A CAMPAIGN LIKE NO OTHER
The civic election is still five months away, but it is already shaping up to be one of the more unusual contests the City of Vancouver has seen in some time. Under normal circumstances, the dominant political parties — most recently, Vision and the NonPartisan Association — would hold nomination meetings where members would cast a vote for the candidate they believed would be most successful in carrying the brand for the party.
This time around, the field appears to be largely populated by independents beholden to no particular party, free to carve out their own place on the political landscape. The parties, meanwhile, are struggling to remain relevant. It is unclear, for example, whether Vision intends to nominate a mayoral candidate — its refusal to answer the question directly leaves us in doubt — while the NPA has blocked the person seen by many as the front-runner from contesting the party’s nomination.
On the centre-right, the NPA has approved three names as mayoral candidates: John Coupar, Ken Sim and Glen Chernen. Once the competition gets underway in September, the victor may face competition from sitting NPA Coun. Hector Bremner, whom the NPA rejected as a potential candidate for reasons the party will not disclose, and former Conservative MP Wai Young, who thought, wrongly, that she’d be running under the NPA banner.
On the centre-left, should Vision choose a mayoral candidate, he or she will be up against independents Shauna Sylvester and Kennedy Stewart, whose ideas could have been lifted straight out of the Vision playbook, minus all the development industry stuff, of course. Appeals to unite the right and unite the left have fallen on deaf ears. As it happens, Adriane Carr, a Green party councillor, tops the polls as candidate for mayor and she hasn’t even declared yet.
Another factor that changes the dynamics of this year’s civic election is the B.C. government’s funding limits, effectively banning corporate and union contributions. As a result, we’re likely to see more social media campaigning and far fewer television ads.
One element we hope we do not see in this campaign is the kind of nastiness that has cropped up in Surrey, where anonymous flyers have circulated targeting Coun. Tom Gill, who is running for mayor of that city. Should that happen here, we would expect a full investigation by the Vancouver Police Department and/ or Elections B.C. to identify the culprits, seize defamatory materials, lay charges if warranted and ensure a clean, fair election process. Unfortunately, neither the RCMP nor Elections B.C. has assumed this responsibility in Surrey.