FINALLY, SEAT AT THE TABLE
Swanson set for council debut
Jean Swanson says she didn’t think she’d be where she is now.
“I think I’m literally the most defeated candidate in Vancouver,” the longtime anti-poverty activist said recently, soon after her very first electoral victory after running more times than she could readily remember, dating back to before Expo 86.
“I always just ran to raise the issues,” Swanson said. “I never expected to win.”
But the 75-year-old, whose decades of social justice work were honoured last year with the Order of Canada, must have had some idea she might finally find success with this year’s civic campaign, after finishing a close second in last November’s council byelection.
For this year’s general election, Swanson ran for council with the Coalition of Progressive Electors, finishing fourth overall, her party’s sole representative on a mixed council of mostly newcomers.
Some find her brand of rabblerousing inspiring, while others find it distasteful. Only last year, Swanson was part of a group of protesters who stormed Vancouver City Hall, shutting down a council meeting and forcing a recess while the housing activists occupied the council floor and sat in the councillors’ seats. That day in June 2017, Swanson sat, at the urging of the younger activists, in the mayor’s chair at the head of the room.
But now, a little more than a year later, she’ll be back on that council floor, but this time as an elected official. And on Tuesday, she’ll get started on working on the platform that got her elected. That means advocating for the interests of low-income people, renters and the homeless.
This week’s council agenda includes a pair of motions to be introduced by Swanson: one calling for the completion of a Downtown Eastside socialhousing project in the works for several years, and the other seeking to protect tenants from “renovictions and aggressive buyouts.”
The second motion calls on the city to “immediately” amend its Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy to, among other things, “require landlords to offer displaced tenants the opportunity to temporarily move out for the necessary duration of the renovations without their leases ending or rent increasing.”
Some of Swanson’s critics say she lacks an understanding of how the housing market really works. They argue that, while well-intentioned, policies like the one on next week’s agenda will discourage landlords from upgrading aging rental properties and developers from building new rental units, thereby actually causing unintended harm to renters. After reviewing Swanson’s anti-renoviction motion, Reliance Properties president Jon Stovell said: “I’m not surprised that Coun. Swanson would propose something like that. But we think it probably goes beyond the city’s legal purview to push that far.”
Stovell’s company, Reliance, is currently trying to do extensive renovations on the Berkeley Tower, a 16-storey rental building in the West End.
Earlier this year, Reliance informed all 60 tenants that they would need to move out to allow for major repairs on the 60-year-old building. Stovell said the Berkeley Tower “and other projects are being targeted by (Swanson’s) motion.”
“Clearly her motion is targeted at landlords who are following the law,” he said. “If they’re going to make it impossible to renovate old buildings, this is a plan to build ghettos ... It appears to me her vision is somewhat naive in how it’s going to (affect) the rental market going forward.”
One thing Swanson has demonstrated is an understanding of attention-grabbing theatrics. And she’s not above using props.
During last-year’s byelection campaign, she stood in front of the $75-million Kitsilano mansion of yoga-wear magnate Chip Wilson with an oversized novelty property tax assessment to pitch her proposal for what she calls a “mansion tax.”
This past summer, at her campaign launch, she brought a gigantic Kleenex to Shaughnessy, explaining it was there for any homeowners who wept over her “mansion tax” proposal.
And on Friday, there was a giant octopus.
Friday afternoon, Swanson appeared at a rally, across the street from the Vancouver courthouse and in front of the offices of a property management company that the demonstrators claimed had tried to remove tenants from affordable homes.
The demonstration was set up as a mock trial, complete with a gigantic cartoonish gavel, and an “octo-landlord” — a person dressed in an octopus costume — supposedly representing the “multi-pronged” approach some landlords and their agents use to evict tenants.
After a series of tenants — including Berkeley Tower residents — took turns sharing their stories of eviction and displacement, Swanson stepped to the mic.
Swanson shared details of her new “anti-renoviction” motion, telling the crowd: “If we got that, we could pretty well slow down and stop these renovictions. But we need six votes (a council majority, to pass the motion), you guys, and I don’t think we have them. But I think if they (other councillors) heard what I just heard in the last halfhour or so, it would be really, really powerful.”
Swanson encouraged each of the tenants who spoke at Friday’s demonstration to make sure they register with city hall to show their support for her motion.
“Those councillors need to hear what I just heard,” she said.
Tristan Markle, COPE’s communications director for this year’s campaign, stood at the back of the crowd during the afternoon demonstration.
“(Swanson) has been saying the same things for 40 years,” Markle said. But what’s changed now, he said, is that enough of the electorate has caught up with her message. While low-income residents might have voted for Swanson in a previous decade, Markle said, as the housing affordability crisis has deepened so much in recent years, her message of economic justice resonates with a bigger segment of Vancouver society today.
“She’s inspiring lots of young people in a similar way to Bernie Sanders,” Markle said, comparing Swanson with the 77-year-old Democratic socialist U.S. senator.
Markle, for example, would have been in elementary school when Swanson finished second in the 1988 Vancouver mayoral election, behind the NPA’s candidate, former real estate developer Gordon Campbell.
Asked about her recent electoral success, Swanson explained: “Well, when you get to be old, you have more time to build up the name recognition that you need.”