Vancouver City Councillor Heather Deal, writing on behalf of her colleagues in Vision Vancouver, late yesterday afternoon posted an e-mail to the many thousands of folks who subscribe to our municipal ‘majority party’ government’s subscription e-mail blast ‘reach out’ facility.
In an e-mail titled ‘A clear choice‘, Ms. Deal stakes out Vision Vancouver’s position on a key issue of differentiation between Vision, and lead opposition party, the Non-Partisan Association.
The argument is clear and reasoned, and presents to the voting public a stark policy difference between the two, what now seems to be, old-line municipal electoral parties.
Today, the NPA announced that Kirk LaPointe is their candidate for Mayor. On behalf of all of us on the Vision Team, we want to welcome him to the race. Anyone who puts their name forward to seek elected office deserves our respect, and we look forward to the campaign ahead.
Our campaign is going to be about ideas for how we can move Vancouver forward. The need to build the Broadway Subway to improve transit and grow our economy. To keep moving towards becoming the greenest city in the world. Building new affordable housing, so people of all incomes can live and work in Vancouver.
That’s what our campaign is going to be about. And it’s going to show the contrast between what we offer, and the choice voters have with the NPA.
Mr. LaPointe has obviously spent a lot of time considering whether or not to run. He looked long and hard at the NPA, their positions and their policies, and liked what he saw.
In his launch today, he refused to stand up against Kinder Morgan’s massive expansion of oil tankers in our waters. We believe that’s the wrong direction for Vancouver - both for our economy and for our environment. There’s too much at risk.
This summer, when you’re out biking the seawall, running at Spanish Banks, or having a picnic at Crab Park, think to yourself: is a massive expansion of oil tankers in our local waters the direction we want Vancouver to go?
That’s just one of the many choices voters will face when they cast their ballot in November’s election.
With the NPA announcing their Mayoral candidate, we can expect the campaign to start to heat up. And throughout the next four months, we’ll be offering our positive agenda to help move Vancouver forward.
Thanks,
Heather Deal
Vision Vancouver
http://www.votevision.ca/
Now, we don’t know who actually composed the e-mail — we fully accept that the sentiments expressed in the blast reflect Ms. Deal’s position on the issues raised, but recognize that the compositional job is generally turned over to a member of the communications staff — but whoever composed the e-mail has crafted one of the best written ‘press releases’ we’ve read this electoral season, as warm and evocative in its prose as anything we’ve read this year, the e-mail inviting the reader to consider, if just for a moment, just what is at stake in the 2014 Vancouver civic election.
Congratulations to Vision Vancouver for adopting a circumspect, politic, resonant, prudent and engaging tone for the upcoming electoral campaign.
