Left-wing parties reach agreements-in-principle to avoid vote splitting
A quintet of left-wing parties in Vancouver have reached agreements-in-principle, brokered by a labour group, that would see them work together to avoid vote splitting in the October municipal election.
As Stephen von Sychowski, the president of the Vancouver and District Labour Council, explained, each of the parties agreed to limit the number of candidates they will run for city-council, school-board and park-board seats. The deals follow a recent byelection that saw a previously left-held city council seat flip to the right due to fractured voting.
“We looked at the byelection in the fall and we saw that the vast majority of citizens in Vancouver voted for progressive candidates, but those votes were split five ways and it led to a Non-Partisan Association success,” von Sychowski said Monday.
The labour council represents about 50,000 unionized workers in Vancouver, including employees at the City of Vancouver. It was the council that brought together Vision Vancouver, the Green party, OneCity, the Coalition of Progressive Electors and Jean Swanson for Council in the hopes of reaching an agreement. Negotiations had taken place over the last month or so, and all parties involved in the talks ultimately signed on, von Sychowski said.
In essence, the agreements seek to ensure the number of “progressive candidates” who appear on ballots closely match the number of available seats, according to the council.
What the deals don’t cover is restrictions on mayoral candidates that the parties can put forward for election. Instead, the council will review all the candidates the parties put forward and endorse one of them.
“We decided early on to kind of cut that piece out of the process,” von Sychowski said. “We didn’t see any kind of likely path to getting everyone all on the same page that early on when we started this way back.”
Anna Chudnovsky, a co-chair of OneCity, said her party had agreed to limit the candidates it would run to two for city council and three for school board. Hypothetically, had an agreement not been reached, OneCity may have decided to run more candidates, she said.
Chudnovsky said that the purpose of the deals, in part, was “to indicate to voters that it is possible to defeat the NPA and other emerging right-wing forces in the city and that voters can do that by following the recommendations of the Vancouver and district labour council.”
Michael Haack, a Vision co-chair, called the agreements a great deal for his party as well as for progressive voters across the city. He said Vision had agreed to limit its candidates to five for council, three for school board and two for parks.
“This agreement is really important because the issues that are facing Vancouverites are big enough that we need to keep working together to solve them with bold and progressive leadership,” Haack said.
The deals came the day after NPA members chose businessman Ken Sim to represent the party as its mayoral candidate in October.