape and its democratic institutions.

Bill McCreery is one of them.

#VanPoli | The Villages Plan | An Open Letter to Vancouver City Council

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Open letter to Vancouver City Council on the “Villages Plan”
Patrick Condon, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia
UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan

Dear Mayor and Council,

I write to challenge key elements of Vancouver’s Villages Plan Programme.

Together with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City is now granting private owners of more than 80,000 parcels the right to build roughly 700,000 new housing units.

This represents enough capacity to house an extra 1.4 million people — more than double Vancouver’s current population of 670,000.

At today’s 1% annual population growth rate, this single decision delivers over 100 years of future housing supply. Yet even the projects already in the approval pipeline (roughly 78,000 units) would satisfy 30 years of trend growth.

Contrary to this city’s long standing policies for new density approvals, this massive landowner entitlement is being provided free of charge, with no expectation of payment for these new land rights.

These land rights are worth many billions of dollars.

The City is giving them away for free in the hope that this will somehow make housing more affordable.

This is an odd notion for our planners to hold. If adding hundreds of thousands of new units to existing neighbourhoods truly lowered prices, Vancouver would have North America’s cheapest housing.

It has North America’s most expensive housing. (charts below)

It defies logic to expect an “unleashing of the housing market” — the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan — to produce affordable housing when we have spent decades trying to do just that. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock since the 1960s, all within a city where virtually every private parcel was in urban use. This is a higher percentage increase of infill development than that of any other North American centre city. If adding housing to existing city districts was the sure fire path to affordability we would have seen positive results by now.

Based on this evidence, it is clear: if affordability is the main justification for this plan, it obviously fails the test.

Massively over-zoning a city above reasonable expectations for population growth serves little purpose. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that only “restrictive zoning” stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t.

The claim is false.

On the contrary, if any city proves that it is possible to use zoning as a positive public policy tool, it is the City of Vancouver. We tripled housing units city-wide. No other centre city did that — an unheard-of achievement.

While this sadly did not make the city more affordable, as we had hoped, it did make the city better. Much better.

How was this 200 percent growth accomplished? By working with residents, not against them. Community planning with local communities was the means to this achievement. Planning with communities was not an impediment, as some now claim. It was the democratic path to a better city.

But sadly it is now obvious that our decades-long effort to encourage the housing market, in the hope that housing would stay affordable, has failed us. Given this evidence, it seems foolish to upzone so aggressively, hoping against hope that, in 30 or 40 years, housing will be more affordable.

Achieving durable affordability much sooner than this requires a major change in direction. We don’t lack housing; we lack affordable housing. Given this fact, we should follow a path that other similar cities have charted — one where the bulk of new housing built is affordable to average wage earners. This can be done by reviving the Vancouver tradition of building non-market housing at scale, largely financed through “land lift” taxes as applied in Yaletown.

Our own internationally famous False Creek South serves as a storied precedent. Service workers to business owners have found homes in that lovely, self-sustaining community.

The pattern is obvious. Reuse it.

Unfortunately, the Villages Plan moves us in exactly the wrong direction. It virtually rules out any form of land value capture tax, based on the mistaken fear that it would raise home prices. It won’t — and it can’t.

A properly designed land-lift tax simply reduces the inflated “land price residual” that now funnels unearned speculative windfalls into private pockets. A properly designed “land lift” tax channels those gains into public benefit — without increasing the price buyers ultimately pay.

I urge you to revise these plans by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in a highly collaborative, bottom-up, neighbourhood-focused planning process. One that might arrive at much stronger inclusionary zoning requirements.

The people of Vancouver would rally behind such plans — plans that ensure that their sons and daughters, and the workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home.

Do not pass this plan.

Let us turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here.

Yours truly,

Professor Emeritus Patrick M. Condon
University of British Columbia

More voices weigh in on ABC Vancouver’s Villages Plan development proposal

Steve Jedreicich — principal of Vancouver’s SJ Development Ltd., brings over 30 years of local urban planning and real estate consulting experience to the housing discussion —  weighs in on ABC Vancouver’s contentious Villages Plan proposal.

WBN News Vancouver publisher Karalee Greer’s published article on the impact of the Villages Plan development proposal currently before Vancouver City Council, in particular its impact on Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. At present, well more than 1000 speakers are set to address the controversial Villages Plan proposal, in meetings that thus far have lasted well into the night at Council.

Randy Helten and Steve Bohus, the good, hard working, dedicated folks behind the informative CityHallWatch website offer a backgrounder on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal, suggesting the plan “was born in the USA.” CityHallWatch offers six more Villages Plan articles the site published in the months of June and July. Click on the multi-coloured links below to access the articles.

Yes, there are even more Villages Plan articles available to you.

As is his wont — and thank goodness for that — The Daily Hive’s well-respected, incredibly hard working urban affairs reporter Kenneth Chan, early in July, published a thorough and well-researched article on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal.

Well worth a read.

VanRamblings | 2026 | Raymond’s Health Update

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After 265 arduous and often painful days of my recovery from prostate cancer surgery at Vancouver General Hospital, I can report to VanRamblings’ readers today that I am well on the way to a full recovery and that, at present, there are no hurdles in respect of my once upon a time prostate cancer that is of concern to me.


The front entrance to Broadview Housing Co-operative, in the heart of the Kitsilano neighbourhood

Today, then, allow me to provide you with some insight into my eight-plus month recovery journey, commencing in early November 2025, when I was bedridden and in immense pain, cared for by friends and neighbours — in particular regarding the latter group, my Broadview Housing Co-operative comrades and in-house health saviours / providers: Heather Redfern and Kevin Stewart, in particular, but also Judi Burley, Laurie Reid, Max Burley, Jordan Patrich, Bobby Asgari, Laurette Yelle, and Libbi Dowd — without whose caring, able assistance and dedication to working with me towards my recovery, I might very well not be here today.

Meaghan, pictured above, was also a core saviour, the light in my life, during my recovery

Meaghan Brister also played a significant — dare I say, pivotal — role before and in the many months after my prostate cancer surgery. I’ve previously published a photo of Meaghan and her husband Alasdair’s 2-year-old daughter, Elliott, sitting at the bottom, on the left hand side, of my bed, an ever present Teague the dog nearby. The whole family have long been very close friends of mine (lucky me!).

Perhaps most important of all over the past 16 months, my personal health saviour, Kelly Ryan

In the time to come, I will dedicate a whole column to Kelly, as I will to Heather — these two angels from heaven, more than any of my other deeply devoted caregivers and friends — were the difference makers in my life these past eight-plus months, who ensured I was eating enough to keep me alive (I had no appetite for months, my weight dropping to 135 pounds from 175 pounds a month prior to my October 31, 2025 prostate cancer surgery, and from an initial 225 pounds when I was first diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer on September 5, 2024).

The one, the only, the exceedingly lovely and achingly bright Nicholas (Nick) John Ellan

And let me not forget Nick (Nicholas John) Ellan,  member of COPE extraordinaire, dedicated socialist, the most well-read and avid consumer of contemporary “literature” (Nick reads widely each day, across the Internet, sharing with me what he’s run across), the brightest person of my acquaintance — and lemme tell ya, I know some achingly bright people who inform and give value to my life — the Nick Ellan who has heard every gory detail of my recovery each and every day for the past 265 days, often multiple times a day, who has put up with my mood swings (no mean feat that, Nick!), and yet through it all has stayed by my side, kept my mind active, challenged me (for which I often get pissed off … let Nick tell you about that), a true friend, a comrade, the best person in the world to travel with — we’re looking at going to Puerto Vallarta next spring — a great cook, a great consumer of pop culture, someone who knows more about the culinary scene in Vancouver than any person I know. Well, what can I say, but … I love you, Nick!

Raymond and Fergus when I weighed 225 pounds, when Fergus was 3 years (he’s 7 years old now)

Each month of my recovery brought some new variation and often uncomfortable transformation, very rarely pleasant, more often troubling and painful in the month of November 2025, requiring that I be hospitalized three times that month, carried out on a stretcher, and rushed to Vancouver General Hospital.

In the month of November, I suffered three hematomas, my bed and my apartment covered in blood prior to my being taken to hospital in an ambulance, Heather, Kelly and Kevin standing by to provide whatever assistance to the paramedics that was deemed necessary.

A hematoma is a sac of pooling blood — composed of red and white blood cells, platelets and fibrin and plasma — that accumulates when a blood vessel becomes damaged and then ruptures, causing blood to rush outside the body from deep within tissues, internal organs and various other body spaces, kind of like a burst blood clot, but messier and more concerning, not necessarily dangerous but should the deep bleeding emanate from inside the abdomen — which is where my invasive prostate surgery took place — can cause severe internal blood loss, leading to life-threatening shock.

Each of my hematomas, once burst, poured blood from my body’s right side for hour upon hour, such that I woke up covered in blood, my bed soaked — like the scene from The Godfather, when the movie producer wakes up covered in blood — and as I attempted to get up, blood tracked throughout my apartment.

Finally, towards the end of November, upon my third hospitalization, urologic oncologist Dr. Amy Sherman came to visit me in my hospital bed, harrumphed and said, “Enough of this!”

Dr. Sherman then proceeded to “sew” up my wound subcutaneously, which served to permanently stop the blood flowing from my body.

I asked her, “Why are you the first doctor to come up with a subcuteneous resolution to my hematomas,” to which she replied (with a twinkle in her eye), “Because they are not as good, as skilled and knowledgeable a doctor as I am.”

Throughout November and December, I received daily care at home from a home care assistant — mainly responsible for cleaning me up, and bathing me in bed, while exploring the potential for a problem that required medical intervention.

In addition, a registered wound care nurse — who, as a group, are very well respected for the work they do — who visited weekly.

Just to wrap this up, and get to the “end”, if November was the month of hematomas, December was the month of fecal incontinence (don’t ask, it was messy), and January (for me, the worst month) a month of constipation that was painful and unrelenting.

February, as Heather visited her sister in Grand Forks for the first two weeks of the month, celebrating her birthday over on Vancouver Island during the latter two weeks of February — something she and her husband, Jason, have done for years — I was pretty much on my own, and left to my own devices.

Truth to tell, my appetite began to return (my neighbour Libbi, who herself was being treated for cancer, told me, “Raymond, the secret to recovering your appetite: the Filet O’ Fish at McDonald’s … and so it proved to be).

In February I was up and walking Teague the dog, slowly and fitfully, but walking throughout my Kitsilano neighbourhood nonetheless, initially with a walker and then with a cane, and eventually — much to my family physician Brad Fritz’s chagrin — I was walking, if a little unsteadily, sans cane or other mobility devices.

Three more notes of interest before I bring today’s Health Update post to a close …

    • In early December, on my way to the washroom I passed out, falling to the floor. For six hours, I “slept” on the cold laminate flooring in my home. At the time, my apartment door was always open. At 7am, after my neighbour Jordan had been up all night wrestling with 2-year-old Wynn and 4-year-old Orlo to get them to sleep, he decided to look in on me. Seeing me sprawled out on the floor, Jordan — a husky, fit guy in his early 40s, and the only Broadview member strong enough to perform strength-requiring physicality — gently lifted me off the floor and into his arms, carrying me to my bed, whereupon he covered me up, as I fell back to sleep. Heather arrived precisely at 9am — as she did every day, 7 days a week, for three solid months — to feed me, do the dishes, clean the floors and put in a wash, emptying the garbage and doing the recycling, as well, finally leaving exhausted for her home on the third floor — having been informed by Jordan of my overnight “event;”
    • Incontinence.  Yep, one loses control of their bladder in the months, up to a year and a half after prostate cancer surgery (which, by the way, turns one into a eunuch which, truth to tell at near 76 years of age, has come as a welcome relief in my dotage). Recently, at Khatsalano Day making my way up West 4th Avenue from Macdonald Street, where I visited each of the political booths that had been set up, I was alarmed to discover the my entire front was soaked (in urine, both Donald Trump and I, alas). I took an EVO home, took a shower, and changed into clean clothing. I have come up with a resolution to the incontinence “leaking” — I wear a diaper, of course, but I place bamboo / cotton boxer protective underwear over top of the diaper, and voilà, no more embarrassing and compromising “leakage”;

Alasdair and Fergus, ‘football’ and rugby stars both

  • Saving the best for last. When I left hospital November 1 2025 — Alasdair and Fergus picking me up from the fourth floor urology recovery floor (a story all in itself) — to bring me home, as we were leaving, I was told that come the autumn of 2026, as my surgical team had not caught all the cancer, I would be subject to five weeks of, five-day-a-week radiation therapy at the B.C. Cancer Agency.

This past Monday, expecting a call from Dr. Miles Mannas, my skilled prostate cancer surgeon, my expectation was that I would be negotiating a date after the upcoming October 17 municipal election for my radiation therapy, which both Dr. Brad Fritz and my friend Roni Jones suggested should occur in the afternoon, because I would be beat in the morning, and barely able to get out of bed …

Roni, in response to my question, “How am I going to get to and from my apartment five days a week to arrive at the B.C. Cancer Agency, and then be ferried home more than a little worse for wear — both Roni and Brad told me that the latter three weeks I would be bedridden (gosh, just like last November). Roni came up with the suggestion of HandyDART for transportation!

At any rate, at 11:45am on Monday morning an ebullient Dr. Miles Mannas called me, cheerful, friendly, voluble and warm of spirit and cadence to say, as I began my radiation therapy negotiation, Dr. Mannas kindly interrupting me …

“Raymond, I don’t know who told you you’d be going in for radiation therapy in the fall, that we hadn’t caught all the cancer during your surgery last autumn. All of your current tests indicate you are cancer free, we caught it all. There is no necessity for you to subject yourself to radiation therapy, it’s simply not necessary.”

We spoke for awhile more, Dr. Mannas asking …

“So, how many diapers are you going through a day? ‘One’, I told him. “Only one,” he asked, a tone of surprise in his voice. “Yep,” I replied. “And how are you feeling these days, “Pretty darn good,” I replied. “I’m writing again, walking up to and beyond five kilometres a day with my dog, socializing with friends, and all and all, I feel as good as I did before I was diagnosed with prostate cancer almost two years ago.”

“And what about your pain medication, the hydromorphone? Have you found your way clear to reducing your pain medication intake?” I replied that I had not taken a hydromorphone tablet in over two months, and prior to that I had reduced my intake to a 1mg tablet most, and then, some days, that I was good.

We spoke for awhile more, as I said to him …

“As you may be aware, prior to my surgery last year, each of the four nurses, two of the anaesthesiologists, three of the surgeons who would be assisting you, and a number of other medical professionals who would be present in the operating theatre during my surgery, told me of how skilled you are, and how fortunate I was to have you as my surgeon. But they said more …

Each individual who visited me prior to my surgery told me how much they loved you, of your wry and boisterous sense of humour, how you always remembered their birthdays, how collegial and supportive you have been in regards to their careers, and their deep and abiding affection for you. We don’t always know what people are saying about us when we’re not around, not in the room. I thought it right to let you in on how much your colleagues respect and admire you, and how much you have added to the quality of their lives, and their work experience at VGH.”

There was a momentary pause, after which Dr. Mannas said …

“Thank you, Raymond. Your words mean a great deal to me. Really, I had no idea. Thank you for your kindness in letting me know. You’ve made my day!”

I thanked him for his skill and all the work he had put in, all of the tests and interventions in which he had engaged on my behalf over the past eighteen months, since he first began treating me in early January of 2025.

And with that, our call came to an end.

And now, all these months later, I am over the moon!