Here we are, just a tad more than three weeks away from Vancouver’s most consequential election in 50 years.

As a friend was saying to us at lunch yesterday, “No one wants towers built across our city. We want livable neighbourhoods, parks and recreation centres, schools and plazas, restaurants like this one where you can sit on the patio in the middle of the day and enjoy an afternoon repast with a friend. Towers? No thank you!”

Political campaigns rely on volunteers to go door knocking, work in the party’s telephone room, participate in burmashaves — that’s when you see a bunch of folks holding and waving campaign signs at you, when you’re heading off to work, or coming home — staff the campaign office, and work to secure the donations that campaigns for office require to create campaign literature, lawn signs, pay for the office, and fund the myriad aspects of a civic political campaign for candidates working towards being elected to one of Vancouver’s three civic bodies: Vancouver City Council, Vancouver Park Board, and Vancouver School Board.

As we have seen in recent days, there are those Vancouver civic parties who are well-funded by the billionaire developers in our city, who would presume to build 3,000 towers across the city if their civic parties gain office at Vancouver City Hall: ABC (A Better City), Forward Together (the Mayor’s party) OneCity Vancouver, Progress Vancouver and Vision Vancouver — which held power at Vancouver City Hall, from 2008 to 2018 — and the troubled Vancouver Non-Partisan Association.

Incumbent COPE Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, Gwen Giesbrecht, hosted a fundraiser / birthday party for herself and her friends — and COPE —  on Saturday, September 17, at Riddim & Spice.

Then there are those Vancouver civic parties who mean good for our city, do not take real estate developer donations, and are seeking to represent you, not the billionaire real estate developers who would seek to destroy the city we love.

Those Vancouver civic parties who mean well, who need donations from you …

• COPE Vancouver (Coalition of Progressive Electors), Vancouver’s 2nd oldest civic party;
• TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver, the gentle density, democratic, neighbourhood-centred civic party, with Colleen Hardwick their Mayoral candidate;
• The Green Party of Vancouver, with three incumbents on City Council;
• Vote Socialist , with Sean Orr as their sole Council candidate.

The 2022 Vancouver municipal election is critical to our collective future, and the choices to be made are stark: give the city away to the greed of developers and those developer-funded civic parties who are more than eager to sell us out.

Or support — and donate to — the Vancouver civic parties who mean well for our city (you can see those party’s names listed above), and their working class candidates of integrity who are seeking office in this year’s civic election.

Or, run the very real risk of destroying the future of the city you love, the treed neighbourhood where you live, the neighbourhood park just down the street, or the nearby community recreation centre, and the lush, green home that our city has been for decades — and may be no more should you not cast your ballot wisely — the city where your children and your grandchildren play, where your neighbours, friends and colleagues gather for picnics, or to play tennis or pickleball, rugby, or soccer, or who enjoy a friendly pick up game of hacky-sack, or baseball.

Just kiss the city of Vancouver you love and have loved for so long, good-bye … because that’s what’s at stake in the 2022 Vancouver municipal election should you not donate, and go to work for, and put up campaign signs for the Vancouver civic parties and their candidates of integrity, who mean well for the future of our city.

Fifty years ago, as an editor at The Peak —  Simon Fraser University’s student newspaper —  VanRamblings wrote a weekly column titled Know Your Local Ruling Class, wherein we would interview a member of the administration, various heads of departments, activist students, and many others.

One particular week, it was our good fortune to interview the head of the fledgling university’s Philosophy Department, someone with whom we had a cursory relationship, given that early on in our university career we had met with him to ask for a late admission to a philosophy course, and another time when he had subbed in for a philosophy professor attending a conference.

As was our wont, as we did each week and as was the case in our interview with the head of the Philosophy Department, we posed the following question: What one foundational lesson have you learned in your life that has most shaped you, most changed you, made you more human, and a better, more accepting person?

The Professor offered a two word answer to the question: people change.

“Some years earlier, I had a student, a supercilious young man who rubbed me the wrong way. I thought him ambitious but insincere, too much ready to provide whomever he was engaging with the information he thought the person might want to hear, an inveterate manipulator of people so as to serve his own good, means and end, someone who if truth be told I found to be something of a detestable human being.

Toward the end of his second year at the university,  much to my chagrin, he made the decision to declare a major in philosophy, for which endeavour he required my approval. As was my duty, the two of us met, and after some while, I granted his request to pursue an Honours degree in Philosophy within the department.

Just last year, after returning from a year long sabbatical, I was told that in my absence, the university had hired a new professor to teach in the department. Much to my dismay, I learned that this new professor was the student who had graduated some years earlier that I so detested, who had gone on to earn both a Masters degree and PhD in philosophy, with a focus on Epistemology, Ethics, and Logic. Of course, I was obligated to meet with him.

An offer was made to this newly hired professor to meet with me in my office one late morning, and perhaps go to lunch afterwards, which we did. To say that I was not looking forward to this meeting would be to understate the matter — nonetheless, we met.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the young man who I had so detested had transformed into an engaging and authentic, mature young man, articulate and bright, well schooled in his areas of study and interest, and utterly charming and personable.

Not only did we attend lunch together, we continued our conversation throughout the afternoon and went out to dinner with a couple of colleagues, where the young man not only held his own, but led the group in a raucously delightful discussion.

Subsequently, with his permission, I sat in on a couple of classes he was teaching, and found him to be an inspiring and skilled teacher his students highly regarded, and if I might say, near worshipped, so engaging was he, such a compelling presence.”

As the good professor intoned: people change. No one of us, if we are possessed of any wit at all, are static in the conduct of our lives.

Such is true and we have found is more the case than that which we have witnessed over the course of the past four years respecting the transformation of 2022 TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick.

When Colleen Hardwick began her term in office, she was intent on embracing her father Walter Hardwick’s legacy as a city builder, and in a rush to burnish that legacy through the introduction of a generational, deeply citizen engaged consultation that would result in something she called The Vancouver Plan, the first motion she presented at Council early in her nascent term of office.

Colleen Hardwick and her daughter,  Kathryn (Kat), at the 1984 Liberal Party leadership convention in Ottawa, fighting for child care, fighting for change, as she has always, throughout her life. 

The orientation led by staff that took place in November and December 2018 was for her a distraction, a delay in getting started on the work that needed to be done to reclaim the city after 10 years of a Vision Vancouver administration.

The purpose of the orientation was successful in part, though, because for a time it brought the novice Councillors closer together.

Surprising to Ms. Hardwick was her developing affection and respect for newly-elected 35-year-old OneCity Vancouver City Councillor Christine Boyle who, Councillor Hardwick told VanRamblings during the 2018 holiday season, from whom she had “learned so much.”

“I was laser focused on affordable housing as a core focus of my time on Council. I discovered that  the Council priorities of my fellow Councillors was not addressing the issue of affordable housing, but was instead focused on addressing our climate emergency, and reconciliation with our Indigenous Peoples.

Christine made it abundantly clear that British Columbians are living on stolen land, and that a necessary part of addressing the crucial issue of reconciliation was to move forward expeditiously on responding to the emergency climate crisis we’re all facing.”

Over the course of that holiday season, at the OneCity Vancouver Christmas party, VanRamblings had opportunity to mention to Councillor Boyle of Colleen Hardwick’s deepening affection and respect for her.

Ms. Boyle responded to VanRamblings by harrumphing, roughly pushing us aside and all but stomping across the room to speak with her acolytes. Soon after, at the beginning of 2019, Christine Boyle set about to create the despicable and wrongheaded narrative about Councillor Hardwick that she is “a rabid right winger,” an egregious notion which Ms. Boyle successfully promoted to the media and her fellow Councillors.

“I have identified as a left Liberal my entire adult life,” Ms. Hardwick has told VanRamblings, “and have worked with women to promote opportunity and fight sexism and misogyny, promoted the cause of unions as necessary to ensure the fair treatment of workers. To be dismissed as a right winger, is anathema to everything I’ve stood for, and worked for, over the past forty years.”

Early on in her Council term, Councillor Hardwick promoted The Vancouver Plan, as an idea whose time had come, an endeavour critical to the future of our city.

Unfortunately, the realization of The Vancouver Plan, as drafted by the City of Vancouver’s Planning, Urban Design and Development Services Department, and presented to Council in June of this year, bore no relation to The Vancouver Plan Ms. Hardwick had envisioned, as a deeply engaging, one-on-one community consultation, with people living in all Vancouver neighbourhoods.

Instead, at the direction of Council — in an anti-democratic amendment drafted by Councillor  Boyle, and seconded by Councillor Pete Fry — the Planning Department was instructed to conduct the consultation sans involvement with the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods — which Ms. Boyle called “an extra legal form of government, unrepresentative and without foundation” — directing staff to conduct a consultation through Talk Vancouver, “the City’s online community of local advisors,” an unauthenticated tool of engagement, which when The Vancouver Plan was presented to Council, Ms. Hardwick referred to as “deeply flawed,” the methodology employed in consulting citizens a sham, telling her fellow Council members she was “deeply saddened” by The Vancouver Plan presented to Council, which she argued should have put housing affordability front and centre.

“One of the many flaws of the Plan,” Councillor Hardwick told Council, “is City planners and Council members’ assumption that adding new supply lowers the cost of housing.” Hardwick told Council “that since the 1980s, Vancouver has added more housing than any other major North American city and it is still the most expensive place to live. We’ve tried adding more housing to address the need for affordable housing, and it didn’t work. If you want to help the many residents who are leaving the city due to high rents, you should insist that, going forward, at least 30% of development be made available to average wage earners.”

Councillor Colleen Hardwick went on to describe her notion of gentle density, and environmentally sustainable wood frame and mass timber construction over the “egregious, greenhouse gas-emitting concrete towers the development industry so loves” that would become “the new Vancouverism, incorporating the worst elements of Manhattan & Hong Kong towerism, devoid of humanity or livability.”

Colleen Hardwick is no longer in such an unrelenting hurry to transform the development ethos of Vancouver, as a singular, exclusionary focus of her endeavours as an elected official at Vancouver City Hall now, her only priority.

“Reconciliation is a core value as City Hall, and central to the discussion on how we as a city should move forward toward a sustainable future,” Councillor Hardwick recently told VanRamblings, in conversation.

In addition to building affordable housing, Colleen Hardwick is now focused, as well, on a democratic plan that would move Vancouver’s electoral system towards a mixed representation model that would elect five Councillors at large, with an additional five Councillors held accountable for representing five distinct districts across the city. Also important to Ms. Hardwick, should she be elected Mayor of Vancouver: re-implementation of Philip Owen’s Four Pillars Plan, and appointment of a Commissioner to draft a model of engagement for the DTES that would more effectively address that which needs changing for the better on Vancouver’s DTES.

A renewed focus on the arts  in our city, dance, theatre, and film; the necessity of increasing funding to Vancouver’s parks and recreation system, and the construction of new, or re-imagined, recreation centres, and increasing green space in our city; creating sustainable job growth to keep citizens living and working in our city; developing a model for citizen engagement to democratize decision-making in our city, giving people living in Vancouver’s 23 neighbourhoods a voice in the decision-making that will transform our city’s future.

Away from the toxic stew that Vancouver City Council became over the course of these past four years, not only has Colleen Hardwick grown, transformed, blossomed,  transcended, she has developed into a passionate and charismatic figure in our city, an undeniable force of nature, perhaps the person on Council most committed to reconciliation, and most committed to addressing the ills of a downtown eastside to serve the interests of those who live in the area, through a revival of Mayor Philip Owen’s Four Pillars Plan, which rather than a purely a law enforcement issue Ms. Hardwick believes is a public health issue that could be tackled through a combination of prevention, enforcement, treatment, and harm reduction.

Make no mistake, Councillor Colleen Hardwick is the only serious-minded Mayoral candidate in this Vancouver civic election dedicated to serving the interests of all Vancouver citizens, and not just the monied forces who are funding the campaigns of ABC (A Better City?), and Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s Forward Together ‘toward a dystopian future’ Vancouver civic party of destruction.