The Grounds the 2018 Vancouver Civic Election May be Fought On Part 1, Backlash: Rightist Vancouver Residents Rise Up to Fight City Hall
The 2018 Vancouver civic election is less than five months away, with election results available late in the evening of Saturday, October 20th.
As the six main Vancouver political parties ramp up their election strategy, the issues emerging are affordable & social housing, transit, property taxes, street cleanliness and service to the public, renewal of our community centre system, and civic government expenditure. But are these the issues, the ground that 2018’s Vancouver civic election will actually be fought on?
VanRamblings would suggest to you the core issue for some residents in the coming Vancouver civic election only tangentially relate to the platform issues on which Vancouver’s six civic parties will run their 2018 campaigns.
Rather, VanRamblings would present to you that the core issue of the coming civic election is … heart, or the lack thereof, and the willingness of Vancouver voters to place self-interest second to that of poverty reduction, and the construction of transitional, social and affordable housing in neighbourhoods across our city, over the course of the next four years.
Funded by the province and being built in the City of Vancouver, by this time next year 680 transitional modular housing units will have opened on ten or more supervised sites across the city, located in as many Vancouver neighbourhoods, the modular housing meant to house Vancouver’s most vulnerable population. The experience of the City following an announcement of modular housing construction has found that each and every time a new modular housing project site is announced, be it at …
- Little Mountain, at 37th and Main;
- 650 West 67th Avenue, at Heather Street;
- 595 and 599 West 2nd Avenue, near the Vancouver Police Department headquarters, and nearby the Olympic Village Canada Line station;
- 4480 Kaslo Street, just south of the 29th Avenue Skytrain station;
- 1131 Franklin Street, over by the B.C. Sugar Refinery, just off Powell Street; and
- 525 Powell Street, at Jackson Street.
Fearful, socially regressive neighbours driven by self-interest, safety and the potential for lower property values come out in droves, well-organized and sometimes numbering in the hundreds, carrying signs and yelling at passersby, while vehemently protesting modular housing construction in their neighbourhood, each time the City announces a new construction site.
Vancouver Coastal Health has proposed an affordable housing facility and detox treatment centre on East 1st Avenue at Clark Drive, the project a divisive one for some Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood residents. One group of locals, though, worries such divisive behaviour will teach their children to be afraid of those who most need assistance and empathy, this latter group coming out in favour of the project.
OneCity Vancouver candidate for City Council, Christine Boyle, had an unhappy experience at a May 2nd Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood — the neighbourhood where her family and friends live — information session on a proposed affordable housing facility and treatment centre to be located on East 1st Avenue at Clark Drive, with the treatment centre controversially, for some residents, taking over the duties for the current, smaller detox centre located on East 2nd Avenue, near Main.
Ms. Boyle said such opposition to the treatment centre was disappointing.
“I don’t want my kids to learn that they should be fearful of people who are homeless or struggling,” Boyle told StarMetro Vancouver reporter, Perrin Grauer. “I worry that’s the lesson coming out of this.”
And there you have it: NIMBY residents opposing modular housing construction in their neighbourhood, or construction of an under lock and key detox and treatment centre — and even the provision of affordable housing in their neighbourhood, that might lower their property values.
Heart, social conscience, empathy for our most vulnerable citizens vs naked, socially maladroit, near-heartless self-interest. That my friends, is the battle ground on which 2018’s Vancouver civic election may be fought.
The 2018 Vancouver civic election is a “throw the bums out” election, and by that many Vancouver residents mean — we’ll see how many, come the evening of Saturday, October 20th — that they’re “sick-and-tired” of the social engineering that has gone on at City Hall”, the focus on reconciliation with our indigenous peoples, promoting the interests of women in the workplace, making our city a racism-free zone, a nuclear-free zone, catering to the interests of our LGBTQ and gender variant communities, Vancouver as a non-gendered bathroom zone, a catering to the interests of vulnerable citizens zone — all at the expense of “tax paying” NIMBY citizens — a city where progressivism has been the order of the day, all much to the chagrin of Vancouver’s meaner, more socially regressive “hey, it’s all about me, my interests, maintaining the value of my property” citizens.
In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, progressives were convinced that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had a presidential win and four years in the White House in the bag, that under no circumstance would a sexist and misogynist, barely literate and totally uninformed man-child buffoon go on to win the White House. Well, you know how that one turned out.
In the 2018 Vancouver election, a lowest common denominator Mayoral candidate, and candidates for Council will emerge — the Wai Young Coalition Party and Hector Bremner campaigns — will emerge from the primordial muck quite soon, well-financed and hungry for power, and ready to turn the clock back to a meaner time, a “people’s movement” that could snatch victory from both the progressive party coalition, and the socially progressive, nominally right-of-centre Vancouver Non-Partisan Association.
