On Monday evening, Little Mountain Neighbourhood House held a Mayoral Forum, at Vancouver’s Heritage Hall, located at 15th and Main.
Seven of the twenty-one Mayoral candidates seeking to fill the Mayor’s chair were invited to the forum, but only four chose to attend …
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Pro Vancouver’s David Chen;
- Yes Vancouver’s Hector Bremner;
- Independent Shauna Sylvester; and
- Vancouver First’s Fred Harding.
Three of the invited Mayoral candidates chose not to attend the NPA’s Ken Sim, independent Kennedy Stewart, and the Coalition Party’s Wai Young.
The evening was informative, as the Mayoral candidates addressed their policies on transit, child care, affordable housing & the livability of our city.
The evening was also informative for the politically astute — Pro Vancouver’s David Chen knew what he was talking about, and enunciated thoughtful positions on the issues, as did independent candidate for Mayor, Shauna Sylvester, the other two Mayoral candidates not so much.
As avuncular and well-spoken as Yes Vancouver’s Hector Bremner and Vancouver First’s Fred Harding proved to be, there was little that came out of their mouths that could be considered to be anything other than a egregious misrepresentation of the truth, indicating to anyone in attendance that neither man had anything approaching a command of city planning, leading audience members to the only reasonable conclusion: neither gentleman knew what they were talking about, and both meant to mislead and misrepresent, in service of their nascent mayoral candidacies.
For instance, on the issues, Messrs. Harding and Bremner weighed in as follows …
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Hector Bremner told the audience that “the reason rental housing isn’t being built in the city” is because Vision Vancouver extracts usurious community amenity contributions (CACs) from developers, as was the case recently with a developer “friend” of the affable Mr. Bremner, who he told those in attendance the city had required “millions of dollar in CACs that made the rental apartment construction “unviable.”
Um, hmmm, no. In fact, developers who build purpose built rental through the city’s Rental 100 programme are NOT charged any CAC “fees” (building rental is good enough for the city), and as added incentive, the city allows the developer added height (for a tower, generally up to six stories), sometimes called bonus density. Hector Bremner is a current Vancouver Councillor — he oughta know better;
- Fred Harding, on the other hand, made a commitment to “free transit” for everyone should he become Mayor of the City of Vancouver following the October 20th civic election. There was no promise of a chicken in every pot, but there might well have been.
Anyone who has the least awareness of what’s going on in respect of the transit file must be aware of Joey Hartman and the Metro Vancouver Alliance’s lobbying on transit with Shane Simpson and Mable Elmore, the provincial Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary, respectively, Responsible for Poverty Reduction, and that this month the Minister will release his long-promised poverty reduction strategy, which in the short term will eliminate transit fares for children five to 12 years of age, and may do the same thing for children 12 – 18 (the latter is being discussed in Cabinet, and provincial NDP caucus).
Furthermore, there’s a provincial plan in the works to reduce transit fares for those earning less than $40,000 a year. At present, 212,000 low income seniors and other eligible persons 60 years of age and older, and 128,000 British Columbians designated as persons with disabilities may avail themselves of the $45 annual B.C. Bus Pass programme Compass Card, while all senior citizens are eligible for the $55 monthly, three zone concession fare card. Great for Mr. Harding to appropriate a New Democratic Party and Coalition of Vancouver Electors (COPE) longstanding, and imminently implemented policy platform on transit.
To be fair to Messrs. Harding and Bremner, their misrepresentation of the truth didn’t hold a candlestick to Coalition Party’s Wai Young telling those in attendance at the recent S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Mayoral debate that “it is the Coalition Party that has long lead the fight against that damnable 12-foot wide asphalt bike path through Kitsilano Beach, and right through the children’s play area, jeopardizing their health.” Um, nnnnooooo …
So, Monday night’s Mayoral Forum wasn’t quite all that it was cracked up to be — 2014’s Mount Pleasant electoral forum was a barn burner, candidates sitting up on a raised stage, and the audience in such a state of high dudgeon that you could all but smell the blood in the air.
Still and all, a goodly number of people, concerned citizens all, turned up on Monday night at Heritage Hall, so at least that was heartening.
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In 2018, one is left with a lingering impression, a sinking, almost forboding sense of dis-ease and collective anomie that this, the soporific 2018 Vancouver civic election has become one of the most numbing, non-issue driven, least contentious & most uninvolving municipal election campaigns Vancouver’s public has experienced in recent years — none of which feels good, or leads one to believe that we’re going to get the city we need.
Kennedy Stewart aka Mr. Bland seems to be the inevitable choice for Mayor — no matter how well Shauna Sylvester performs on the hustings — OneCity’s Christine Boyle and COPE’s Derrick O’Keefe seem not to have caught fire with the public (“c’mon now people, Derrick and Christine are the two most exciting, transcendently change-making and charismatic civic election candidates in 30 years!”), there’s no good (Vision) vs evil (NPA) narrative in this campaign, Vision is likely to get wiped out on election night, and no matter how transforming COPE’s and OneCity Vancouver’s campaigns are in this election — honest, they’re the saviours of our city, why don’t people see that? — the voting public seems capable of little more than an occasional sideways glance, and a drowsy attempt to stifle a yawn.
