The 2018 Vancouver municipal election has been full of surprises, but none more revelatory than the Coalition of Progressive Electors’ (COPE) re-emergence as serious contenders at all three levels of civic governance.
COPE: the must party for which to cast a ballot for those among us who want real, palpable change — which is to say, a municipal political party dedicated to the construction of thousands of units of truly affordable “social” housing, ranging from democratically-run housing co-ops, co-housing, supportive housing, modular housing, rental housing, town homes, and environmentally sound low-rise apartment buildings and townhouses in every one of Vancouver’s twenty-three neighbourhoods.
COPE’s progressive City Council candidates Anne Roberts, Derrick O’Keefe and Jean Swanson are laser-focused on the provision of affordable housing for all of us, to reclaiming Vancouver for working people across all of our diverse neighbourhoods, in all of our diverse communities.
Adriane Carr & Pete Fry working with COPE + OneCity Vancouver to build the city we need
Working with OneCity Vancouver’s Christine Boyle and Brandon Yan, and the Green Party’s Adriane Carr and Pete Fry, together these Council candidates of conscience would constitute the working majority at City Hall post October 20th, where they would set an agenda focused on ensuring that all families would be afforded safe, secure housing at affordable rates.
Sound like a pipe dream? Not on your life.
In COPE candidate for City Council Derrick O’Keefe, Vancouver now has our very own articulate, inspiring and winning social justice fighter, kin to Seattle’s much-beloved Kshama Sawant, New York City’s wildly popular Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Victoria’s Ben Isitt — someone who will stand up for you, for the planet, and for the folks who live in your neighbourhood.
All elections are crucial, but none more so than Vancouver’s 2018 municipal election. Derrick, Jean Swanson and Anne Roberts not only promise change, each is committed to achieving and accomplishing change for the better that is fair, just and serves the interests of the many over the few.
Surely, heading into the 2018 Vancouver civic election, you don’t want more of the same, the politics of meanness and scarcity, the continuing ugliness of the depletion of our city’s physical and social environment, made even more grave and consuming of our every waking thought by the grip of Vancouver’s ever-worsening affordable housing crisis, a ruinous city and province where the redistribution of money from hardworking British Columbians like you and me serves only to line the pockets of the idle and undeserving, at the continuing insupportable expense of our families.
The Vancouver Non-Partisan Association, Yes Vancouver, Wai Young’s so-called Coalition Party and Fred Harding’s Vancouver 1st civic parties promise only austerity, wont and increased social and economic anxiety, and a tragic political paradigm that promises an even more virulent attack on the social and economic interests of working people, in order that the interests of the economically privileged few might be better served.
The 2018 Vancouver civic election is about nothing less than the survival of our community, how going forward we will we organize our communal life and rule ourselves compatible with our economic and social interests.
In 2018, the choices we will make at the ballot box are stark: a vote for COPE’s Anne Roberts, Derrick O’Keefe and Jean Swanson, OneCity Vancouver’s Christine Boyle and Brandon Yan, and the Green Party’s Pete Fry and Adriane Carr — complemented, perhaps, by Rob McDowell, Sarah Blyth and Sarah Kirby-Yung — or the irrecoverable ruination of our city and our physical environment. October 20th: the choice will be yours to make.
