Councillors mull bid for mayor’s seat
This fall’s Vancouver election is shaping up to be vastly different than the last one in 2014 — a race so far hampered by low-profile potential candidates and strict, new campaign-financing rules — says a longtime analyst of municipal politics.
“It’s not going to be the same campaign we’ve seen where you have the two dominant parties trying to out-spend each other,” said veteran pollster Mario Canseco, president of Research Co. “At this stage in the game, it seems to me more of a case of name recognition.”
A new Research Co. poll, released exclusively to Postmedia, asked voters which of 11 potential candidates — people who have either declared or expressed an interest in running for mayor — would be a good choice for the job.
Rather than anyone affiliated with either of the established Vancouver political parties — Vision and the NPA — who have ruled Vancouver politics for more than a decade, the person with the highest support (25 per cent) was Green councillor Adriane Carr.
The next highest support went to Jean Swanson (16 per cent) and Shauna Sylvester (eight per cent), who are both centre-left but not affiliated with Vision. Swanson ran as an independent council candidate in last October’s byelection, and Sylvester has said she will run as an independent mayoral candidate this October.
The online poll questioned 400 Vancouver residents on April 9 and 10. Its margin of error is plus/minus 4.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Canseco said he’ll be watching in the coming months for the left to try to unify by choosing one candidate to back as mayor — to try to avoid what happened in October’s byelection for a council seat, when strong centre-left candidates split the vote allowing a victory for the NPA’s Hector Bremner.
“(Unifying) is absolutely necessary for them. They are just coming out of a byelection where you have many progressive candidates who essentially cannibalized each other,” he said.
Just six per cent of poll respondents thought Bremner, who has only been on council for six months, would be a good choice for mayor. That is the highest support of any centre-right potential candidate, including NPA Park Board commissioner John Coupar (five per cent) and former Conservative MP Wai Young (three per cent).
In previous elections, the NPA chose well known candidates in Suzanne Anton and Kirk LaPointe. “This is a situation where the NPA really hasn’t found that golden knight that is definitely well known by many residents,” Canseco said.
The uncertainty of who will emerge as the strongest candidate on the right is made even more curious by how poll respondents answered a second question: who would make a bad choice for mayor?
Young and Bremner lead that unfortunate category, followed by Swanson and Carr.
The provincial NDP enacted new campaign rules last year, which ban corporate and union donations; set a $1,200 annual cap on individual donations; and institute new restrictions on loans, election advertising and expense limits.
No longer will Vision and the NPA be able to run expensive campaigns financed by deep-pocketed supporters, which is one reason many observers believe a large number of incumbents have decided not to seek re-election.
“It will be more of a grassroots campaign,” Canseco predicted.
So, how does a candidate with a lower profile get name recognition in a large city like Vancouver, with little money for advertising ?
“Ultimately knocking on doors. This is the way campaigns used to be run before money took over. We might be back to a situation similar to the elections we had in the ’70s and ’80s,” Canseco said.
“One of the key issues is to talk about things that matter. We’ve seen homelessness, housing, poverty definitely be important issues in the city.”
Carr, who had the most votes of any council candidate in the last election, has fairly equal support in all three of the areas polled: the westside, the eastside and downtown. She draws the same amount of support from people who voted Vision and NPA in the last election.
But it is still early days.
“We may have new names in the next couple of months. There is a lot of discussion about who else could be running,” Canseco said. “We’ve been used to a lot of NPA, a lot of Vision and one Green. This new council could be different.”