One month from today, voters go to the polls to elect a new civic administration in the City of Vancouver. Honestly, they oughta stay home.
Billionaire developers and wealthy millionaires have bought the 2022 Vancouver civic election, negating democracy, and the will of Vancouver’s citizens.
Bear with us while, as per usual, VanRamblings buries the lede.
This morning the Non-Partisan Association’s Mayoral candidate Fred Harding, incumbent NPA Councillor Melissa De Genova, and veteran Vision Vancouver School Board trustee Allan Wong — along with twelve other 2022 Vancouver civic election candidates — find themselves in Supreme Court responding to Vancouver Chief Election Officer Rosemary Hagiwaraha’s Court challenge seeking to declare that fifteen Vancouver candidates for office are not entitled to have their names on the ballot papers using Chinese, Persian or other non-Latin characters.
The 15 are Fred Harding, Elaine Allan, Honieh Barzegari, Cinnamon Bhayani, Iona Bonamis, Ken Charko, Melissa De Genova, Morning Lee, Tesicca Truong, Arezo Zarrabian, Rahul Aggarwal, Milan Kljajic, Suzie Mah, Allan Wong, and Dave Pasin.
Seven term Vancouver School Board trustee Allan Wong sought re-election in 2014 and 2018 without Chinese characters, but included Chinese characters in his September 7th nomination documents. Vision Vancouver council candidate Honieh Barzegari used a Farsi font on her form, while Forward Together council candidate Tesicca Truong expressed a desire to use both Chinese and Vietnamese beside her name on the ballot.
Ms. Mah, a COPE candidate running for School Board, submitted her nomination with her English name and her Chinese name, telling the Vancouver Sun’s Cheryl Chan that the Chief Election Officer’s court challenge “sends a disturbing message that only anglicized names are allowed on ballots.”
“I’m known by my Chinese name by my family, and any time I talk to the Asian press, and they want to translate my name into Chinese. I wouldn’t want to just have my English name in print,” said Mah, who added that there needs to be a clearer definition of “usual name” established.
The two Vision candidates said they were dismayed to learn their usual names are at risk of being removed from the ballot, while the NPA candidates accused Ms. Hagiwaraha’s application as tantamount to cultural appropriation.
The Court is expected to rule on the matter before the end of the week.
Someone dropped a two-page spreadsheet printout on the south sidewalk of 300 block W Broadway. Appears to be a list of donors and donations. Who knows if it's legit? The donors names are eye-catching! #Vancouver #Vanpoli pic.twitter.com/9i9yQ28FYU
— Stanley Q Woodvine (@sqwabb) September 13, 2022
Meanwhile Mayor Kennedy Stewart and his Forward Together civic party seem to be in a bit of trouble, following on the retrieval of a two-page spreadsheet printout of a list of Forward Together donors and donations.
The editor of The George Straight, Charlie Smith, calls Mr. Woodvine’s retrieval of the Forward Together donors list an astonishing find, given that the document includes a list of “captains” in what appears to be a fundraising document. Beside each name are the 2022 donations, followed by the goal.
Mr. Smith writes that the “captains” represent a surfeit of influential, well-heeled and wealthy Vancouver developers and real-estate executives, such as:
- Arnold Silber, president, Value Property Group ($4,000 donations, $25,000 goal);
- Terry Hui, CEO, Concord Pacific, the real estate development company that oversees the development of the Expo lands ($8,200 donations, $31,250 goal);
- Daisen Gee-Wing, senior vice president, Canadian Metropolitan Properties ($1,200 donations, $12,500 goal);
- Jim Szabo, vice chairman capital markets, CBRE ($1,250 donations, $12,500 goal);
- Joe Carreira, vice president development, Conwest Group of Companies ($1,765 donations, goal $12,500);
- Jon Stovell, president and CEO, Reliance Properties Ltd. ($2,500 donations, goal $12,500);
- Bob Rennie, founder, Rennie Marketing Systems ($12,500 donations, goal $12,500);
- Francesco Aquilini, partner, Aquilini Investment Group, and owner of the Vancouver Canucks ($64,300 donations, goal $110,000);
- Raymond Louie, chief operating officer, Coromandel Properties Ltd. ($2,500 donations, goal $25,000);
- Stepan Vdovine, director, business development and corporate affairs, Amacon ($12,424 donations, goal $18,750);
- Ian Gillespie, founder of Westbank Projects Corp. ($2,400 donations, goal $25,000);
… among a massive group of other monied Vancouver developers who appear set to donate to Forward Together;s campaign to the tune of millions of dollars.
As Mr. Smith wrote in The Straight at 2:41 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon …
Stewart’s party has not explicitly admitted that this spreadsheet was created by someone with Forward Together. But there is certainly circumstantial evidence. The name “Neil” shows up, as do the initials “NM”. Stewart’s chief of staff is Neil Monckton. There are also some names on the list with past associations with the NDP, which is a party that Stewart has represented in the past and which Monckton has worked very hard to elect. They include former B.C. NDP presidents Moe Sihota and Craig Keating.
Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Brahman writes that Neil Monckton, who is Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s Chief of Staff, collects an annual $126,366 salary. Mr. Monckton has been on unpaid leave from the position since September 10th.
VanRamblings is struck by the notion that, although under provincial election legislation brought in by former Attorney General David Eby in 2018 to limit political party donations to $1250 per individual, Stepan Vdovine — Executive Director of Vision Vancouver until the party’s defeat in 2018 — has donated $12,424, just shy of ten times the allowed amount, while real estate marketer extraordinaire Bob Rennie donated $12,500, exactly 10x the allowed amount.
British Columbia’s next Premier, David Eby, weighed in on the controversy …
“Fundraising will always be part of politics, but some people are clearly frustrated that the rich are no longer able to buy convenient access to politicians with private $10,000-a-plate dinners or six-figure donations. We’re not going back to the bad old days,” Eby told the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano. “If I am elected leader, our government will continue to monitor and improve our campaign financing laws where necessary to ensure that all people, not just the rich, get their voices heard during and after elections.”
One imagines the matter of developer donors exceeding the allowed election donation amounts has likely been referred to Elections B.C. for investigation, as requested by rival Vancouver civic party TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver.
“Vancouver voters need to know the truth about this alleged fundraising list before they cast their ballots — it’s critical that Elections BC find out what has actually happened and clear the air,” TEAM for a Livable Vancouver campaign manager and Council candidate Bill Tieleman, told The Straight.
VanRamblings learned yesterday that a high profile Council candidate in the current Vancouver civic election called the employer of a person working on a rival party’s campaign, insisting to this person’s employer that she must be fired from her well-paid job immediately, for “interfering in the election campaign,” the victim of this despicable actl distraught, arising from the actions of a contemptible candidate for office in the 2022 Vancouver civic election.
As VanRamblings has been writing for some weeks now, ABC (A Better City) has set its sights on purchasing the current civic election outright, having already spent millions of dollars, and ready to spend millions more — orders of magnitude larger than any other Vancouver civic campaign for office in 2022, at least four times Forward Together’s campaign budget, and as much as one hundred times the campaign budgets of rival parties, including the Green Party of Vancouver, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver, Vision Vancouver, Progress Vancouver, OneCity Vancouver, COPE Vancouver and Vote Socialist.
As we wrote above, the provincial NDP government brought in municipal election finance reform legislation in 2018, with strict campaign spending limits. As Dan Fumano reported in The Vancouver Sun on August 3rd, billionaire Lululemon founder Chip Wilson found a “work around” that would allow him to create a U.S.-style political action committees that — as the Witchita, Kansas-based billionaire Koch brothers have done for years, in the United States — would allow him, and other like-minded millionaires and billionaires, to funnel monies and finance “pro-business” politicians and political parties, all without breaching the tenets of British Columbia’s election finance reform legislation.
In 2021, Chip Wilson founded the Pacific Prosperity Network — a non-profit NGO — to work behind-the-scenes to finance right-leaning, free-enterprise municipal and provincial candidates, and “help” them get elected, to form government. In July of this year, Chip Wilson wrote a letter urging other wealthy people to contribute $50,000 to $200,000 each to PPN, saying he’d donated $380,000 to the cause (recently reported as a donation to ABC).
In Vancouver’s 2018 civic election, Mr. Wilson was a high-profile supporter of NPA Mayoral candidate Ken Sim. After narrowly losing to Mr. Stewart four years ago, Ken Sim is running again this year with the upstart ABC (A Better City). In an interview with ABC campaign manager Kareem Allam, Mr. Fumano was told …
“We appreciate Chip’s success as a businessman, but when it comes to politics, we’re not values-aligned. And he has no involvement on our campaign, other than those donations made a year ago.”
Yeah, sure, right. A $388,000 donation by Mr. Wilson to ABC (A Better City) — and, in Ken Sim, the party’s seemingly pliable and “co-operative” candidate for Mayor — is just peanuts, and as Mr. Allam states above, Chip Wilson’s “values” are not aligned with ABC (A Better City), clearly the civic party of Wilson’s choice, with the preferred Mayoral candidate running for office in the 2022 Vancouver civic election.
Here’s the rub: ABC (A Better City) and ABC alone possesses the civic election budget that has allowed ABC to buy saturation radio and TV advertising deriding Mayor Stewart for his alleged — and as as VanRamblings wrote Tuesday, untrue — intention to legislate mobility pricing in Vancouver, that would charge citizens $15 to $65 dollars for vehicular travel within the city, when mobility pricing is a regional issue years away from implementation, if ever.
VanRamblings was apprised Wednesday, Ken Sim and ABC (A Better City) are polling in the low-to-mid 30s range, with Mayor Stewart’s flailing and failing Forward Together campaign mired at 25% and falling, with Colleen Hardwick’s TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver way back at 16%, with Fred Harding’s NPA at 8% and Mark Marissen’s Progress Vancouver campaign barely registering at 6%, leaving the Greens, OneCity Vancouver, Vision Vancouver, COPE, and Vote Socialist to divide up the remaining twelve to sixteen per cent of the vote.
Internal ABC polling — reports are that ABC’s polling firm is making contact with up to 2,000 probable Vancouver voters daily — give every indication of an ABC (A Better City) sweep at the polls on Election Night, October 15th, an inevitability, when the nascent civic party will elect Ken Sim as Vancouver’s next Mayor, and all seven ABC (A Better City) City Council candidates for office.
The only question remaining open, then, is which two current candidates for office will form the official opposition on Vancouver City Council: the Greens’ Adriane Carr & Pete Fry; TEAM’s Bill Tieleman & Sean Nardi; Vote Socialist’s Sean Orr & COPE’s Breen Ouelette; Vision Vancouver’s take no guff Lesli Boldt, and Forward Together’s Dulcy Anderson; the NPA’s Melissa De Genova & Arezo Zarrabian; or, maybe, Progress Vancouver’s Morgane Oger will fill one of the two open slots on the next “give it all away to developers” City Council.
