Tag Archives: 2022 municipal election

#VanElxn2022 | A Quick, Neighbourly Précis of Vancouver’s Civic Election

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Over the weekend, at the request of a neighbour — who was out doing some gardening at the front of our home —  VanRamblings engaged in a conversation about the 2022 Vancouver municipal election, who the Mayoral candidates are, and what the various municipal parties offering candidates for office aspire to as they seek to take residence at Vancouver City Hall post election day, Saturday, October 15th.

VanRamblings apprised our cherished, hard working neighbour, as follows …

Mayor Kennedy Stewart, and his Forward Together municipal party. Now, here’s a Mayor who spent more time this past term in office meeting with and acquiescing to real estate developers in our town than he did working on behalf of those who (barely) elected him to office in 2018. What does Forward Together stand for? Build, build and build more 40 storey towers everywhere, on every block, more towers than you can imagine, almost all of which will be sold offshore, as speculative ventures rather than homes, and which units in these towers will remain unoccupied long, long into the future. Mayor Kennedy = the politics of greed run rampant, a Mayor absolutely not on your side.

“Hmmm,” my neighbour said, “that doesn’t sound good.”

“No, it doesn’t,” VanRamblings responded. “But there’s worse than Mayor Kennedy Stewart, and his Forward Together party — who are now running 6 candidates for Council! With provincial election legislation kicking in Thursday, September 15th restricting campaign spending, in the last 10 days in adding Alvin Singh, Tessica Truong and the Mayor’s wife, Jeanette Ashe, to Forward Together’s campaign slate, each new candidate allows the expenditure of an additional $220,000 apiece in overall campaign spending = $1.32 million for ads, social media, billboards and radio and TV advertising in the four week lead-up to election day.”

“One more point: the OneCity Vancouver and Vision Vancouver civic parties are brothers and sisters in arms of Forward Together, in this election. A vote for candidates running with any of these three civic political parties is a vote for another term of a feckless Kennedy Stewart as Vancouver’s Mayor.”

“Now, where was I? Oh yes. There’s worse than Mayor Kennedy Stewart and Forward Together in the 2022 Vancouver civic election.”

ABC (A Better City). In a greater rush to destroy our city than any other municipal party with candidates running for office in the 2022 Vancouver civic election —  with paper candidate / unprincipled ABC front man / dumb as a door knob (about civic politics) Ken Sim, as ABC’s Mayoral candidate —  the powers behind ABC (that would be multi-millionaire Rocky Mountaineer owner / businessman Peter Armstrong,  and multi-billionaire Lululemon founder Chip Wilson) — won’t be giving the city away to developers, as say, Forward Together intends. Nope. ABC will be the developer, both Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Wilson fancying themselves as future billionaire Vancouver real estate developers, who intend to rescind the Empty Homes Tax, should they gain a majority on Council, and demand the provincial government —  be it an NDP, or a provincial Liberal government over in Victoria —  rescind their Empty Homes Tax, prepared to call out the duly elected MLAs and Cabinet members as “racists” for not allowing a multi-billion dollar influx of foreign capital to pour into the construction of more towers than you could possibly imagine —  can you say the word expropriation? We knew you could —  displacing Vancouver residents all in the name of greed.

A vote for ABC (A Better City?) Mayoral candidate Ken Sim would mean that you hate yourself, you hate your children and grandchildren, you hate your family, your neighbours and your colleagues, their children and their children’s children, and that you not only don’t care about our city, you actually hate our city. A vote for ABC = a death wish for what we’ve known and come to love as … Vancouver.

“Surely, there’s got to be someone out there with their head screwed on straight,” averred our neighbour. “Someone who has the best interests of the city at heart, for you, for me, for our families. Tell me that’s so, Raymond.”

L-R Stephen Roberts, Grace Quan, Param Nijjar, Colleen Hardwick, Bill Tieleman, Cleta Brown, Sean Nardi

TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver. Although not perfect —  VanRamblings wants to see meat-on-the-bone policies —  in 2022, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver is the only game in town, the only Vancouver civic party for which you can cast your ballot in good conscience. Not only is TEAM Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick the single most caring, educated and principled candidate among the five Mayoral candidates seeking office in Vancouver in 2022, she’s … now steady yourself … a democrat. Yes, that’s right: unlike every other candidate running for office with all the other Vancouver civic parties in 2022, Councillor Colleen Hardwick, and her six TEAM candidates for Vancouver City Council, would pause the completely unnecessary paean to real estate developers —  the Broadway Plan and the Vancouver Plan —  with a TEAM civic administration plan that would commence a multi-neighbourhood re-drafting of community plans for Vancouver’s 23 diverse neighbourhoods that would ensure densification in each neighbourhood, as necessary, while incorporating schools, parks, small business, green space and plazas, recreation centres and other community amenities into those community plans.


Arbutus Walk, a human-scale, gentle density Kitsilano development at 12th and Arbutus

If you care about the city of Vancouver at all, if you love your children, and hold your family, your neighbours and your colleagues in high regard, and want the best for them, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver, and TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver alone has the Mayoral candidate, in Colleen Hardwick, and the Council candidate slate for which you can, in good conscience, cast your ballot at the advance polls early next month, or on the autumn election day of Saturday, October 15th.

Only TEAM for a Livable Vancouver will work to preserve neighbourhood integrity.

Above: graphic representations of the Broadway Plan, passed by Vancouver City Council

Now for the also-ran Vancouver Mayoral candidates I told my neighbour about.

Mark Marissen and Progress Vancouver. Running a pretty much carbon copy Forward Together / Vision Vancouver / OneCity Vancouver campaign for office, as much as VanRamblings likes Mark Marissen, and at least one of his Council candidates running for office, Mark Marissen has as much chance of becoming Vancouver’s next Mayor as you, your post person, or VanRamblings does. A knowledgeable and respected politico with a good heart, Mark Marissen has mounted a virtually invisible campaign for the Mayor’s office. In 2018, the Vancouver civic party he created, Yes Vancouver, secured 9,924 votes and 5.73%  of the vote —  which we’re pretty much expecting will be the case in 2022, as well.

Fred Harding, and the Non-Partisan Association. Fred Harding, who operates a business out of Mainland China, and whose wife wife Zhang Mi is a popular, well-known singer across Asia, was parachuted into the position of the NPA’s 2022 Mayoral candidate — after both Colleen Hardwick and Mark Marissen refused the NPA’s entreaties, following NPA Mayoral candidate John Coupar’s unseemly ejection as the NPA’s Mayoral candidate. A personable fellow, who presents well, given the trials and tribulations of the Non-Partisan Association campaign for office in 2022 —  hardly aided by the American-style dirty tricks campaign Peter Armstrong and ABC are running against the NPA, whose voters list Peter Armstrong stole before setting about to form ABC as his “new” Vancouver civic party — the NPA would seem to in deep trouble in 2022, and may be hard-pressed to elect anyone to office.

#VanPoli | False Creek South | The Heart of Our City Preserved

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REJECTED | City of Vancouver Real Estate Department Plan for False Creek South

In early October, when the City of Vancouver’s Real Estate Department presented a sordid, mercenary plan for the redevelopment of False Creek South —  that parcel of land on the south side of False Creek stretching from the Cambie Street bridge to the Granville Street bridge — Mayor Kennedy Stewart the very next day came out in full-throated support of The Plan, writing in an overly solicitous column published in The Straight that averred …

“Great cities like ours can never stand still. We must always examine whether our city is meeting our needs, both for today and tomorrow.”

The Real Estate Department’s Plan called for a greedy financial return to the City, that sought to more than triple the existing density of homes in the False Creek South neighbourhood, from 2450 units to a reconfigured 6600 units.

The real cost of the Plan?

The absolute, utter destruction of the False Creek South neighbourhood, a decimation of the heart and demographic integrity of one of Vancouver’s most sustainable and livable districts — the ‘close-fisted’ Plan laying waste to existing housing co-operatives dotted throughout the neighbourhood, moving residents from their current locations to a ghettoized, ‘poor door’ stretch of land situated along the bustling, carbon emitting 6th Avenue traffic corridor.

Community outrage soon ensued.

As founding chair of the UBC urban design programme, Patrick Condon, wrote in an article in The Tyee , the City’s Real Estate Department’s Plan would …

  • Increase market condos nearly fourfold, from 688 to 2,350 units;
  • Increase by more than 13x market rental units, from 150 to 2020 units;
  • See all new buildings constructed at least six storeys tall, ranging up to 50 storeys tall at the Granville Street bridgehead. Today, most buildings on the district’s city-owned land are three to four storeys in height;
  • Shift the tenure mix on city-owned land from the current 36% market strata, 8% market rental & 56% non-market co-op / affordable rental units, to 35% market strata, 30% market rental, and 34% non-market co-op and affordable rental;
  • Eventually demolish most of the existing co-ops, with these sites reused for market rentals and market condos, or to expand Charleson Park.

As Robert Renger, a retired senior planner who worked with the City of Burnaby, wrote in a response article in The Straight to the column written by Mayor Stewart — as well as to supporters of the City of Vancouver’s Real Estate Department’s Plan for False Creek South, which accused False Creek South residents of both nimbyism and elitism …

  • 15% of FCS residents are children, with 11% freehold and 16% citywide;
  • 17.5% of False Creek South family households are single-parent, compared to 10.9% of False Creek South freehold and 15.9% citywide;
  • The income mix on FCS lands closely parallels that of the city as a whole.
  • The residents of False Creek South had long ago published a document they called RePlan , a thorough and critical vetting of the City’s proposed Plan for the False Creek South neighbourhood, writing that …

    “False Creek South offers a housing model that is affordable, resilient and community-focused, with a variety of affordable, mixed-income housing options that span a spectrum of housing tenures. We are calling on Vancouver City Council to protect the existing variety of affordable, mixed-income housing options in False Creek South, to eliminate the threat of housing insecurity on leased City land, to kick start community growth, and to create right-sized housing in the False Creek South neighbourhood.

    Let’s expand affordable, resilient, mixed-income, mixed-tenure housing communities. Vancouver needs to protect and create more housing that is community centred, diverse, equitable, inclusive and secure that spans all leasehold housing tenures, including permanent housing for people who have experienced or are at risk of homelessness.”

    On October 5th in a motion presented to her colleagues on Vancouver City Council, Councillor Colleen Hardwick did just that in calling for security of tenure for the beleaguered residents of False Creek South, whose ongoing residency in the neighbourhood would be jeopardized by the redevelopment Plan published by the City’s Real Estate Department. Before that motion could be discussed around the Council table, the members of Council sought to hear feedback from the residents of False Creek South, as well as citizens from right across the city.

    Councillor Colleen Hardwick + retired CoV planner / RePlan co-author , Nathan Edelson

    Long story short, after hearing from some 171 residents of the City of Vancouver — many of them children, now adults, who had grown up in the False Creek South neighbourhood — in, perhaps, the most moving series of addresses this or any other Council has ever heard, in an amendment motion presented by Councillor Christine Boyle, all 10 Vancouver City Councillors, with an about face by Mayor Kennedy Stewart, unanimously rejected the City Real Estate Department’s Plan for False Creek South, instead opting to turn the process of the redevelopment of False Creek South to the City’s Planning Department, which planning process will include respectful and extensive consultation not only with False Creek South residents, but engaged residents across the city at-large.

#VanPoli Politics | The Pending Chaos of the 2022 Vancouver Civic Election

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In somewhat under a year — Saturday, October 15, 2022 to be exact — the next Vancouver municipal election will take place, when a Mayor and 10 City Councillors will be elected to civic office at Vancouver City Hall in our fair city by the sea.

Although VanRamblings will not commence intensive coverage of Vancouver’s next civic election until sometime in the spring of 2022, there is enough going on politics-wise in our city to comment on the state of municipal political affairs — which is what VanRamblings will set out to do over the next couple of weeks.

Why all the hubbub about Vancouver politics in the autumn of 2021?

When our NDP provincial government brought in legislation governing the conduct of municipal elections — limiting / eliminating third party advertising in the three months prior to the election date, while also limiting the expenditure of monies each civic party, and candidate, could spend towards the goal of achieving civic office — the doors were left wide open to spend any amount of money in the civic arena prior to the exertion of British Columbia’s civic election “restriction date”.

Thus you have A Better City mayoral candidate Ken Sim — who in the 2018 Vancouver civic election ran as Mayoral candidate for the Non-Partisan Association, coming within 1,000 votes of becoming our city’s Mayor — holding a campaign kickoff and fundraiser this past Wednesday at Chinatown’s Floata Seafood Restaurant, where all of Vancouver’s esteemed civic reporters were on hand to nosh on food, and otherwise kibbitz with one another and attendees at this swish municipal affairs soirée. That Peter Armstrong (Mr. Sim’s main financial backer, who introduced Sim to civic politics), he sure does know how to put on a feed.

Current Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart has announced that he’ll seek re-election in 2022. Longtime political fixer and campaign strategist extraordinaire, Mark Marissen, has announced his bid for Mayor, as has current Park Board Commissioner John Coupar. Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick has also served notice that she will seek the Mayoral nomination with  a reinvigorated TEAM (The Electors Action Movement) civic party — that’s five mayoral candidates.

VanRamblings believes that the 2022 Vancouver municipal election will prove to be the ugliest and most divisive civic election ever waged in our west coast burgh, that there’ll be no end of bad behaviour from the myriad candidates putting their names forward in the hope of gaining office and tenure on Vancouver City Council, that OneCity Vancouver — and more particularly, OneCity Vancouver’s resident ‘mean girl’ Council mainstay, Christine Boyle — will run a vicious campaign of unrivaled and unmitigated class warfare against the parties and candidates OneCity has already successfully defined as “right wing”, with the media buying into this condemnable nonsense hook, line and sinker. Alas — it was always thus. 😢