Stewart set to lead mixed council
Kennedy Stewart started his day the same way he begins every Sunday. But when he made his weekly phone call to his mother in Nova Scotia this Sunday, it was his first as mayor-elect of Vancouver.
“We have the same kind of moral sense, that’s where I got it from,” Stewart said. “She gives me lots of great advice, that’s why the Sunday calls are more for me than her, that’s for sure.”
Stewart said his mother, Cathy, was proud, but “wishes my elections were called a little earlier.”
Indeed, when Stewart, the former NDP MP for Burnaby South, won Saturday’s election, the race came down to the wire with the final polling stations not reporting results until well past midnight.
That meant it was almost 5 a.m. in rural Nova Scotia, where his mother was still awake waiting on the results. By the wee hours of Sunday morning, Stewart had finally bested the Non-Partisan Association’s Ken Sim with whom he’d been neck-and-neck all evening, to become Vancouver’s first successful independent mayor in more than three decades.
On Sunday, Stewart was replying to some of the congratulatory messages he received from across the country, including outgoing threeterm Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, with whom Stewart will meet this week to discuss the transition, and federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who is now trying to take Stewart’s old job, by running for his seat in the federal byelection to replace him.
Robertson’s party, Vision Vancouver, enjoyed a majority on council for the entire decade of his mayoralty. But unlike his predecessor, Stewart will preside over a mixed council where no party has a majority.
Saturday ’s results leave the city ’s new 10-member council evenly split between five councillors from the centre-right NPA on one side, and on the other, five councillors representing a trio of left-leaning parties (three Greens and one apiece from COPE and OneCity).
The NPA’s five successful councillors include Melissa De Genova, the party’s only incumbent seeking re-election, Colleen Hardwick, Lisa Dominato, Rebecca Bligh and Sarah Kirby-Yung. The Greens elected Adriane Carr, the top votewinner and only other returning councillor, Pete Fry and Michael Wiebe, while Jean Swanson won with COPE and Christine Boyle becomes the first councillor ever elected with OneCity.
That means if all the left-leaning councillors are aligned with Stewart on a particular issue or vote (assuming everyone is in attendance), they’ll have the slimmest of majorities even if the NPA councillors vote in a bloc against them.
On some issues, Stewart is likely to have the support of the left side of his council, like his pledge to increase the empty homes tax, a measure brought in by the last Vision-majority council and the first of its kind in Canada.
Sim opposed the tax, but Stewart wants to triple it. The Greens indicated they were open to increasing the tax, pending a review of its first year, and both OneCity and COPE support boosting it.
But Stewart may find less support on council for other ideas he campaigned on, such as his call to change the plan for the Broadway Subway to Arbutus Street. Stewart wants the subway to go all the way west to the University of B.C., but members of the NPA, the Greens and COPE all expressed a reticence to change an established plan that already has funding commitments worth billions from the provincial and federal governments.
Stewart said even if he doesn’t find a lot of support from his colleagues on council for changing the subway plan, he believes he may find a more unlikely source on the other side of the Fraser River.
“That’s something I can do on my own, to start talking with Ottawa, and interestingly, my best ally on that may be Mayor Doug McCallum from Surrey, because he had a resounding victory there, and his whole agenda was replacing LRT with SkyTrain,” Stewart said.
If the mayors of Metro Vancouver’s two largest cities both want changes to the established regional transit plan — a longer subway line all the way to UBC in Vancouver, and SkyTrain instead of LRT for Surrey — then Stewart hopes they’ll be able to get Ottawa’s attention.
“I think there’s a possibility to have a strong regional voice talking to the (federal) Liberal government as we go into the federal election (next year),” he said.
Stewart, the left-leaning former NDP MP, and McCallum, the rightleaning law-and-order candidate who previously looked at running with the federal Conservatives, may seem like a bit of a political odd couple.
But, Stewart said Sunday: “I think that, if you just drop all the left-right partisan stuff, and you think, what’s on the agenda that we can work together on, that might be one … There’s a very small window for us to make this happen, and I’d be very interested in sitting down with Mayor McCallum.”
So building consensus on council, issue by issue, will be crucial.
“With the last council where there’s a majority of one party, you kind of have a government and opposition, in a sense. But this will be different,” Stewart said.
“Say I’m just obstreperous all the time, I’m never going to get anything done, and it’s the same with other council members ... It will be more of a discussion than it will be ramming anything through. And I think that’s healthy, I think the city needs a bit of that, because the politics here have been very adversarial.”
“I see myself as one of 11,” Stewart said. “I don’t see myself as one plus 10.”
Stewart said he wants to get some wins early, by tailoring his agenda to start with items where he thinks he’s more likely to garner universal support.
Stewart pointed to the first pledge in his plan for his first 100 days in office: clearing the permitting backlog in the planning department by hiring more staff and changing processes, with a special focus on approving rental housing.
“That’s really how I’m looking down my shopping list and saying: ‘What should I put first?’ And maybe leave the tough things that we don’t agree on, or there’s not an initial agreement on, for a little later. Just until we get to know each other.”
Stewart and his new council colleagues will be sworn in Nov. 5, just a few days before his 52nd birthday.
On Sunday, he was still adjusting to his new life. Stewart said after he woke up: “I just kind of got up and looked out my window at the city and thought: ‘Oh jeez. I’m responsible for this now.’ ”