IS THE TIMING RIGHT?
With several left-leaning candidates running on social justice platforms likely to split the vote, the Oct. 14 municipal byelection may provide the right-of-centre NPA a chance to pick up another seat and shift the ‘balance of forces’ on city council.
There’s only a single council seat up for grabs in Vancouver’s first municipal byelection in 25 years, but city hall watchers say there’s plenty on the line.
Coming 12 months before the 2018 general municipal election, this byelection will determine “the comfort level of the Vision majority,” said Richard Johnston, a UBC political science professor. “And it could mark a subtle shift in the balance of forces in the next election. … There’s actually a fair amount at stake.”
The NPA, generally considered the Vancouver establishment’s right-of-centre party, will have a good opportunity to pick up another council seat, Johnston said.
Vision Vancouver has become the city’s most established and powerful left-leaning party, and their majority of six seats (five councillors and the mayor) won’t be threatened by the result of the byelection, which was triggered when Vision Coun. Geoff Meggs resigned to take a job with the B.C. NDP government.
But, Johnston said, “outflanking Vision on the left” in this byelection, there’s the Green party and two other high-profile candidates “identified with social justice and advocacy issues who have, possibly, ready-made constituencies. … It is striking that you have, actually, a number of serious, already quite wellknown candidates out there.”
Unlike a normal civic election, where each voter chooses up to 10 names for the 10 council seats, voters in this byelection will choose just one name from nine candidates, and there’s a chance the left-of-centre vote could be split among a number of fairly high-profile progressive candidates.
“This may divide that vote and open the door for the NPA,” Johnston said. The NPA would, of course, welcome a victory in
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the byelection, Johnston said, but “it may not mean anything in terms of the next election.”
However, if the NPA loses despite the fractured left-leaning vote, Johnston said, that may send a signal the party faces an uphill slog for next year’s general municipal election. “If the NPA can’t pull this one off, boy, it seems to me they really do have trouble,” he said. “It’s sort of been handed to them.”
If the NPA picks up a fourth seat on council, it would threaten Vision Vancouver’s ability to approve motions that require a two-thirds majority.
Meanwhile, the Greens have said if they’re able to add a second Vancouver councillor, their ability to get their motions seconded and thus publicly debated would be a “game-changer for public accountability.”
If the Oct. 14 byelection can be defined by a single issue, it’s housing. In interviews over the past week, the five highest-profile byelection candidates all said they consider housing the most pressing issue facing the city.
Former Vancouver councillor Gordon Price said housing isn’t just the No. 1 issue in the byelection: “It’s also the second issue and the third issue.”
Price, a six-term NPA councillor, said the issues he dealt with on council between 1986 and 2002 were not nearly as daunting as the challenges faced by the council today — and by whoever makes up the council after the October 2018 municipal general election.
“I don’t envy them at all,” said Price, who is also a former director of Simon Fraser University’s city program. This council and the next needs to tackle incredibly difficult, “fundamental” challenges on the housing front, he said.
“What is the future of the city if we can’t house teachers and firefighters?” Price said. “What kind of city do we want to be?”
NEW AND OLD VANCOUVER
Vision Vancouver is trying to position itself as the party of change and progress, even after almost a decade in power. In announcing Diego Cardona as their council candidate, a Vision news release described him as “a fresh new voice in Vancouver’s political scene.”
Cardona is certainly new; at Vision’s last electoral victory party in 2014, he would not have been old enough to celebrate with a glass of Champagne.
The party’s announcement also emphasized Cardona’s life story, which sets him apart from other candidates. The 21-year-old came to Canada in 2005 as a refugee from Colombia after guerrillas kidnapped and killed his father. Cardona, his mother and his sister immigrated to Montreal before moving to Vancouver, where his mother died in 2012. Since then, Cardona, a community organizer and part-time Zumba instructor, has worked to support himself and his sister, with whom he lives in a rented suite in southeast Vancouver.
In a recent interview, Cardona focused on the NPA’s Hector Bremner instead of the other leftleaning candidates, the Greens’ Pete Fry, Judy Graves of the newer OneCity party and Jean Swanson, an Independent running with the endorsement of the long-established left-wing COPE party.
19 RUNNING IN NEXT MONTH’S SCHOOLS BYELECTION, PAGE A21
“In Vancouver, I don’t think it’s really about the left versus right, or centre versus centre-left or centre-right. It’s really about a new and an old Vancouver, and I think this will be more of a referendum on that,” Cardona said.
“I think both main parties — and I don’t want to disregard my other fellow candidates — but both main parties, NPA and Vision, have sort of selected candidates that articulate that narrative very well between a new Vancouver and an old Vancouver.”
Bremner worked as a political staffer in the B.C. Liberal government, and his official biography highlights his experience in the deputy premier’s office, where he worked with B.C. Housing. Cardona, too, is quick to highlight Bremner’s experience — though he frames it in a decidedly different light.
Cardona described his opponent as “Rich Coleman’s executive assistant” and said Bremner “embodies what I think is the conservative Christy ClarkStephen Harper way of doing things.”
Vision’s media strategy has taken a similar approach, with press releases describing Bremner as “a former oil and gas lobbyist, B.C. Liberal staffer, and failed B.C. Liberal candidate.”
Cardona acknowledged he faces a challenge because byelections are generally unfavourable for the governing party. The conventional wisdom says that upset citizens are more likely to show up to vote than their neighbours who are largely content.
“They say it’s a good way to send a message (to the governing party),” Cardona said with a laugh. “Yes, I’ve heard that a lot.”
Countering that, Cardona emphasized his NPA opponent’s connections with the B.C. Liberals, pointing out that the party did not fare well in Vancouver in May’s provincial election, losing eight of 11 ridings in the city to the NDP.
“The Liberals got a message in Vancouver,” Cardona said.
Bremner said Vision’s choice of a 21-year-old political neophyte is the action of a party with an “image problem.”
“They have been talking up a really good game about being green, being socially progressive, caring about affordability,” Bremner said, adding inequality worsened and the housing crisis got deeper on Vision’s watch.
“People are starting to see through the veneer,” Bremner said.
Bremner said he considers the decision by Vision’s board of directors to appoint Cardona as their candidate as an “attempt to keep young people with the party.”
Like the other candidates, Bremner pegs housing as the top issue, with his platform focused on the supply side: Vancouver, he said, needs to build, build, build.
What is the future of the city if we can’t house teachers and firefighters? … What kind of city do we want to be?
There are only two things on which “all the experts agree,” Bremner said — climate change is real and Vancouver has a “supply crisis.”
Vancouver needs to build a lot more housing much faster, Bremner said, but city hall needs to make sure they’re building the right type of housing. Luxury one-bedroom condos in sleek skyscrapers are not as helpful as affordable three-bedroom townhouses.
While most of Vancouver’s residential land is still zoned for detached single-family houses, Bremner said he wants to see more of the city opened up to the so-called “missing middle” of the housing equation: mediumdensity options like townhouses, duplexes and triplexes.
Asked if he’s worried that the idea of densifying vast swaths of the city could upset the longtime homeowners who might be seen as the NPA’s traditional base, Bremner said he believes there’s been a palpable “shift” in the last couple of years as those houserich older voters have come to recognize that change is needed, and that adding density and vitality to their residential neighbourhoods will bring benefits.
On Thursday, Cardona released his own proposal for densifying single-family zoned neighbourhoods by creating a new building type allowing six families on a single lot. The following day, Graves’ office issued a statement slamming Cardona’s proposal as a “half-measure,” and calling for three- to six-storey rental buildings in every neighbourhood.
VOTE-SPLITTING ON THE LEFT
The trio of fairly high-profile candidates to the left of Vision creates the potential to split the progressive vote: the Greens’ Fry, OneCity’s Graves and Swanson the Independent.
In interviews this week, all three candidates expressed respect for each other’s work, but stressed how they differ from each other.
Fry, a community advocate and communications professional, is making a second run for council. He ran for the Green party in the 2014 Vancouver election, picking up 46,500 votes, about 10,000 votes behind the 10th and final spot on council.
“Jean appeals to a very, very hard left voter, and Judy will pull from an organized labour pool. But I think at the end of the day — this sounds immodest to say — but I think I have more capacity to do the actual work of city building,” Fry said, casting himself as a good balance between progressivism and pragmatism.
Swanson and Graves are campaigning on proposals that are either impossible or outside the authority of civic government, Fry said, but he wants to promise things he can actually deliver in his role in city council. As an example, Fry pointed to Swanson’s proposal for a “mansion tax,” a sort of surcharge for the owners of Vancouver’s most expensive properties, as something that would not be achievable without the province making sweeping legislative changes.
Graves, who has also proposed a surcharge on the city’s most expensive properties, said she believes her unique experience — almost 40 years of working for the city, most recently as its advocate for the homeless — makes her the best choice on the left side of the ticket.
“I know the inside of city hall. I know how it works. I know the impact of good policy and I know the impact of bad policy,” she said. “I also know how important it is not to try and come in and shake everything up.”
Swanson also highlighted Graves’ decades at city hall — but as a negative. Swanson, a longtime anti-poverty activist who was invested into the Order of Canada this year, described Graves as too closely tied to a political establishment that has, over the years, helped to create many of the problems the city faces now. Swanson describes herself as someone who comes from outside the establishment to make change. She calls herself “an activist” in the mould of Harry Rankin, the longtime alderman and social justice champion.
Graves “is a very nice person, but I think we need more than niceness. I think we need fierceness,” Swanson said.
Graves, Swanson and Fry all say that even if Vision wants to present itself as the party of a socially progressive, sustainable Vancouver, they can’t completely escape responsibility for the city’s worsening housing and homelessness crisis.
For Graves, the issue seems to be particularly personal. She
This may divide that vote and open the door for the NPA … If the NPA can’t pull this one off, boy, it seems to me they really do have trouble.
was, she said, full of optimism when she was working for the city nine years ago when Mayor Gregor Robertson and Vision first came to power on a promise of ending street homelessness by 2015. Vision’s record since then, Graves said recently, has “completely broken my heart.” This week, a Metro Vancouver report showed the number of homeless people in Vancouver has increased about 35 per cent in the last six years.
Win or lose on Oct. 14, Graves said she plans to run for council in October 2018’s general election, again under the OneCity banner. Similarly, Fry said he plans to run in 2018. But Swanson said she is focused on the byelection and has not made a decision about next year.
In next October’s general election, when voters elect 10 councillors, there will be a chance for left-leaning voters to spread their support around. Graves said if she, Fry, and Swanson are all on the ballot again next year, there’s a chance “We could all be on council together.”
“That would be great,” Graves said. “Council always works better when there’s a diversity of people on council, and a diversity of parties.”
THE OTHERS
The other four candidates who have put their names forward in the council byelection are Mary Jean (Watermelon) Dunsdon for the Sensible Vancouver party, and three Independents: Damian Murphy, Gary Lee and Joshua Wasilenkoff.
Dunsdon, a longtime cannabis activist better known around Wreck Beach as Watermelon — the nickname appears on her official nomination documents — is running under the banner of Sensible Vancouver, the newly formed municipal arm of the provincial Sensible B.C. party. She was the only candidate interviewed this week who identified anything other than housing as her top issue, focusing on the city’s policies on cannabis reform and its response to the opioid crisis.
Murphy, a 48-year-old who works in the non-profit housing sector, said he knows he has an uphill battle without the backing of a political party, given that Vancouver hasn’t had an Independent councillor in decades. But Murphy said he wouldn’t run any other way.
“There shouldn’t be any party politics at the municipal level,” he said. “It would be fantastic if we had 10 Independent councillors all sitting around the table working together. … It would allow you vote your own conscience.”
The other Independents, Lee and Wasilenkoff, two Vancouverites in their 20s, both said they chose to run to represent the voices of young people in the city.