OneCity Vancouver’s 2018 candidates for City Council, Brandon Yan and Christine Boyle
United Church Minister, longtime community activist and lifelong Vancouver resident, Christine Boyle — for those of you who have been following VanRamblings’ coverage of the 2018 Vancouver civic election, you’ll know the accomplished Ms. Boyle is our favourite 2018 candidate for office — and Brandon Yan, a community activist with a Master’s degree in Urban Studies from Simon Fraser University, where he researched civic education and public engagement practices — were selected by OneCity Vancouver’s membership as the party’s 2018 candidates for Vancouver City Council.
OneCity Vancouver’s Christine Boyle addressing members at nomination meeting
Brandon ‘hope of our future‘ Yan thanking new members of OneCity Vancouver
OneCity Vancouver 2018 School Board Candidates
OneCity Vancouver’s Jennifer Reddy, Erica Jaaf & current Vancouver School Board trustee Carrie Bercic were selected as the party’s 2018 candidates for Vancouver School Board
OneCity Vancouver also selected its 2018 Vancouver School Board candidates at Saturday’s nomination meeting: Jennifer Reddy, 2010 – 2017 Vancouver School Board Program Director for Engaged Immigrant Youth & Settlement Workers in Schools; Data Manager for Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) — Canada’s federal funding agency for health research — HIV Trials Network, and longtime public education activist, Erica Jaaf; and veteran public education activist, current OneCity Vancouver School Board trustee, and the conscience of the Board, Carrie Bercic.
Under a progressive coalition arrangement struck with the Vancouver & District Labour Council, OneCity Vancouver was allowed to run two City Council and three Vancouver School Board candidates. In the 2018 civic election, OneCity has chosen not to run Vancouver Park Board candidates.
Brandon Yan committed to electing a progressive civic administration at City Hall this year.
All was not sweetness and light at the OneCity Vancouver, though — although you’ll never meet a more engaged and good-humoured, passionate and compassionate group of civic politicos than is evident hourly with the good, caring and activist folks involved in OneCity. No, the hardest working and most organized, with the best on-the-ground team signing up members and running a pretty darn skookum nomination campaign, was Ben Bollinger, who could be seen standing outside the Polish Community Centre building gently kvetching that a OneCity nomination candidate for Council, other than he, looked likely to be selected by the some 266 OneCity members ready to cast their ballot on Saturday afternoon.
Blame Charlie Smith, the Georgia Straight’s longtime editor, who wrote a column last week headlined Racist at-large voting system creates uphill challenge for Vancouver candidates of colour, in which he wrote …
“Vancouver’s at-large system would lead to the election of hardly any new candidates of colour to Vancouver council. It might result in an even whiter council than the current group, which includes Kerry Jang and Raymond Louie.”
One supposes that VanRamblings didn’t actually aid Mr. Bollinger’s venture, either, when we pointed out in a June 5th column that …
According to the 2016 census demographic, Vancouver’s population by racial and ethnic breakdown …
- Chinese: 27.7%
- South Asian: 6%
- Filipino: 6%
- Southeast Asian: 3%
- Japanese: 1.7%
- Korean: 1.5%
- West Asian: 1.2%
Take a look at the figures: 47.1% of Vancouver’s population is Asian.
The Asian vote is monolithic.
Buzz in the Polish Centre Hall was that members should give serious consideration to casting a ballot for either candidate of colour, Brandon Yan or RJ Aquino, which venture ended up savaging Mr. Bolliger’s unannounced vote total. Still, almost unique to OneCity Vancouver, members and candidates in the party work together as a team, for the greater good not just of the party, but for the citizens of Vancouver.
You can take it to the bank that there’ll be no harder-working OneCity Vancouver campaigner for OneCity candidates than Ben Bolliger.
Full disclosure: VanRamblings is a member of OneCity Vancouver, although we keep at top of mind, Groucho Marx’s old aphorism, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”
For now, though, VanRamblings has something of a love affair going on with OneCity Vancouver (although, we’re quite sure we’re driving them crazy — condolences may be sent to OneCity co-chairs Alison Atkinson and Anna Chudnovsky, as well as Board member Cara Ng, and OneCity Vancouver City Council candidate, must, must, must-elect Christine Boyle).
2018’s Vancouver civic election is — for the first time ever, we believe — a heart election, an election in which we believe that the most compassionate and heart-filled candidates in the current civic election will be elected to Vancouver City Council, Vancouver School Board & Vancouver Park Board.
Of course, we’re talking: informed heart, fiscally prudent heart, affordable housing championing heart, public education activist heart, parks, recreation and environmentally conscious heart, good-humoured and good-natured heart, change the city for all of us, and not just the elites, representing heart — a beating, vibrant heart that will sweep OneCity Vancouver’s Christine Boyle & Brandon Yan, Coalition of Progressive Electors’ Jean Swanson, Anne Roberts & Derrick O’Keefe, and Green Party of Vancouver’s’ Adriane Carr & Pete Fry to a bountiful victory as the 2018 – 2022 Vancouver City Councillors of conscience, to build The City We Need.
