Quick! Look busy...and ethnic!

Vancouver is a cosmopolitan, diverse city with people from a wide variety of ethnic and religious traditions. Unless you're trying to impress a Federal Cabinet Minister.

How anyone could question Vancouver's ethnic and cultural diversity and crack the management ranks at City Hall is beyond belief for this page. If you're smart enough to give orders to municipal workers, you should be smart enough to know about Chinatown, Punjabi Market, Commercial Drive, the Powell Street Festival, Greek Days, Channel M, The rotating troops of ESL students, the lack of Conservative Members of Parliament...

It could be that the Fairview neighbourhood around City Hall is pricing itself into being another Shaughnessy, or the cancellation of last weekend's Vancouver Culturefest. For whatever reason, City of Vancouver officials felt they had to move a substantial number of visible minorities to the front of the shop and ask them to pretend that they worked there.

Federal Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn had stopped by City Hall as he was in town to discuss diversity and multiculturalism with local officials. This page hopes that after this unnecessary and pathetic window-dressing exercise, a definition of tokenism was on the agenda for Blackburn's meeting.