Category Archives: #CdnPoli | Canadian Politics

#VanElxn2022 | VanRamblings’ Mayor and Council Endorsements

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Almost inevitable that VanRamblings would endorse Councillor Colleen Hardwick as Vancouver’s next Mayor, don’t you think?

Why is VanRamblings enthusiastically and wholeheartedly supporting and endorsing TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver’s Colleen Hardwick for Mayor of Vancouver?

Listen to what Patrick Condon — the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture — has to say about Colleen Hardwick.

Make no mistake, Colleen Hardwick is the only candidate running for Mayor in 2022 who is on your side, on the side of all of us who live within one of the 23 currently livable Vancouver neigbourhoods, that each of the other Mayoralty candidates would seek to destroy, as incumbent Mayor, Forward Together’s Kennedy Stewart, ABC Vancouver’s Ken Sim, the Non-Partisan Association’s Fred Harding, and Progress Vancouver’s Mark Marissen envision a future tower-driven city, encroaching on every neighbourhood, with twenty to seventy storey towers Vancouver’s almost inevitable future were any of these men to assume the Mayor’s office post-Election Day, only two short days from now, on Saturday, October 15th.

Colleen Hardwick is the only democrat running to be Mayor of Vancouver, the only candidate for Mayor that would pause, if not rescind, the Broadway Plan and Vancouver Plan, as she and her cohort of outstanding TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver’s candidates for Vancouver City Council would consult with those of us who live in each of the neighbourhoods across the city, towards building an inevitably more dense city, while developing renewed community plans that would give you a voice in how your neighbourhood would develop in the years to come.

Have we written that Sean Nardi is one of our very favourite candidates running for office as a TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver candidate for Vancouver City Council?

No? Well, now we have.

As a key organizer of the Fairview Slopes / South Granville Action Committee, Sean devoted countless hours to rallying the community to fight the out-of-scale for the neighbourhood, 28-storey Jameson Birch Street project, devoting hundreds of hours to analytical research and neighbourhood organizing.  Sean’s painstaking fact-based advocacy work impressed the hell out a broad network of activists from across the city, City Councillors who sat up straight in their chairs when he addressed Council, senior staff within the labyrinthine City Hall bureaucracy, and our devoted civic affairs journalists. Believe us when we write, Sean means to make a difference — and with his newly-acquired MBA from Simon Fraser University, a dozen years of project management in the field of information technology, his hard-won expertise in problem-solving, as well as his work in crisis management and fiscal management, plus Sean’s work developing innovative strategies to build better, more efficiently, more humanely —  always with a focus towards addressing issues involving our present climate emergency —  Sean Nardi is definitely a candidate for Vancouver City Council for whom you want to cast a vote.

While most of our current crop of Vancouver City Councillors — not to mention, the current crop of Vancouver Mayoral candidates — consider themselves to be Gods on Mount Olympus, the holders of all knowledge, who believe they have the preordained right to rule over you, whether you like it or not, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver’s Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick and her outstanding, feet planted firmly on the ground Council candidate slate walk the Earth just as you do.

TEAM will work for a livable, affordable city for local residents, for renters, housing co-op members, and condominium and home owners from across the city. TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver will focus on delivering homes at a lower cost, including for low wage workers, the homeless, and those experiencing housing insecurity.

Providing a mix of non-market and market housing, for rentals and ownership, including housing co-ops — where no one will pay more than 30% of their income to be housed — co-housing, secondary suites, multiple conversion dwellings, infill, laneways, multiplexes, townhouses, and apartments — planned in partnership with local residents at the scale of each neighbourhood,  employing City-owned, provincial and federal Crown lands to build affordable housing across the city, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver is making the commitment to you that they will work to build affordable housing that will meet every Vancouver citizen’s needs.

TEAM Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick, and her outstanding and well-experienced TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver slate of candidates for Vancouver City Council, acknowledge the contract the City of Vancouver has entered into with the provincial government that will see the construction of towers within a two-block radius surrounding Millennium line Skytrain stations along the Broadway corridor. The notion that this mass, tower-driven style of development, though, might become Vancouver’s default housing typology is anathema to everything the TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver slate of candidates for Vancouver City Council stand for.

Campaign manager for, and candidate for Vancouver City Council with, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver, the well-experienced and tremendously engaging Bill Tieleman, no matter which other candidates for office in 2022 that you are selecting to cast your vote for, Bill Tieleman is the must, must, must-elect for Vancouver City Council this year. No other candidate in this election is as accomplished as Bill Tieleman as a communicator, and as someone who has worked deep within government — from 1996 through 2001, for instance, as Director of Communications in the Premier’s office, in the first term when the provincial New Democratic Party was in power — Bill is a must-vote. You’ve likely seen Bill fighting — successfully! — for the re-opening of the Coast Guard station just west of the Burrard bridge, and seen him on your TV screens many evenings representing the interests of workers, and the community-at-large, always fighting the good fight on your behalf.

Did we mention that Bill Tieleman is VanRamblings’ “next door neighbour” (he lives in the condominium due west of our housing co-op home), and that Bill is the most honest and authentic person we know, that Bill brings himself to the world with such heartbreaking integrity, fidelity and sense of purpose, with an unmatched energy as he works for social change, and a fairer, more just city, region and province, that for us — on almost a daily basis — is little short of revelatory. Make sure you save a vote for Bill Tieleman, to help us realize the city we need.

Well, the six outstanding TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver slate of candidates for Vancouver City Council, including a heartbreakingly bright Colleen Hardwick for Mayor of Vancouver, constitutes for VanRamblings the must-elect majority that, when elected, will turn this city around, and set a course that will place the city back in the hands of Vancouver citizens, and not the developer class in our city, as TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver sets about to rebuild the trust of Vancouver residents, lost over the course of the past fourteen years, first with the 2008 election of a majority Vision Vancouver City Council, followed by Vision 2.0 this past four years.

Above, VanRamblings has identified the must-elect majority who will turn our city around, build affordable housing, build a human-scale transit system that serves the needs of Vancouver residents across the city, re-engage with all of us who live in one of Vancouver’s 23 vibrant neighbourhoods, address the issue of public safety, and work with the federal and provincial governments to respond to the human tragedy on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that warehouses our most vulnerable citizens in substandard SROs, where crimes against those who call the DTES home continues to run rampant, where death has become a tragically common feature of life around Main and Hastings, where we must do better, and with a TEAM-led civic administration at Vancouver City Hall, we will do better.

VanRamblings has known Mike Klassen for more than 30 years, as the most honourable person of our long acquaintance, a friend in a time of need, phenomenally skilled, a true neighbourhood advocate, and VanRamblings’ webmaster who created our site during the holiday season in 2003, débuting VanRamblings in 2004.

And now, Mike Klassen is running for Vancouver City Council, with ABC Vancouver.

We have known Mike Klassen, always, to be fair-minded, possessed of an umatched personal and professional integrity, and during his years as Vancouver’s première civic affairs columnist with the Vancouver Courier newspaper — where his writing was superb, his insights possessed of an integrity and a heart that spoke both to his professionalism as a journalist, and to how Mike has always brought himself to the world — there was no finer journalist in town. There is no one running for City Council in 2022 who is more intimately familiar with how government works, how decisions are made, and how change for the better comes about.

In his work as a vice-president with the B.C. Home Care Providers Association, Mike Klassen has gained a rapport with members of the New Democratic Party caucus that is second-to-none, each member of that caucus having come to respect Mike Klassen as someone who gets things done, someone with whom it is easy to work towards change for the better, someone who does his homework, someone who is non-partisan in the interests of better serving the needs of British Columbians, and those of us who call Vancouver home. Quite simply, Mike Klassen gets things done.

VanRamblings loves Mike Klassen, the candidate and our friend, with all our heart, and believe that he will emerge on Council as a generational difference maker for the better. Please, please, please save a vote for ABC Vancouver’s Mike Klassen.

Sarah Kirby-Yung. Yep, there she is above, VanRamblings’ favourite political figure, on Vancouver Park Board — where, as Chairperson of the Board, Sarah Kirby-Yung worked with then Park Board General Manager Malcolm Bromley to ban cetaceans in captivity (that means no more whales cruelly kept in “cages” at the Vancouver Aquarium) — and this past term on Council, as one might reasonably expect if you know Sarah Kirby-Yung at all, Ms. Kirby-Yung emerged as the hardest-working member on Council, steering clear of the toxic politics that weighed Vancouver City Council down for much of the past four years, on a Council where Ms. Kirby-Yung actually managed to build alliances across the political spectrum, among a disparate group of her fellow electeds — with Green Party of Vancouver City Councillor, Pete Fry (who VanRamblings is also endorsing!), who loves, respects and admires Sarah Kirby-Yung, as is the case with Sarah’s fellow ABC Vancouver colleagues, Lisa Dominato and Rebecca Bligh, achieving this feat on a toxic City Council, where she even managed to bring an often too-partisan, and at times misogynist, Mayor on board as a fan — to get things done.

As VanRamblings has written previously, you have Sarah Kirby-Yung to thank for helping see us through the pandemic while providing aid to restaurants in dire financial straits, while championing restaurant patios, and side street plazas, where we could meet together in the open, in neighbourhoods across the city.

You know who the most productive person on City Council was this term , the Councillor who was always available to the press, by far Council’s best communicator (although, Pete Fry gives Sarah a run for her money), and the (am I allowed to say this?) the get ‘er done gal around the Council table, always, always, always on your side, fighting for you, and fighting for a better, fairer and more just city — Sarah Kirby-Yung. If you love our city, you must save a vote for Sarah Kirby-Yung.

And now, to our two new favourite, first time candidates in this 2022 Vancouver civic election who, if there is any justice at all, will win in a walk on Saturday night.


Stephanie Smith, 2022 Green Party of Vancouver candidate for Vancouver City Council

A labour and social justice activist living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, since the late 1990s, Stephanie Smith has worked in the non-profit sector as a front line legal advocate,  most recently in the Downtown Eastside at First United, providing legal advice to those who’ve come to her expressing a concern about the conditions of their lives.

“What that’s meant is that representing tenants on the DTES, we’ve worked to save one tenancy at a time, one eviction hearing at a time. In labour terms, ‘One job, one grievance.’ One person’s income, one person’s disability benefits appeal at a time. Over the years, my colleagues and I have won countless battles, but sometimes it feels to us like we’re losing the war.”

For Stephanie Smith, entering this campaign as a Green Party candidate for Council, she has come to feel a new sense of possibility, of optimism in places that she hasn’t felt it for a long time.

“This is a terrible moment in a lot of ways. The forces aligned against people seem so overwhelming, and there’s so much suffering. So many people in Vancouver feel like they’re on the bubble, they’re one eviction notice, one demoviction, one renoviction away from never being able to come back to the city.

That profound insecurity is destructive to people, destructive to community, and destructive to our city.

There are things we can do together, if we are bold, if we are thoughtful, and if we are collaborative, that will bring security and a sense of belonging, a sense that we’re going to be able to remain here and not be pushed out of the city by developers.”

Stephanie Smith assures VanRamblings that she will dedicate every waking moment as a Vancouver City Councillor to working towards creating housing in our city that is genuinely affordable housing for wage earners, for the working poor, for seniors and single parents, for all those who are in need, where no tenant or co-operative housing member would pay more than 30% of their income to be housed, and real tenant protections enacted.

Elect Stephanie Smith, a well-experienced, grassroots community activist and people’s advocate. You can make that happen, you must make that happen, by marking your ballot for Candidate #141 this upcoming Saturday, for the people’s advocate, Stephanie Smith — to help transform Vancouver into a city for all.


Arezo Zarrabian, NPA candidate for Vancouver City Council, in which Ms. Zarrabian blows the roof off the rafters at the Vancouver Police Department’s all-candidates forum! Watch. Listen. Cheer!

NPA Vancouver candidate Arezo Zarrabian, running for a seat on Vancouver City Council is, by far, the loveliest, the strongest, the best informed, the most articulate and the candidate with the most commanding presence that we’ve come across and become acquainted with during the 2022 Vancouver civic election season.

Everyone who’s heard Arezo Zarrabian has come away mightily impressed.

Just watch and listen to the video at the top of this portion of today’s VanRamblings column, where you’ll see Vancouver’s première crime data analyst, a decorated 13-year veteran of the Vancouver Police Department, where in the video she blows the roof off the rafters because she, and she alone, knows what’s going on in our city, was the first to identify that there are four random, unprovoked attacks occurring in our city, across every one of Vancouver’s 23 neighbourhoods, on unsuspecting, innocent victims, each and every day.

As if the video above, featuring Arezo Zarrabian as she goes up against Mayor Kennedy Stewart and ABC Vancouver Mayoral candidate Ken Sim — where she calls them out for their hapless foolishness and divisiveness — is not astoundingly impressive enough — and we’re here to tell you that it’s damned impressive — when Arezo Zarrabian, a first generation Iranian-Canadian born citizen, spoke at the University Women’s Club of Vancouver all-women candidates Women Transforming Cities forum, as she began her address to the audience, she broke down as she spoke about Mahsa Amini, whose death in police custody in the jails of Iran, has triggered continuing nationwide and worldwide protests calling for regime change in Iran. Recovering from her moving display of emotionally, Arezo Zarrabian gave, by far, the strongest, most well-received candidate speech of the evening, the only candidate to receive — in her case, alone — an extended standing applause.

If you’ve been saving yourself to vote on Election Day, this upcoming Saturday, October 15th, we strongly encourage — we beg you — to save a vote for Arezo Zarrabian, number 150 on your ballot. Quite simply, we in Vancouver need more persons of character and integrity, more informed decision-makers like heartbreakingly brilliant Arezo Zarrabian involved in the life of our city.

Believe us when we write: Arezo Zarrabian is a difference maker, from whom you will be hearing much in the months and years to come.

Saving the best for last, yes it’s the guy who makes you weep because he’s all heart, and wit and commitment, the  Vancouver City Councillor who (along with his friend, and fellow member of Vancouver who is running for a second term on Council, Sarah Kirby-Yung) is a must-vote for Vancouver City Council.

Following the 2018 Vancouver civic election, in his first four-year term on Vancouver City Council, Pete Fry worked with constituents to resolve their problems with City Hall’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, while also dedicating his energies to resolving land use issues in order that the interests of Vancouver residents might best be protected. Renter protection, the provision of affordable housing, transparency and good governance, working to make Vancouver more resilient in the face of climate change, protecting our natural habitats, and supporting our vibrant arts, culture and small business communities, these were but a few of the issues that were addressed by Pete Fry in his first term on Vancouver City Council. Pete Fry is now asking for your support, to re-elect him to a 2nd term on Council.

VanRamblings say: hell yeah, VOTE FOR PETE FRY, the guy who’s on your side.

#VanPoli | Homelessness + Housing | A Series | Part 1

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Each and every year for the past two decades, and more, hundreds of new homeless persons arrive on our shores to call Vancouver their new home.

These homeless persons, arriving without any money or resources, come down to Vancouver from the north of our province, from the Okanagan, Vancouver Island or some other provincial locale. More of the newly arrived homeless make their way to Vancouver from the Prairies, Ontario, Québec or the Maritimes, more often than not having been provided with a bus / train or plane ticket furnished by their provincial social services Ministry, having been told, “Go west, where the skies are blue, the weather warm, the people friendly, and the streets are paved with gold.”

A surprisingly large contingent of Vancouver’s new homeless arriving in our city each year, somehow make their way across the U.S. borders to both the north and south, arriving (mostly) from California — but, as well, from a polygot collection of other U.S. states — as well as from Mexico, and Central and South America.

Then, there are Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian or Filipino citizens who jump ship (or who were onboard for the long journey across the Pacific, as stowaways) to arrive in Vancouver, here to stay, they hope, here to make Vancouver their new home.

Upon arrival, these émigrés to our lustrous Pacific shores often make contact with one of the hundred or more outreach workers populating the downtown eastside, those angels of mercy helping the newly arrived find a place to stay, registering them for social assistance, or persons with disability coverage, making sure that they’re covered by B.C. Medical, ensuring their needs are otherwise looked after.

Then, among the newly arrived émigrés, there is the contingent who want to stay under the radar: the heavily drug dependent, and the drug dealers.

Apart from Vancouver’s (mostly) good weather, the other key reason this new homeless population moves to Vancouver relates to the ready availability of drugs. Vancouver is North America’s largest drug distribution centre. Heroin arriving from Afghanistan through Amsterdam will find its way to Vancouver, to be carried across the continent. The raw ingredients to make fentanyl arrives in Vancouver from China (the Canadian government long ago staunched the supply of raw fentanyl into Vancouver … now fentanyl has to be “mixed”, locally, in Vancouver).

Of the new arrivals each year, approximately one-third of the new “out of town” homeless population remain in Vancouver, many sleeping in doorwells, under park benches, in alley ways, in garages, loading bays, under bridges, in and around Jericho or Stanley Parks, or have found themselves shelter, or life in an SRO.

Many others make their way to municipalities across the Metro Vancouver region, mostly to Surrey and Burnaby, but as well to the Tri-Cities (Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam), Ladner, Langley and Richmond, Haney, Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, not to mention the North Shore.

A contingent of members of the Vancouver homeless population make their way into the Fraser Valley (as far out as Chilliwack, Agassiz and Hope) or over to Vancouver Island — mostly Victoria, Nanaimo and Duncan, but across the entire Island, as a whole — with a sizeable number heading to the Okanagan’s inviting climes.

A remaining number of homeless persons return home — with the provincial government, more often than not providing the fare home — having enjoyed (or not) their brief vacation on the west, with a smaller number deported or in jail.

All of the above is by way of saying, when the annual Homeless Count is conducted each March, the number of homeless persons always rises, sometimes by substantial numbers, and not because it’s persons — seniors, or others — who have found themselves evicted from their apartments because rents have become too high, or young people who have aged out of the care system (or lack thereof) provided by the province of British Columbia.

Rather, this is a sorry tale of human misery.

In some sense, then, the problem of resolving Vancouver’s homelessness crisis would seem irresolvable — the more housing that is built, the more modular housing structures constructed, the more hotels purchased by the province, the more SROs that are renovated by the province to make this kind of congregate housing livable, the more shelters that are made available, the more homeless persons who will arrive on our shores, this year, and  all the years beyond.

Today’s VanRamblings’ column is not prescriptive, nor do we attempt to provide historical context — we’ll do that later in the week, plus offer what we feel may be a short term fix to help alleviate the lives of human misery for persons who are living at a bare subsistence level,  as VanRamblings sets about to present an historical context dating back decades, through until today.

#VanPoli | Taxes | Downloading the Tax Burden to Municipalities

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In a disparaging VanRamblings story published last week on this site —  titled Vancouver City Council To Raise Property Taxes a Whopping 6.35% — we took Vancouver City Councillors to task for raising property taxes in our city beyond what most homeowners, small businesses, and landlords could reasonably afford.

Now, as it happens, VanRamblings is a big fan of taxes which, in good measure, pay for: our schools, from kindergarten through university post-graduate work; roads, highways, bridges and other transportation infrastructure (including public transit); our judicial and public safety systems (the courts, police, fire firefighters, paramedics, prisons); ‘social programmes’ including all aspects of child care (encompassing children in the care of the province, when family structures have broken down); all aspects of our vibrant health care system; and much, much more.

To be fair to Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart, and the five Vancouver City Councillors who voted in favour of the 6.35% property tax increase in 2022 — that would be the three Green Party of Vancouver City Councillors, Pete Fry, Adriane Carr and Michael Wiebe, OneCity Vancouver’s Christine Boyle and COPE’s Jean Swanson —  as is our wont, today we’ll publish one of our infrequent “history lessons” to explain, at least in part, the rationale as to why the Mayor and five City Councillors cast their vote in favour of a  6.35% property tax increase for 2022.

In 1984, Conservative Party leader Brian Mulroney was elected as Canada’s 18th Prime Minister, supplanting a Liberal Party of Canada that had been in power for 21 consecutive years, Canada’s 33rd Parliament in the autumn of 1984 consisting of 202 Tories, 135 Liberals, and 31 New Democrats. During Mr. Mulroney’s nine years in power, his government had many successes, on the environment and on the trade front, negotiating a groundbreaking free trade agreement with the United States. Contrary to billing, more often than not, Conservatives in power tend to be spendthrifts, all while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and failing to keep an eye on the federal budget.

In the midst of a deepening recession, when Mr. Mulroney stepped down as Prime Minister of Canada on Friday June 25, 1993, apart from and in spite of the then wildly unpopular 7% Goods and Sales Tax (GST) his government had brought in, Mr. Mulroney left his successor, Kim Campbell, with the legacy of a multi-year $42 billion annual budget deficit — a grim sum absolutely unheard of in those days.

Only four short months later, on Monday, October 25th, 1993 Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien was elected as Canada’s 20th Prime Minister. First order of business? Appoint a Finance Minister, and commit to not only eliminating the egregious annual deficit, but cut the accumulated $840 billion long term Mulroney legacy debt in half. Who would perform that masterful fiscal feat? The head of Canada Steamship Lines, from 1988 forward the Member of Parliament for the southwestern Montréal riding of LaSalle-Émard, and Prime Ministerial aspirant, Paul Martin.

In Canada, long ago the federal government negotiated what became known colloquially as a tax rental agreement with the provinces. The federal government would collect income taxes from Canadians, take a portion for federal coffers, while transferring the majority of the federal tax income collected back to the provinces. For years, back to 1945, the agreement worked well for all levels of government — until 1996, when Finance Minister Paul Martin “changed the game”.

In the 1995 federal budget Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government abandoned any pretense of federal financing of post-secondary education, changing what was known as the Canada Social Transfer into the renamed the Canada Health and Social Transfer(CHST), cutting a total of $3.5 billion in the CHST for the 1996/97 fiscal year. The total cuts to the provinces in the first five years Jean Chrétien was in power: $7.6 billion in transfer payments that would otherwise have gone to the provinces, or a devastating decline of 40.7% in health, education and other transfer payments to the provinces by the 1999-2000 federal fiscal year.

All of a sudden, the provinces were made almost entirely responsible for the largest provincial budget item: health care, and entirely responsible for funding post-secondary education, federally-funded programmes that had been in place since as far back as the end of World War II.

The good news for the federal government: by 2003 federal Liberal Finance Minister Paul Martin had not only eliminated any notion of an annual federal budget deficit — instead, creating a yearly surplus —  but had, as well, paid down $440 billion in long term debt, cutting the federal debt in half as Jean Chrétien had promised a decade earlier. The bad news for the provinces: provincial Premiers and their Finance Ministers had to come up with funds to make up for the lost / eliminated “tax rental agreement” revenue that funded provincial programmes.

Provincial governments made up for the lost federal revenue by creating, or dramatically raising, provincial sales taxes, instituting or raising fees for every imaginable service, from driver’s licenses to camp ground fees, along with instituting bridge and road tolls while looking to any other sources of revenue provincial Finance Ministers could come up with to make up for lost federal funding.

The major source of newfound provincial revenue: municipalities. If the federal government had download responsibility to the provinces for health care, housing, and post secondary education, provinces sought to gain revenue from the towns, villages and cities that filled the landscape of their provinces. All of a sudden, cities, towns and villages were almost entirely responsible for the provision of affordable and social housing, social programmes, child care, road construction and maintenance, and other infrastructure (sewers, provision of clean water), and any number of programmes previously almost the sole responsibility of the provinces.

Where senior levels of government may run deficit budgets, cities, towns and villages, school boards, and Vancouver’s Park Board are required to run an annual balanced budget. With responsibility for programmes previously funded by the province now the responsibility of municipalities, cities, town and villages scrambled to find the required revenue, which translated into: skyrocketing parking rates and extended paid parking hours, dramatically increased parking fines, and skyrocketing development permit fees for homeowners and developers alike — and, what is known as Community Amenity Contributions by developers paid to the city to fund child care centres, neighbourhood recreation centres, as well as social and affordable housing, and a variety of arts and other programmes.

Here, then — as may be seen in Councillor Boyle’s tweet above — was the dilemma faced by Mayor Kennedy Stewart and our City Councillors when, last week, together our elected civic leaders voted for a 6.35% property tax increase for 2022, to fund not just core programmes, but the programmes that determine the livability of our city, and also fulfill the election commitments made by the Mayor, the three Green Party City Councillors, and our OneCity and COPE Councillors. Last week, for Mayor Stewart and five of our Councillors, conscience won out over fiscal restraint.

#CdnPoli | Why Did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Call a Summer Election?

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The most frequently asked question over the course, and throughout the duration, of the summer election called by the Prime Minister: why did Justin Trudeau call a needless summer election — particularly when, on Election Day, the final electoral result was a continuing minority Liberal government?

Internal Liberal Party polling conducted last spring, and throughout the summer, registered Justin Trudeau and the Liberals with a 45% approval rating, with Trudeau one of the most well-liked and respected Canadian Prime Ministers since Confederation. In the summer, within the Prime Minister’s office, the pressure on Trudeau to call a snap election was immense.

Prior to the 2021 federal election, the Liberal Party held 154 seats in a Parliament of 338 members. Pragmatically, what that meant for the Liberals was that all of the Committees of the House had majority Opposition party participation, and more importantly, decision-making power that could be — and more often than not was — wielded by the Opposition as a cudgel to serve their own partisan interests: the Conservatives, NDP, Bloc Québécois, and Greens, those parties less interested in the welfare of the Canadian people than scoring points against the government.

As they did during the election, in a display of rank partisanship and future, hoped-for increased electoral success,  and possibly government, the elected members of Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP colluded to make the life of the government as miserable as possible, using the committees not simply to hold the government to account, but to do all in their power to create an impression that Justin Trudeau’s government was both ‘do nothing’, and corrupt.

Little wonder Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted to call a summer election.

Why did Justin Trudeau call a summer election, then? To recap …

  • Throughout the first 8 months of the year, the Liberals had been riding high in the polls, Canadians grateful for the quick action by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to secure the economy, through the introduction of CERB for Canadians who found themselves out of work due to the pandemic; the introduction of both a seniors grant for the poorest seniors, and an ongoing monthly supplement to the Canada Child Benefit to help families weather the storm of the pandemic; and the introduction of any number of business support programmes to keep the Canadian economy afloat. And, of course, securing the tens of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses that would keep Canadians safe, and help over time to bring COVID-19 to an end. Thus far, more than 60 million doses of the mRNA Pfizer, Moderna, and the AstraZenica and Janssen vaccines have been administered to Canadians 12+, with millions more doses to be made available for children aged 5 to 12 years;
  • Focus on the economy and the health of Canadians rather than continue to allow the Conservatives and the NDP to play the sort of unproductive partisan politics that not only made the life of the government more difficult, but in having to respond to the partisanship of the Tories and the NDP on the Committees of the House, inhibited the Liberals from governing as effectively as the government deemed necessary, and to serve the best interests of all Canadians. A majority government, had that been the result of the September 20th election, would have made the life of the government easier, while still allowing the Opposition to hold the government to account.

In respect of the Trudeau government not being able to secure a majority, make no mistake: Shachi Kurl cost the Liberals a majority government.

Going into the English Leaders’ debate, the Bloc Québécois had lost their footing, with all polls showing them unable to retain more than 10 seats in Parliament, for a loss of 22 seats. The support of Québeckers had moved virtually wholesale to hometown boy Justin Trudeau and his Liberal party — which looked to pick up most of the lost Bloc seats, propelling them to a majority government. Then Ms. Kurl asked a damnedly poorly phrased question concerning Québec Bill 21 — banning Québec citizens from wearing religious symbols, and mandating that one’s face be uncovered to give or receive specific public services — the contentious nature of her question propelling the Bloc into a stratospherically high 32-riding seat count, costing the Liberals their much sought after majority.

One final point: the opportunity to exercise our franchise, to go to the polls and cast our ballot in seclusion, to hold our government to account, is central to our nation’s democracy. No election held in Canada, or elsewhere, is ever unnecessary. The opportunity to go to vote in an election is both our democratic right, and at the core of our democracy. Following a 35-day election period, Canadians went to the polls, and collectively decided that a continuing minority government for the Liberals would be for all of us the best possible outcome, and voted accordingly.