Here we are, just a tad more than three weeks away from Vancouver’s most consequential election in 50 years.
As a friend was saying to us at lunch yesterday, “No one wants towers built across our city. We want livable neighbourhoods, parks and recreation centres, schools and plazas, restaurants like this one where you can sit on the patio in the middle of the day and enjoy an afternoon repast with a friend. Towers? No thank you!”
Political campaigns rely on volunteers to go door knocking, work in the party’s telephone room, participate in burmashaves — that’s when you see a bunch of folks holding and waving campaign signs at you, when you’re heading off to work, or coming home — staff the campaign office, and work to secure the donations that campaigns for office require to create campaign literature, lawn signs, pay for the office, and fund the myriad aspects of a civic political campaign for candidates working towards being elected to one of Vancouver’s three civic bodies: Vancouver City Council, Vancouver Park Board, and Vancouver School Board.
As we have seen in recent days, there are those Vancouver civic parties who are well-funded by the billionaire developers in our city, who would presume to build 3,000 towers across the city if their civic parties gain office at Vancouver City Hall: ABC (A Better City), Forward Together (the Mayor’s party) OneCity Vancouver, Progress Vancouver and Vision Vancouver — which held power at Vancouver City Hall, from 2008 to 2018 — and the troubled Vancouver Non-Partisan Association.
Incumbent COPE Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, Gwen Giesbrecht, hosted a fundraiser / birthday party for herself and her friends — and COPE — on Saturday, September 17, at Riddim & Spice.
Then there are those Vancouver civic parties who mean good for our city, do not take real estate developer donations, and are seeking to represent you, not the billionaire real estate developers who would seek to destroy the city we love.
Those Vancouver civic parties who mean well, who need donations from you …
- COPE Vancouver (Coalition of Progressive Electors), Vancouver’s 2nd oldest civic party;
- TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver, the gentle density, democratic, neighbourhood-centred civic party, with Colleen Hardwick their Mayoral candidate;
- The Green Party of Vancouver, with three incumbents on City Council;
- Vote Socialist , with Sean Orr as their sole Council candidate.
The 2022 Vancouver municipal election is critical to our collective future, and the choices to be made are stark: give the city away to the greed of developers and those developer-funded civic parties who are more than eager to sell us out.
Or support — and donate to — the Vancouver civic parties who mean well for our city (you can see those party’s names listed above), and their working class candidates of integrity who are seeking office in this year’s civic election.
Or, run the very real risk of destroying the future of the city you love, the treed neighbourhood where you live, the neighbourhood park just down the street, or the nearby community recreation centre, and the lush, green home that our city has been for decades — and may be no more should you not cast your ballot wisely — the city where your children and your grandchildren play, where your neighbours, friends and colleagues gather for picnics, or to play tennis or pickleball, rugby, or soccer, or who enjoy a friendly pick up game of hacky-sack, or baseball.
Just kiss the city of Vancouver you love and have loved for so long, good-bye … because that’s what’s at stake in the 2022 Vancouver municipal election should you not donate, and go to work for, and put up campaign signs for the Vancouver civic parties and their candidates of integrity, who mean well for the future of our city.
