Vancouver election overrun with candidates
VANCOUVER • As election campaigns kick off across British Columbia its largest city is facing a race unlike any other, experts say.
A proliferation of new parties and independent candidates are crowding the Vancouver race in a widespread turnover of the existing council.
“It’s really weird, it’s not common to anything I’ve ever seen,” said David Moscrop, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa who recently left British Columbia.
The city operates under a party system and voters elect council members at-large because Vancouver hasn’t had wards since the 1930s.
Since 2008, centre-left Vision Vancouver has dominated council under Mayor Gregor Robertson, who is not running again.
This year, newcomers are looking at a rare opportunity. Only four incumbent councillors are running and among them, only one is returning from Vision Vancouver. The party also saw its mayoral candidate, Ian Campbell, bow out just one week before the nomination deadline.
“To have, I wouldn’t say collapse, but have the entrenchment of a major party, and then that space filled by a ton of new independent candidates in a party system, is unusual and remarkable,” Moscrop said.
“But it’s also a reminder that in politics when there’s a space that emerges to be filled, it gets filled.”
The result leaves voters in Vancouver to choose between 21 mayoral and 71 council candidates vying for the mayor’s job and 10 council seats. Eleven parties are running candidates.
Moscrop predicted the election will largely be fought on a single issue: housing.
“There’s different parties with different approaches to fixing it that on first glance don’t break down on ideological lines of left-right as much as they do on density, non-density, how they want to do transportation inside development projects. That’s all substantive and encouraging,” Moscrop said.
Hamish Telford, a political scientist at the University of the Fraser Valley, said new campaign finance rules are likely part of the reason so many new parties and candidates entered the race. They prohibit corporate and union donations and limit individual contributions to $1,200.
Under the old system, he said candidates with name recognition or established political parties tended to soak up available donations, making it difficult for newcomers to break in.
“What we’re seeing at least this time around is a proliferation of parties, a proliferation of candidates because they don’t need as many resources to compete against the established candidates and parties,” he said.
Patrick Smith, a political science and urban systems professor at Simon Fraser University, said it all could have the unintended consequence of lowering voter turnout.