Category Archives: Decision 2014

Emerging: Growing Consensus for Kirk LaPointe Mayoral Candidacy

October 2, 2014BC Politics, Decision 2014, Politics, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

Kirk LaPointe, NPA candidate for Mayor, announcing his candidacy

There’s a coalition of progressive voters coalescing around Kirk LaPointe, the socially progressive Non-Partisan Association candidate for mayor.
For VanRamblings, the most surprising aspect of the 33rd annual Vancouver International Film Festival arises from the dozens of approaches by filmgoers that have been made to us by community activists working across every neighbourhood in the city — folks with whom VanRamblings has worked on countless NDP, COPE and Vision Vancouver electoral campaigns, as well as on community activist projects too numerous to mention — who have, chapter and verse, detailed the egregious anti-parks and recreation, neighbourhood destroying, pro-development, covert, and pharisaic decision-making that has gone on at City Hall and Park Board this past six years under an execrable Vision Vancouver civic administration.
Make no mistake, a well-organized Anyone But Vision movement has begun to form, and almost all of those with whom VanRamblings has engaged are what Andy Yan, a planner and public data analyst with Bing Thom Architects, refers to as engaged voters — those citizens who live along the golden horseshoe, the crescent of big-turnout polls that extends from the Commercial Drive / Grandview Woodland area, through Mount Pleasant to Fairview and Kitsilano, the city’s inner ring of neighbourhoods.
Andy Yan may well be right, but if VanRamblings were to take into account the dozens of infuriated telephone callers, e-mails, texts and direct social media messages we receive each day, dissatisfaction with Vision Vancouver would appear to extend far beyond the golden horseshoe, and well into both the LGBTQ+ and Chinese communities, both of which latter voting groups have indicated they’ll leave Vision Vancouver in droves this election, as they head back to the warming embrace of the Non-Partisan Association.
And let us not forget, either, the rampant and vocal dissatisfaction that has emerged this last term with Vision Vancouver in the Hastings-Sunrise, Dunbar, Killarney, West End, Yaletown and Marpole neighbourhoods.

Among progressive voters, the move to support Kirk LaPointe emerges not out of a lack of support for COPE mayoral candidate Meena Wong, but rather from the realpolitik that Ms. Wong cannot defeat Gregor Robertson.
The progressive voters who’ve contacted VanRamblings by phone and social media, and stopped us on the streets and in coffee shops by the hundreds these past four months want Gregor Robertson and his ne’er-do-well band of Vision Vancouver colleagues gone from the Vancouver civic scene — in Kirk LaPointe, these progressive voters have identified a viable, socially progressive, thinks for himself (one of the salutary comments we hear often) and electable alternative for the mayor’s chair, and a candidacy around whom a growing coalition of progressive voters has formed, an under-the-radar bloc of community-oriented activists who are working in neighbourhoods across our city to ensure that Kirk LaPointe becomes Vancouver’s new mayor late in the evening this upcoming November 15th.

In Toronto, a burgeoning alliance of voters has formed around the mayoralty candidacy of former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader, the once beleaguered John Tory, whose current 49.2% standing in the polls is both testament to his middle-of-the-road, socially liberal candidacy, and more than double that of challengers Doug Ford and Olivia Chow. Make no mistake, the vast majority of Toronto voters want the Ford family out of Metro Toronto civic politics, and everyone from provincial Liberal cabinet ministers to longtime members of the provincial NDP have come out in groundswell support for the socially liberal, fiscally conservative John Tory.
A similar dynamic would appear to be emerging in Vancouver.
In Kirk LaPointe, progressive and engaged voters see a Red Tory, who just as is the case with the seems-certain-to-win Toronto mayoralty candidate John Tory, offers socially liberal programmes, fiscally sound city management, and open and transparent municipal governance.
Imagine, in John Tory and Kirk LaPointe, the two largest English-language speaking cities in Canada could, and might very well, have socially progressive mayors in place, leaders who could actually engage in a respectful dialogue with senior levels of government (unlike you know who) to achieve much that would be beneficial to the concerns, and wants and needs of their respective electorate — leaving open the possibility, as well, that such socially progressive candidate wins could serve to redefine the concept of conservatism in Canada, consigning Stephen Harper’s mean-spirited concept of conservatism rightfully to the dustbin of history.
Kirk LaPointe and John Tory as latter day incarnations of Bill Davis.
There’s even a rumour extant that former premier, and Vancouver mayor, Mike Harcourt will endorse Kirk LaPointe late in this electoral campaign.
Rumour has it, too, that independent mayoral candidate Bob Kasting, and the startup Vancouver Cedar party, will also endorse Mr. LaPointe’s candidacy for mayor late in the current Vancouver municipal election cycle.

Most engaged voters know that the roots of the Progressive Conservative party emerged from the post WWI United Farmers movement, a radical grassroots, socialist amalgamation whose supporters founded the Progressive Party of Canada (what we refer to today as the — albeit, almost extinct — Red Tories within the Stephen Harper-led Conservative party), before amalgamating with the Conservative party proper in the early 1940s.
Progressive voters — traditional NDP voters — have a long history of voting strategically to support socially liberal, Progressive Conservative candidates whose grassroots ideals reflect those of the more left-leaning NDP.
In 2014, that would appear to be what we have in the Non-Partisan Association — a small “c” conservative municipal party that reflects the ideals of a broad cross-section of the voting electorate, a made-in-Vancouver civic political party comprised of honest, hard-working and humble servants of the public interest whose electoral platform consists of:

Working with senior levels of government to develop affordable, and social housing, programmes to meet the broadest cross-section of the needs of the voting electorate in Vancouver, and their families;
As Vancouver’s population ages, we have in Kirk LaPointe, a mayoralty candidate who is committed to investing in affordable housing and amenities for seniors citizens;
A socially progressive Non-Partisan Association mayoral candidate who grew up in rank poverty (a far cry from the silver-spoon-in-his-mouth mayoral incumbent), who has committed that with an NPA administration at Vancouver City Hall no child will go hungry, and more — that 365 days a year no child in our city will go hungry.
What Kirk LaPointe hasn’t said is that he will work with senior levels of government to ensure that child poverty in Canada’s third largest city will become a grievous and deplorable feature of Vancouver’s past — make no mistake, Kirk LaPointe is committed to this latter goal, but has not made an announcement because he can’t promise he’ll deliver on it his first term in office. Unlike our incumbent mayor, the principled and socially conscious Kirk LaPointe, the mayoral candidate with the Non-Partisan Association, does not overpromise and under-deliver;
Talking about overpromising and under-delivering, Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver have promised us free wi-fi across the city since before they were first elected. Kirk LaPointe has promised the same thing, beginning on Vancouver’s eastside, he says. The difference between the two promises? Kirk LaPointe will deliver on his promise, while you’ll be waiting til the cows come home before Gregor Robertson follows through on yet another empty Vision campaign promise;
A municipal party in the NPA that will not increase property taxes in their first year in power, as the new civic administration conducts an audit of Vancouver’s likely to be woeful financial affairs;
A party that does not practice the faux greenwashing of Vision Vancouver, but a municipal party that is committed to the health of its citizens, and is a vocal opponent of Vancouver’s waste to energy plans, as well as Metro Vancouver’s plan for a garbage incinerator and Vancouver’s current plan for a gasification plant at the city’s garbage transfer station. The NPA will instead concentrate on ways to increase reducing, reusing and recycling the City’s solid waste.
A mayoral candidate in Kirk LaPointe who will end Vision Vancouver’s game-playing and get the long-awaited Southeast Vancouver Seniors Centre facility built; will create an open and transparent City Hall Lobbyist Registry, as well as the first ever Office of the Ombudsperson in Vancouver, an office that would seek to resolve citizens’ disputes with the City fairly and without necessitating resort to the courts, in the process returning trust and transparency to City Hall.

Here’s a link to information on the Ombudsman Office, in Toronto;

Yes, there is something of the aspect of the merry-go-round in covering civic politics. It has oft been said, though, that a day in politics can seem like a lifetime, so changeable is the political dynamic from day-to-day.
While it is true that the party polling conducted early last week by Vision Vancouver and the Non-Partisan Association does not, as yet, reflect the growing groundswell of support for Kirk LaPointe’s “Anybody But Gregor” candidacy, perhaps that’s more a function of polling that was done outside of the golden horseshoe. VanRamblings has consulted widely in Grandview Woodland, Mount Pleasant, Fairview and Kitsilano, and we can tell you that for weeks now organizing drives have been afoot to dampen / hinder / annihilate the vote for Vision Vancouver; it’s just a matter of time before the polls reflect a much-increased support for the candidacy of Kirk LaPointe, whose electoral coattails could very well permanently dislodge a damnable Vision Vancouver administration from City Hall and Park Board.

In August, VanRamblings published a column, the headline of which read
“Mayor Gregor Robertson Virtually Unbeatable.” At the time, we had no firm idea that our concerns respecting Vision Vancouver’s governance of our city was so widely shared. Seems that the mayoral dynamic has changed a month and half later. VanRamblings may have to issue a mea culpa yet.

Decision 2014: Vancouver Civic Election Mayoral Race a Dead Heat

September 29, 2014BC Politics, Decision 2014, Politics, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

With the 2014 Vancouver civic election finally heating up, the internal polling conducted for the two major mainstream parties seeking office in the Vancouver municipal election — Bob Penner, Stratcom founder, president, CEO, and former employer of Gregor Robertson’s Chief of Staff, Mike Magee, for Vision Vancouver; and Maple Leaf Strategies’ partner and pollster Dimitri Pantazopoulos (who conducted last year’s spot on election polling for the provincial Liberals), and currently Non-Partisan Association lead pollster — released resonant internal polling results on the Vancouver Mayoral race to their anxious political masters, late last week.
Whereas the polling conducted for newspapers and the broadcast media — done on the cheap, or for free (in exchange for the marketing advantage to the pollster), and utterly meaningless for purposes other than their entertainment value — generally results in highly inaccurate polling data — not least because of the small sample size — the much larger, poll-by-poll sample conducted for the major political parties, with extrapolated numbers that take into account the ‘most likely to vote‘ segment of the voting populace, produces as near to accurate polling results as is possible.
So, you want to know: what are the Vancouver mayoral race insider party polling results, with a sample size for each of Vision Vancouver and the NPA in excess of 2,000 most likely to vote Vancouver residents?
The answer …
Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson, the Non-Partisan Association’s Kirk LaPointe, and COPE’s Meena Wong are in a statistical dead heat.
In the three weeks following the entry of the Coalition of Progressive Electors’ mayoral candidate into the mayoral race, Gregor Robertson’s approval / intent-to-vote rating has dropped a calamitous 17 points! Statistical dead heat polling results: 32%, COPE’s Meena Wong / 34%, the NPA’s Kirk LaPointe / and 32%, Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson.
The Non-Partisan Association is both sanguine, and over-the-moon about the results. Sanguine, because as VanRamblings was told, “Kirk has room to grow”, and over-the-moon because Meena Wong has knocked our city’s sitting Mayor off his previously-thought-to-be unassailable perch. “This will be a horse race,” say NPA insiders. “We’re confident that in the final weeks of the campaign Kirk LaPointe, as he becomes better known to the electorate, will pull well ahead of our deeply unpopular incumbent mayor.”
Vision Vancouver apparatchiks with whom VanRamblings spoke simply yawned at the polling results, recalling how in 2011’s civic election Vision Vancouver was in tough in the polling, and seemingly on their way to defeat. The final five days of the 2011 campaign — which witnessed a saturation $657,000 (and mightily effective) television ad campaign that ran on all local TV station newscasts, morning, noon, early evening and late night, turned the tide for Vision Vancouver, wiping out previously dire internal polling results, propelling the incumbent majority party to victory.
Emerging as perhaps the biggest surprise in the 2014 Vancouver civic election: COPE’s Lazarus-like restoration to political relevancy. Who’da thunk that the folks currently directing the COPE election machine, and the members of COPE’s Left Front, have a taste for retail politics — which is to say, sophisticated ground game, grassroots, mass appeal politics designed to appeal to both the broadest constituency of voters, as well as to the diverse communities that comprise the Vancouver in which we live?
At a time when many on the left (not to mention, almost all members of Vancouver’s political class) were writing off COPE’s chances to make an impact in the 2014 Vancouver municipal election campaign, with the energizing emergence of Meena Wong on the Vancouver municipal scene — honestly, a first-rate candidate for Mayor, who’s been setting the election issue agenda this past three weeks — and an exceedingly strong, high profile community activist COPE Council slate, representing both the largest and the strongest COPE Council slate in a generation, make no mistake: COPE is now a factor in the 2014 Vancouver municipal election.

Meena Wong announcing her candidacy at COPE’s September 6, 2014 Nominating Conference

Back to the Future: A Brief History of Vancouver, Pre-War to Now

September 26, 2014Decision 2014, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, 83% of Canadians lived in the rural areas of Canada, mostly as members of farming families, leaving only 17% of the population to reside in hub cities like Montréal, Toronto & Vancouver, with much lesser populations in the prairie cities, and provincial capitals.

Following the end of the overseas conflict, with the industrial heartland of Germany, not to mention a great swath of Europe, and the production capitals of Japan leveled by the ravages of war, North America soon became the industrial heartland, and the bread basket, for the world.

Soldiers arriving home from Europe, rather than choosing to return to the farming communities from whence they had come prior to the outbreak of the conflicts in Europe and Japan, remained in the cities, many of them choosing to marry. The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed an unprecedented mass in-migration of highly-skilled, mostly European, industrial workers to populate the factory floors, and run the means of production.

In the 1950s, with a burgeoning population requiring housing, Vancouver became one of the three major Canadian cities to experience a building boom, a boom that has not been equaled since on our shores. The form of development chosen? The single-detached family dwelling. Apartment buildings were few and far between, the Vancouver economy thrived, and new homes were offered on the market at a $2000 price point, or less.

In Vancouver, as was the case across the North American continent, the populace adopted the much-ballyhooed economic notion of “a car in every garage” (requiring that a house be attached to that garage). With personal motor vehicles all the rage, the population was encouraged to consider streetcars as a relic of the past, an outmoded means of transportation.

In the mid-1950s, the Interurban streetcar service — a service that had been inaugurated in 1891 to transport British Columbians across the southwest region of our province — was moth-balled, the entire service dismantled, track-by-track, the invaluable, inexpensive and well-utilized Interurban streetcar lines seemingly gone forever.

Vancouver’s Raymur Housing Project — social housing in Vancouver, circa 1970

In the 1950s, provincial government social planners spanning the nation, in concert with their federal government counterparts, set about to create “urban social housing complexes” to house the provinces’ poorest citizens. In doing so, Canadian provinces adopted the multiple family dwelling, or “apartment”, model as the housing form to shelter the indigent population. In U.S. cities like Detroit and Chicago, we are much more apt to call these “urban social housing complexes” by a more colloquial name: ghettos.

In Toronto, the constructed, soon-to-be-crime-ridden, concrete tower neighbourhood was named Regent Park. In Vancouver, the new community to house the poor was named The Raymur Project, with residents from across British Columbia brought to Vancouver to live in the newly-conceived, virtually free urban social housing complex.

As is so often the case with our current gentrifiers without a heart Vision Vancouver civic administration, folks already resident in the neighbourhood were displaced when the construction of Raymur commenced — an estimated 860 full-time residents of the downtown eastside neighbourhood were left to the vagaries of 1950s Vancouver to find alternate accommodation on their own, over half of their number longtime residents of the community, of Chinese descent.

Both social housing projects failed in their initial iterations, developing into crime-infested urban ghettos, as had been the American experience.

Tom ‘Not So Terrific’ Campbell, controversial Vancouver mayor, in office from 1966 to 1972

In 1966, running as an independent, a brash and confrontational Tom Campbell defeated sitting NPA mayor, Bill Rathie, to become Vancouver’s 31st mayor. From the outset, Campbell’s ascension to the Mayor’s office heralded a pro-development ethos that would make even Vision Vancouver blush, in the process advocating for a freeway that would cut through a large swath of the downtown east side, require the demolition of the historic Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings, and bring about the construction of a luxury hotel at the entrance of Stanley Park, as well.

Vancouver’s West End neighbourhood, 1960, pre-high-rise construction. Photo, Fred Herzog.

In the West End, where Campbell — a wealthy, successful developer — owned substantial property, the newly-elected Mayor all but ordered the demolition of almost the entirety of the well-populated West End residential neighbourhood — housing mostly senior citizens in their single detached homes — as he set about to make way for the rapid construction of more than 200 concrete high-rise towers, transforming the West End forever.

All of these “changes” augered wild controversy among large portions of the Vancouver populace, leading to regular, vocal and sometimes even violent protests throughout Campbell’s treacherous tenure as Mayor, finally leading to his defeat at the polls in the November 1972 election.

Density For Whom, and in Whose Interests?

What our beloved city will look like in every neighbourhood, if Vision Vancouver is re-elected

VanRamblings would suggest that there are parallels to be drawn between Tom Campbell’s leadership, and that of Mayor Gregor Robertson, and his majority Vision Vancouver administration.

Under Vision Vancouver, five blocks on either side of every arterial in the city has been re-zoned for mid-rise building construction, with the potential to upzone to highrise towers across every one of the 23 neighbourhoods that comprise our beloved city. Hell, if you didn’t know better (then, maybe again, you do), you’d almost think that Mayor Gregor Robertson is Tom Campbell reborn with a somewhat more handsome visage, given the “development-at-all-costs” ethos that his Vision Vancouver civic party has initiated and carried through all throughout their development on speed six-year tenure in city government. Tom Campbell would be proud of Gregor Robertson;;
In the next term of government, with a Vision Vancouver administration in place, the approved multi-tower Oakridge development will pale when compared to the proposed scale of the planned re-development of the Langara Gardens neighbourhood, the area situated between 54th and 57th Avenues, just west of Cambie. And let’s not forget, either, that Gregor Robertson tried to hive off half of the Langara Golf Course for a massive condo tower development, depleting Vancouver’s already diminishing green space (yet another attack on the collective interests of Vancouverites, under Vision Vancouver), attending solely to the pecuniary interests of their development community masters;
Under a Vision Vancouver administration, our current sitting civic majority party ignored the concerns of neighbours respecting Wall Corp’s out-of-proportion to the neighbourhood redevelopment of Shannon Mews, approving an almost four-fold increase of units (from 200 to 700) in the massively re-developed housing project, proving once again that Vision Vancouver is dedicated to serving the interests of their development masters, with nary a consideration for the livability of our neighbourhoods, whatever area of the city in which we may live;;
And while we’re on the subject of Wall Corp., do you recall reading, above, of the 860 residents who were displaced when The Raymur Project began construction? Vision Vancouver, too, likes to displace longtime residents from their neighbourhood when they approve development — and, gosh, wouldn’t you know that it’s not social housing that Vision would intend to build when they displace residents, but fancy condominiums to cater to … Take a moment to remind yourself of the controversy surrounding the sale of three tracts of land at 955 East Hastings that displaced 200 longtime, low-income residents — also left to fend for themselves. That’s gentrification under Vision Vancouver, for ya. We’ll write about Wall Corp.’s massive Wall Centre Central Park development at Boundary and Kingsway — another day; that development requires a full column to properly explore;
Subway. Let’s talk about transportation for a moment. Vision Vancouver wants to build a subway down Broadway. Gee, one wonders why a “subway”, when cities across North America have adopted the low-cost, virtually greenhouse gas free, inexpensive to maintain, neighbourhood-reviving streetcar system? Gosh, it couldn’t have anything to do with the “town centres” that developers would build (and make a fortune on) at each subway station along the route — the city of Vancouver expropriating the four blocks surrounding each station, at Clark, Fraser, Oak, Arbutus, Macdonald, Alma and Blanca streets — all to serve the interests of their developer masters.Patrick Condon, University of British Columbia Chair of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, likes to refer to this transportation-centred, town centre development style as “gleaming glass towers spread like beads on the string, disconnected from the surrounding communities they overshadow, sentencing neighbourhoods between stations to a future of slowly aging residents, gradually shrinking populations, more empty classrooms, restricted access for young families, fewer commercial services, and an increased dependence on the car to get around”;
No re-development proposal in Vision Vancouver’s last term was more controversial than the Grandview Woodland development plan, which all but ignored the initial report of the City of Vancouver planner charged to consult with Grandview Woodland residents, and develop a plan the neighbourhood could live with, the report almost completely re-written by staff in the Mayor’s office. Vision Vancouver demanded from the neighbourhood the realization of tower-driven “town centres” at both Clark & Commercial and Broadway, as well as 8+-storey towers along the entire expanse of Nanaimo and Hastings streets;
In their next term of government, a Vision Vancouver administration would demolish the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, turning over the land beneath the viaducts to large-scale developers, Concord Pacific and Polygon. With the viaducts gone, without saying so in so many words, Vision Vancouver proposes to complete the highway through the east side that many of us fought against more than 40 years ago, driving a six-lane freeway through Strathcona and Trillium parks, as well as two, cherished community gardens;
And let us not forget, either, that under a Vision Vancouver administration, the Marpole neighbourhood has been transformed as Vancouver’s least expensive, largely rental-driven neighbourhood, to a developer’s paradise of tower-driven condo highrises, mostly catering to a wealthy — and often, offshore — elite.

In 2014, over the course of the past six years, Gregor Robertson has conducted the affairs of City Hall, and the re-development of our city neighbourhoods, as if he is a more contemporary, perhaps somewhat handsomer, yet equally oleaginous, venal, and even more corrupt version of Tom Campbell, objectively, Vancouver’s worst mayor ever.

Come this November 15th, Vancouver voters will face the same question as voters faced in 1972. Do those of us who live in Vancouver want to see continued, untrammeled high-rise development in our neighbourhoods, or do we want livable, sustainable neighbourhoods across our city, where we can raise our families, get to know our neighbours, and preserve the peace and prosperity of the Vancouver that we have all come to know and love?

The choice is yours. Make sure you get out to the polls, 48 days from now.

Decision 2014: Giving the Lie to the Campaign’s Defining Narrative

September 23, 2014BC Politics, Decision 2014, Politics, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

The defining narrative of the 2014 Vancouver civic election revolves around the notion that voters have a choice to make: either we can vote for “the developer parties” (Vision Vancouver and the Non-Partisan Association), or we can vote for the “good guys” … Vancouver First, the Cedar Party, the Greens, or COPE, those municipal parties that do not accept donations from the development companies which operate in the city of Vancouver.
At best, this “good guys” vs “bad guys” narrative is simplistic.
At its worst, this untoward and unnecessary narrative is a vicious, wholly unwarranted and degrading condemnation of those fine potential public servants who choose to run with the so-called “developer parties.”
As if, somehow, the narrative suggests, principled and hard-working Vision Vancouver Council candidates like Niki Sharma and Andrea Reimer, or equally meritorious Non-Partisan Association Council candidates Suzanne Scott and Melissa DeGenova, upon being elected this next term, would sit up nights scheming to do the business of developers while subverting the interests of the electorate — all the while stuffing their pockets with loot secured from the likes of Ian Gillespie at Westbank, Michael Audain at Polygon, Wall Corp’s Bruno Wall, and Terry Hui at Concord Pacific.
What a harmful, destructive, libelous, slanderous and soul-destroying deceit to perpetuate — utterly unique to the political maelstrom on Canada’s west coast, for you will hear this narrative nowhere else — and how demeaning to the democratic interests of the political process.
And, it’s not as if either Vision Vancouver or the Non-Partisan Association can venture a considered response to this syllogistic argument based on false premises — lest they risk lending credence to the logically fallacious and destructive argument by very dint of deigning to offer a response.
To make matters worse for all of us, rather than encouraging the voting electorate to get out and cast their ballot for the “non-developer-funded parties”, instead this destructive, ultimately counter-productive narrative serves only to suppress and depress voter turnout, fitting conveniently, as it does, into a narrative myth often promoted in our news media, in the films we watch in our local multiplex, and on our television screens at home: that all politicians are corrupt, there’s nothing that can be done to change that circumstance, that politicians run for office simply to pad their own pocket, are “in it” solely for self-aggrandizement, and while in office consciously mean to do barbarous, malicious harm to the public good.
Little wonder that turnout at the polls in 2008 was a paltry 30.79% (there were only 124,285 recorded ballots from 403,663 registered voters) in what was a crucial municipal election, a figure hardly bettered in 2011 with only 34.57% of eligible voters choosing to cast their ballot in that election.
As Non-Partisan Association candidate for mayor, Kirk LaPointe, has been wont to point out, “All of us feel quite comfortable in the idea we’ve got rich, fertile territory to criticize policy …” — which is as it should be.
In recent weeks, Vision Vancouver has enunciated a transportation policy that commits the party to working with senior levels of government towards the construction of a subway down Broadway. Just yesterday, the NPA announced a plan to appoint an independent Ombudsperson at City Hall to ensure accountability and transparency, and protect citizens’ rights.
Nowhere in Vision Vancouver or the Non-Partisan Association’s declaration of either party’s platform tenet did I read a criticism of the “underfunded parties running in this election who don’t have a hope in hell of getting elected.” I mean, they could have, but they didn’t — and they won’t.
Why? Because the Non-Partisan Association and Vision Vancouver are remaining true to their commitment to run an issues-based municipal election campaign, giving the people of Vancouver a choice between two distinctly different competing visions on how our great city might move forward into the future, should one or the other party triumph at the polls when the ballots are counted on Saturday evening, November 15th.
In 2014, is it necessary that the smaller, competing parties engage in the shopworn cliché of the “developer parties” vs. the forces of good that are the other parties seeking office at Council, Park Board and School Board?
Surely there are a plethora of civic issues out there to engage the attention of voters. Is it necessary to continue to peddle a simplistic, and I would say ultimately offensive to voters, myth of those dastardly “candidates for the developer controlled parties”? There must be, there has to be, a better way.
Fortunately, the Coalition of Progressive Electors mayoral candidate, the principled Meena Wong, has chosen the higher road in enunciating hers and COPE’s vision for the future of Vancouver — a realistic vision that includes setting a $15-an-hour minimum wage in Vancouver, and charging a surtax on “empty homes” bought for speculative purposes, which tax money would be applied to the construction of social housing in Vancouver.
The Green Party of Vancouver, as well, has mostly kept to the issues — green issues, as you might imagine, that have much appeal to Vancouver’s voting electorate, as Vancouver’s nascent political party strives to hold the balance of power at city council in this next term of office. The Cedar Party has taken research in this election to new and glorious heights — rooting out a “secret development” at the north end of the Granville Street bridge.
Let’s make the 2014 Vancouver civic election about the issues: openness and transparency in municipal government, development of a workable strategy that will ensure the provision of affordable and social housing in the city of Vancouver, form of development (high-rise vs low-and-mid-rise) in our neighbourhoods, a transportation strategy that will meet the needs of all residents (a $4.2 billion subway down Broadway vs a network of at-grade light rail / streetcars across our city), a return to a long-held city policy of 2.75 acres of park space for every 1000 residents, and robust consultation and people-centred planning, among a raft of other issues.
Vancouver does not have to be the wild west of municipal politics. Let’s strive for something better, something finer. Let’s conduct a municipal election in Vancouver that will engage the interest of voters, and ensure a record turnout of the Vancouver electorate at the polls this November.