VanElxn2022 | An Ugly and Disputatious Vancouver Municipal Election In 2022

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In 2014, Vision Vancouver’s Queen of Mean, the party’s longtime Director of Communications, Marcella Munro, ran a 24-hour-a-day backroom operation for the governing party, staffed by 20 writers who’d been hired to respond to any online provocation that might be seen by some to bring Vision Vancouver into disrepute.

For the most part, the operation was harmless: if some average citizen made a comment on an online story in The Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Sun or The Province newspapers — or any other online publication that covered civic affairs, including social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — members of the cult-like Vision Defense Team were at the ready with a pithy and well-written response to the miscreant commenter who had dared — heaven forbid! — to call into question the innate integrity and goodness of  Vision Vancouver.

That was then. This is now. Over the past eight years, political dirty tricks, such as the relatively harmless work of the Vision Defense Team, has evolved.

It would seem that the Greg Andrews aka @gregeh on Twitter — a vicious YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) provocateur — who attacked TEAM’s quite wonderful Linsea O’Shea (the absolute find of the 2022 Vancouver civic election campaign) is not only a disreputable, violence prone misogynist (aren’t they all?), but an avowed racist and serial abuser who counsels women to take their lives (isn’t that a crime?)

You see, these YIMBY folks — who would very much seem to be in the employ of Vancouver’s development industry — in pushing for more unaffordable condos to be built everywhere across the city, and who — unlike Marcella Munro and her otherwise well-intentioned Vision Defense Team — are prepared to go to any lengths, involve themselves in any sort of untoward conduct that would, at least on the surface, seem to serve the declared interests of their well-heeled developer masters.

VanRamblings would like to present Mr. Andrews’ original tweets but, alas, he’s blocked us, so you’ll just have to make do with the following screen captures …

Also, note this: Greg Andrews has argued for gassing his opponents …

Despite Andrews’ history of racism, misogyny and violence, a number of local YIMBY politicians and activists follow him on social media.

According to a June 17, 2021 story in the online indie journal, ThinkPol …

This is not the first time Vancouver’s YIMBY movement has faced allegations of racism. During the 2018 municipal elections, a YIMBY blogger asked voters to reject a South Asian candidate because “you can take a slave out of the jungle but you can’t take the jungle out of a savage.”

A surfeit of directors of Vancouver’s prominent YIMBY organization, Abundant Housing Vancouver, shared the blog post, later claiming that publication of the blog post was a conspiracy by the group’s opponents to make the group look bad.

In 2020, YIMBY blogger, Smart Living VanCity, came out as an alt-right white supremacist. A number of YIMBY advocates, including Greg Andrews, have since turned their Twitter timelines private, as @MonitorYvr continues to tweet out.

All of the above is to record the toxic level of discourse among opposing sides in the debate as to whether steel-and-concrete, beads on a string, greenhouse gas emitting podium and plynth style 40, 50, 60 and 70 storey towers is the development model Vancouver should adopt going forward — as is the case with the Forward Together, Vision / OneCity and Progress Vancouver civic parties — or, as is the case with TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver, a democratic and community engaged, neighbourhood-and-citizen respecting gentle density approach to building housing to resolve Vancouver’s omnipresent housing crisis is the preferred approach.

Meanwhile, in other not-so-good news of the day, the September 19th Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods Mayoral debate that was to take place at the Britannia Community Centre and be moderated by Business in Vancouver publisher and editor-in-chief, Kirk LaPointe, was cancelled yesterday, after a representative for ABC Mayoral candidate Ken Sim wrote to the Coalition stating that Mr. Sim would not be made available to attend the single most important Mayoral debate of the 2022 election season, while Vancouver’s feckless and invisible Mayor Kennedy Stewart and his Forward Together Vancouver civic party failed to respond at all.

In other distressing campaign news, the Non Partisan Association (NPA) is accusing ABC President Peter Armstrong of hiring an individual to work on the NPA campaign, with the sole purpose of retrieving data from the NPA for ABC (A Better City?) to use in their campaign — for many years, Mr. Armstrong was the President of the NPA, only to have the party stolen from him while vacationing on his yacht, and visiting his very good friend, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson’s Italian villa.

As for more dirty tricks from the ABC campaign for office, there’s this …

Then there’s this tweet by Peter Meiszner, an ABC candidate for Council.

And how about Vancouver City Councillor Christine Boyle’s “head over heels in love with her” (wait til he wakes up one day) husband Seth Klein going after TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver Mayoral candidate, Colleen Hardwick.

VanRamblings will leave the campaigns for office with this peace of advice …

Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

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