MP JOINS ‘TUMULTUOUS’ CITY RACE
Kennedy Stewart will run for mayor as an independent
Kennedy Stewart, the New Democrat MP for Burnaby South, seems pretty casual when discussing his arrest in March, the special prosecutor reviewing his case, and the impending possibility of a contempt-of-court charge.
But when the conversation turns to the constantly shifting sands of Vancouver’s political landscape, Stewart describes that world as “tumultuous.”
Stewart officially stepped into the tumult Thursday, kicking off his campaign to run as an independent candidate for Vancouver mayor in October’s election.
For his announcement, Stewart chose a location atop the 28-storey Harbour Centre, directly above Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus, Stewart’s longtime workplace. And through the observation-deck windows outside Stewart’s news conference on Thursday, one can also see east to the spot on Burnaby Mountain where Stewart was arrested March 23 at a protest against the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, a project he has staunchly opposed as an MP.
Stewart will run as an independent, instead of seeking a municipal party’s nomination, he said, because he believes it gives him the best chance to “bring all the progressive forces together.”
There’s been much talk in recent months of the city’s leftleaning parties co-operating ahead of the October election, to give them the best chance of beating the centre-right NonPartisan Association, and avoid fracturing the so-called “progressive vote.”
Recent weeks have seen several announcements from various Vancouver parties about their respective nomination processes and who may or may not run. Vision Vancouver has made a series of public statements that have led to significant confusion over the question of whether the party, which has dominated local politics for the last decade, will or will not run a mayoral candidate this year.
Meanwhile, Vision’s main rival, the NPA, appears to be mired in its own mess, with a feud developing between Coun. Hector Bremner and the party’s board, which this week rejected Bremner’s bid for the mayoral nomination, despite his claim that he led the party in membership sign-ups.
That situation continued to escalate Thursday with NPA president Gregory Baker and his party’s elected caucus member, Bremner, engaged in a public war of words.
So if any Vancouver voters are confused at this point about what the ticket will look like in October, perhaps they shouldn’t feel too bad, considering Stewart, who has a PhD from the London School of Economics and is on leave from SFU’s School of Public Policy where he has taught about democracy, acknowledged the whole rapidly changing scene is a bit muddy.
At Thursday’s news conference, Stewart said: “I’ve spoken with all the parties, and I’ve just decided (running as an independent) is the best way forward. Their processes are a little unclear to me and they keep changing.”
In an interview following the news conference, Stewart told The Vancouver Sun that the political landscape in the city right now, less than six months from the election, “is so tumultuous, you don’t even know what’s going to happen the next day, with the NPA, and with Vision also, and COPE.”
Stewart said he hopes he “can play a positive role” in negotiating the way forward to unite the left-leaning parties.
But his Thursday announcement comes more than a month after one of his SFU colleagues, SFU Centre for Dialogue executive director Shauna Sylvester, began publicly positioning herself as the independent candidate to unite Vancouver’s progressives. Stewart said his new-found political rivalry with Sylvester won’t lead to awkward interactions when they bump into each other in the SFU faculty lounge.
He exchanged texts this week with Sylvester, he said, and hopes to meet her next week for coffee for a discussion about, “How does this move forward? Is there any room for compromise? Where do we agree on policy?”
Stewart speaks highly, too, of Green party Coun. Adriane Carr, who is also considering a mayoral run and topped a poll last week as Vancouverites’ favoured pick for the job.
A few times Thursday, Stewart repeated the phrase: “My name will be on the ballot in October.”
But, if the city’s left-leaning parties were to end up rallying behind another candidate like Sylvester or Carr, would Stewart still stick to his guns and stay on the ballot at the risk of splintering the city’s progressive vote?
“Well, the first lesson I had in my media training was to never respond to hypotheticals,” Stewart replied. “Wayne Gretzky could get in the race. So you never know ... I know things change a lot, even in the course of a campaign.”
Indeed, you never know. Even barring a great run by the Great One himself, it seems like just about anything else could happen in this race.