Vancouver City Councillor Heather Deal, writing on behalf of her colleagues in Vision Vancouver, late yesterday afternoon posted an e-mail to the many thousands of folks who subscribe to our municipal ‘majority party’ government’s subscription e-mail blast ‘reach out’ facility.
In an e-mail titled ‘A clear choice‘, Ms. Deal stakes out Vision Vancouver’s position on a key issue of differentiation between Vision, and lead opposition party, the Non-Partisan Association.
The argument is clear and reasoned, and presents to the voting public a stark policy difference between the two, what now seems to be, old-line municipal electoral parties.

Today, the NPA announced that Kirk LaPointe is their candidate for Mayor. On behalf of all of us on the Vision Team, we want to welcome him to the race. Anyone who puts their name forward to seek elected office deserves our respect, and we look forward to the campaign ahead.

Our campaign is going to be about ideas for how we can move Vancouver forward. The need to build the Broadway Subway to improve transit and grow our economy. To keep moving towards becoming the greenest city in the world. Building new affordable housing, so people of all incomes can live and work in Vancouver.

That’s what our campaign is going to be about. And it’s going to show the contrast between what we offer, and the choice voters have with the NPA.

Mr. LaPointe has obviously spent a lot of time considering whether or not to run. He looked long and hard at the NPA, their positions and their policies, and liked what he saw.

In his launch today, he refused to stand up against Kinder Morgan’s massive expansion of oil tankers in our waters. We believe that’s the wrong direction for Vancouver - both for our economy and for our environment. There’s too much at risk.

This summer, when you’re out biking the seawall, running at Spanish Banks, or having a picnic at Crab Park, think to yourself: is a massive expansion of oil tankers in our local waters the direction we want Vancouver to go?

That’s just one of the many choices voters will face when they cast their ballot in November’s election.

With the NPA announcing their Mayoral candidate, we can expect the campaign to start to heat up. And throughout the next four months, we’ll be offering our positive agenda to help move Vancouver forward.

Thanks,

Heather Deal

Vision Vancouver
http://www.votevision.ca/

Now, we don’t know who actually composed the e-mail — we fully accept that the sentiments expressed in the blast reflect Ms. Deal’s position on the issues raised, but recognize that the compositional job is generally turned over to a member of the communications staff — but whoever composed the e-mail has crafted one of the best written ‘press releases’ we’ve read this electoral season, as warm and evocative in its prose as anything we’ve read this year, the e-mail inviting the reader to consider, if just for a moment, just what is at stake in the 2014 Vancouver civic election.
Congratulations to Vision Vancouver for adopting a circumspect, politic, resonant, prudent and engaging tone for the upcoming electoral campaign.

Meet Kirk LaPointe, the next Mayor of Vancouver, and current NPA mayoralty candidate

Father, husband, raconteur, journalist, editor, nobody’s fool, not beholden to special interests (read: developers, or Joel Solomon / the Tides Foundation / Hollyhock), a man of wit and intelligence who is possessed of warmth, charm and élan, a man of the people who grew up in a single family household that experienced desperate straits of poverty and want, a person who entered the profession of journalism because, as he told VanRamblings just prior to his campaign commencement address on Monday morning, “without journalism, I would never have been provided the window on the world that was afforded me. I have been fortunate in my life. The time has now come to give back, to help make the lives of families and children in our city better, to give back to the people of Vancouver.”
In 2014, Kirk LaPointe has re-fashioned the NPA as the Naturally Progressive Association (or, perhaps, as he suggested, the No Preferred Advantage municipal party — this a comment on the blaringly obvious marital tryst that Vision Vancouver has formed with developers in our city — the NPA, Vancouver’s municipal party seeking office that is on your side).
VanRamblings recommends that you watch and listen to the full commencement speech Mr. LaPointe gave to those assembled at Jack Poole Plaza yesterday morning, in order that you might gain some early insight into just what kind of man has come forward to seek the Mayor’s chair, “in 2014, in 2018, and beyond” he suggested to VanRamblings, and others.
Prior to meeting for the formal, 10am campaign kick-off announcement, just west of the Trade and Convention Centre, Mr. LaPointe met with selected media for an informal Monday morning breakfast ‘briefing’, and had the following to say on the issues facing our city, & why it is he has chosen to come forward to offer his name in candidacy for the Mayor’s chair …

An edited version of the Kirk LaPointe, NPA Mayoral candidate, media briefing | July 14, 2014

The above said — thoughtful comments made by a filmmaker, as it happens — the early response of a number of our distaff associates to whom we supplied the video proved to be at variance and more pointed …

“Omigawd, this is too much information. That is very embarrassing and I consider myself a pretty liberal person from the 60s. What on earth is this girl thinking recording something like this and then running for Park Board? Yikes. God help us if this is the best that Vision has to offer!”

Combine the overwhelmingly negative response of women to the rumours of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s purported infidelity — while the response of most men is to simply yawn, and say ‘So what” — and one would have to think, going forward, that Vision Vancouver looks to be in trouble in respect of the crucial women’s vote in the upcoming civic election campaign.

As an educator, we have taught all Grades K thru 12, in both the public and private school systems, and have taught at college and university, as well. In addition, in the 1980s and 90s, as part of a consultancy, we worked with wealthy immigrant families — mostly from Hong Kong, China and Indonesia — a feature of which was providing assistance to the children in the family, in helping them to adjust to their new (always private) schools.

The parents of the children with whom VanRamblings worked, although loving and very supportive of their children, were ultra-conservative in their approach to any one of a number of social issues, not the least of which was sex education — which, for them, even extended as far as to how their children were allowed to dress, when not in their school uniforms.

A few of the children had problems both adjusting and gaining friends, not least because of (even by the children’s own estimation) the ‘nerdy clothing‘ their parents forced them to wear. On one occasion, we asked our daughter to intervene, taking her over to speak with the mother of one particularly brilliant young lad (who was enrolled in Harvard in the summer time, although he was only in Grade 8!) — after some negotiation, the mother ended up turning over her credit card, and within two hours our daughter returned with a new — appropriate for his age and circumstance — wardrobe for the boy. Within the week, the boy had gained new friends, felt noticeably more comfortable in and out of school, and all was well.

VanRamblings expects that, in large measure, Trish Kelly’s “becoming comfortable with the thought of, and acting on, seeking pleasure from your own body” video above is directed at the many thousands of young women (and perhaps men, too) who find themselves enrolled at university, somewhat unmoored, who are attempting as best they are able to construct a sense of identity that is separate and apart from their parents. Part of establishing identity is coming to terms with one’s own sexuality.

As such, Trish Kelly’s sex positive video provides a humorous and entertaining introduction to a topic not often talked about in polite company, and even more rarely broached in the families of the young people to whom the video would appear to be directed. We are fully supportive of the intent of the video and, in particular, Ms. Kelly’s role in producing and starring in the entirely necessary and educational video.

Make no mistake, VanRamblings is not an adherent of the new puritanism. Neither will we engage in the misogynist, slut-shaming, anti-woman conduct that is, woefully, so prevalent today — which conduct just pisses us off. We release the video today in order that the video not find itself inserted as part of a future “dirty tricks” campaign directed at Ms. Kelly — say in late October or early November, when the release of the video might have maximum damaging effect on Ms. Kelly’s nascent candidacy for Park Board.

In the coming weeks and months, VanRamblings will offer reasoned argument as to why Ms. Kelly and her New Voices, One Vision slate of Vision Vancouver Park Board candidates are unfit for office — that unfitness arising from the decision taken by each slate member to run as a candidate for Vision Vancouver, and the fact that the Vision Vancouver Park Board over the course of the past six years has proved to be the worst Park Board in the whole of the 126-year history of the Vancouver Park Board.

Such criticism would be separate and apart from — which is to say, have nothing to do with — the existence of the video. VanRamblings is entirely supportive of Ms. Kelly’s candidacy, as a community activist, but not as a member of a Vision Vancouver Park Board slate that would, in office, seek to continue the desecration of our parks and community centres.

All of the above said, we wonder at a Vision Vancouver campaign team who would allow such a potentially explosive video to enter the public realm, and become what is certain to be a key element in the conversation surrounding Ms. Kelly’s appropriateness for elected office — all bereft of any explanation or contextual statement, or explicit statement of support for her candidacy.

The Vision Vancouver campaign team was obligated to develop a narrative that would turn criticism of the video into positives for both the campaign, and for Ms. Kelly’s nascent candidacy. Perhaps the video as art. Surely they must have known that the video would come to light, particularly when it is freely available on the waywardwest.tv YouTube channel.

Is the Vision campaign team in such disarray (key longtime strategists on the campaign have reportedly left) that no one bothered to vet Ms. Kelly, identifying potentially damaging material related to the candidate’s emergent run for Park Board — really, is this just another example of the low regard in which Vision holds its Park Board candidates and Commissioners, who time and again are hung out to dry by the party?

In any campaign for elected office, the campaign team takes on a role of in loco parentis. The campaign team is supposed to protect the interests of its candidates, save them harmless from the slings and arrows of poor misfortune, attacks from the opposition, and any and all information of a damaging nature that might leak out during the course of a campaign.

Thus far, the Vision campaign is conducting itself admirably — as word leaks out about character issues surrounding the Mayor, and now with Ms. Kelly’s video entering the public sphere (without any hint of context, or information supportive of the candidate) — admirable, one supposes, if they were working for the opposition. No wonder the opposition parties are doing all they can to remain mute, while staying the hell out of the way of the looming train wreck that is Vision Vancouver’s 2014 campaign for office.

Revelations on the collapse of the marriage of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson continue to find their way into the public sphere.
In response to a Facebook post on Sunday evening, a commenter (and informed source) revealed the name of the woman with whom Robertson was allegedly involved: “His extra-marital affair with ***** is well known, she was on the City Hall payroll, now on the Vision Vancouver payroll.”
In a Sunday afternoon conversation with a friend, he asked that in order to protect the interests of one of the parties involved in the developing Vision Vancouver story — a person with whom he is familiar, and for whom he, and many, many others in our community have some very deep affection — that VanRamblings “leave the story alone.”
We would, but we cannot — although we will continue to not publish revelatory information about individuals involved in this ongoing story.
The central issue in this developing civic, and election-related, intrigue is not one of alleged poor judgement on the part of Mayor, but rather …

• How revelations related to the Mayor’s alleged improper conduct speak to the character of Vancouver’s highest elected official

• The impact that the drip, drip, drip revelations of alleged misconduct and impropriety by the Mayor are having on the Vision Vancouver goal to win a third majority term in Vancouver municipal government, and

• The civil, and possibly criminal, legal implications respecting the Mayor’s conduct if it is true that taxpayer’s money was paid to the Mayor’s liaison, and in consequence whether the Mayor met his fudiciary responsibility to the public interest in such circumstance

In the evening hours following the 2011 Vision Vancouver swearing in ceremony at the Creekside Community Centre, a senior operative on the Vision team told VanRamblings …

“The 2014 Vision campaign will be a difficult one. The Mayor, and Vision itself for that matter, have an inordinate number of skeletons in their closet, any one of which, were it revealed, would devastate the campaign and lead to a likely wipeout at the polls. I can’t believe that one, or more, Vision-related revelations won’t come to light before the next campaign gets underway.”

VanRamblings has been told that the “wheels are off the bus” on the Vision Vancouver re-election campaign, that despite a rousing defense of the Mayor by Vision’s very own Queen of Mean, Director of Communications Marcella Munro — and an entirely unnecessary, wrong-headed and nasty evisceration of the opposition municipal party, the Non-Partisan Association [you know your campaign is in big trouble if you’re placing the wicked witch of the west out front, to issue a statement to the press] — that the party’s velvet mafia are concerned, once the wheels are back on the bus, just what the campaign will confront around the next bend in the campaign road.
Meanwhile, Vision Vancouver is on the attack against Alex G. Tsakumis, the reporter who broke the online story of the Mayor’s marital breakdown …

“Completely LOVE how Vision Vancouver’s friends have corralled around the embattled Mayor of Vancouver. They seem to be claiming that the Mayor’s critics are vile loathsome rumour mongers and need to stick to policy. Meanwhile … the Mayor’s staff, battalion of PR hacks, accomodative local media friends, needy real estate consultants and political operatives have spent the last three days TRYING to smear opponents, their families, and businesses by attempting to plant stories to, as one reporter put it to me an hour ago, ‘ruin you and everyone else who won’t put down your spades and stop digging for the truth.’ Gosh, sounds like he’s innocent doesn’t it? No cover up, folks, please move along. Nothing to see here. Pathetic …”

In her Globe and Mail report on the Mayor’s “separation” from his wife, Globe civic affairs journalist, Frances Bula, revealed …

“Reporters who regularly cover city hall were called at the beginning of June by people in the mayor’s office to let them know the mayor and his wife were separating and that the mayor had moved to a condo in the West End.”

Such revelation in Ms. Bula’s story causes one to wonder why it is that no journalist in town reported on the said “separation”.
Does the press — in the interests of transparency and keeping the public informed — not have a reportorial duty to reveal such information to the public, particularly when it concerns the Mayor of the third largest city in Canada? While it is true that Ms. Bula, and others in the media, have now reported out on the story, would the information of the Mayor’s marriage breakdown ever have been reported, had Mr. Tsakumis not published his Facebook post Friday night, and revealed the details of the separation?
One would have to assume that, as seasoned journalists, those who were “called into the office” must have understood what the potential impact the revelation of the Mayor’s marital breakdown might possibly have on the Mayor’s bid for re-election this autumn. One wonders, too, why Vision Vancouver didn’t get ahead of the story, and have their journalist ‘friends’ report out — isn’t that a central tenet of Crisis Management 101?
One is left to ponder what the well-experienced professionals who constitute Vision Vancouver’s velvet mafia campaign team must have been thinking — surely they’ve been to this rodeo before many, many times, and would know full well what the downside might, and would probably, be if they didn’t get out ahead of what - surprise surprise - is now a potentially far more damaging story than would have been the case had they issued a simple, early June press release on the matter, with all the attendant spin.
As Clinton-Gore strategist Paul Begala once said on the campaign trail, “Politics is show business for ugly people” — following from Mr. Begala’s pithy aphorism, it is not difficult to determine why it is that there is so much interest attached to the story of Robertson political ‘intrigue’.

On Saturday, VanRamblings tweeted out …

In respect of the first tenet, and this particularly would be true for folks who are, or have found themselves, secure within a successful, loving relationship - what Vancouver voters must know is that Mr. Robertson no longer has his closest and most trusted confidante to advise him and provide succour during the course of what will most assuredly be a very difficult autumn electoral campaign - which circumstance must be devastating for him, and perforce his upcoming re-election campaign.
Reports are, too - and this, again, would be true of most marriages - Mr. Robertson’s spouse was the brighter and more savvy of the two politicos, and the loss of her companionship and counsel cannot help but have a traumatizing impact on his ability to perform to par, even despite the advice of a first-rate campaign team, over the course of the coming four months.
In respect of the second tenet: if you have studied, at all (as has VanRamblings), the development of social policy and the body politic, you would know to a certainty that the second truism is just as applicable to the federal Tory cabinet as it is to the conduct of municipal affairs in the city of Vancouver, and all circumstances beyond of a political nature.
Make no mistake, the Vision Vancouver electoral campaign is reeling.
In 2002, when the NPA’s Jennifer Clarke conducted a coup d’etat against sitting NPA Mayor Philip Owen, the NPA were devastated at the polls that November. In 2005, with the Coalition of Progressive Electors’ rent by division, COPE went down to ignominious defeat, and Vancouver’s natural governing party, the NPA, was once again re-elected to majority municipal government. In 2008, with members of the NPA once again at each other’s throats, NPA Councillor Peter Ladner mounting a successful challenge to NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan, the NPA were all but wiped out at the polls.
Vancouver voters do not like drama. Drama equals defeat at the polls.
For six years now, Mayor Gregor Robertson has been almost unassailable - despite his occasional egregious, verging on amoral conduct - the perfect and well-chiseled Teflon figurehead for his Vision Vancouver municipal party.
But now - given all the cries arising from the community for the defeat of Robertson and his Vision colleagues - a ‘circumstance’ has developed that is unrelated to policy, development, park maintenance or the myriad other areas of civic jurisdiction for which a municipal government is responsible.
Whether Vision Vancouver likes it or not, there’s a whisper campaign going on out there, a campaign over which they have no control. The core message of the 2014 Vancouver civic election campaign is slowly changing — and VanRamblings would suggest, the prospects for Vision Vancouver in the lead up to, and on, November 15, 2014, are not good, not good at all.