Byelection gives NPA fourth council seat
The Non-Partisan Association has snagged a fourth seat on Vancouver city council while four school board trustees fired last year by the previous provincial government will return to their positions.
Saturday’s byelection, the city’s first in 25 years, drew nine council candidates to fill a single seat vacated over the summer by Vision Vancouver’s Geoff Meggs, who, after nine years in council chambers, left to take a job as Premier John Horgan’s chief of staff.
The NPA’s candidate, Hector Bremner, came out victorious with 13,372 votes close to 28 per cent of the 48,645 ballots cast, according to unofficial results late Saturday.
Official election results will be declared by the chief election officer by Oct. 18, according to the city.
Bremner will now join the NPA ‘s George Affleck, Elizabeth Ball and Melissa De Genova on city council. His term will end shortly after the next Vancouver civic election in October 2018.
“We’ve worked very hard to bring a message of hope to people and I feel like it connected,” said Bremner, just as unofficial results showed a clear path to his victory. “Right away, we’ve got to sit down and talk about how we’re going to fix housing.”
The pro-development Bremner, who ran for the B.C. Liberals in New Westminster in 2013 and is vice-president of public affairs for communications firm Pace Group, campaigned on a platform focused on fixing the city’s housing crisis.
Bremner proposed zoning changes to increase density, bolstering the use of city-owned land for social and market-rental housing, and streamlining the building-approval process.
Saturday night, he vowed to work with the NPA to address homelessness, a rental-stock shortage and the overdose crisis.
“I hope Vision will work with us, and (Green) Adrianne Carr,” he said. “I think it’s time to park the partisanship and we’ve got to work together ... the reality is, people are hurting and they don’t want partisan sniping and they don’t want positioning.”
With his election, Vision is left with five councillors, with Mayor Gregor Robertson giving the party a single-vote majority of six Vision votes out of 11. The NPA’s four seats will effectively block Vision from “supermajority” votes on major matters requiring two-thirds approval such as issuing grants and selling or swapping city-owned land.
Nineteen candidates vied for the nine trustee positions, including six people who sought to return to the job after the entire school board was fired last October by the previous provincial government, when it failed to pass a balanced budget on time.