It's appears the mayor has hit the campaign trail early
Vancouver voters won't have to worry about an early municipal election this year to go along with the provincial vote, but Mayor Kennedy Stewart seems to have already kicked off the 2022 mayoral campaign.
This week, reporters received an emailed news release under a stylized “Team Kennedy Stewart 2022” banner.
The email's tone was markedly different from the usual press releases about goings-on at city hall that have come over the last two years from the director of communications for the Vancouver mayor's office. This wasn't a regular update about city business; this was more like a campaign message.
The headline read: “NPA kills Mayor's plan to make homes affordable for middle-class families.”
The news release accused Non-partisan Association councillors of nothing less than voting to “crush the dreams of hard-working families desperate to get into the housing market.”
Crushing the dreams of families!
The press release, sent out around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, concerned the results of that evening's council meeting, which had wrapped up about an hour earlier. That evening, NPA Coun. Lisa Dominato had introduced a motion directing staff to explore enabling more so-called “missing middle” housing types such as townhouses and row houses for the city's lower-density areas.
Two weeks earlier, Stewart had announced his plan to introduce an amendment to Dominato's motion, which would ask staff to research and report back on his own vision for enabling missing middle housing. Stewart's proposal would ask city staff to nail down details, but basically he proposed a pilot project allowing multi-unit buildings on lots zoned for single-family housing, with up to six homes, aiming to increase home ownership options for households earning between $80,000 and $150,000 a year.
This wasn't a typical amendment to a motion before council; they're often drafted on the fly. Stewart's proposal had a name — “Making HOME” (an acronym for `Housing Options for Middle-income Earners) — and had its own snazzy website at makinghome.ca, which has a vibe not unlike a campaign website.
But Tuesday night's meeting didn't go the way Stewart had hoped. After he introduced his amendment outlining his “Making HOME” proposal, council ended up referring Dominato's original motion back to staff for more review and a report back next year on public feedback.
The mayor was “flabbergasted,” he said Tuesday night, that council chose to add another step to the process, which would already include opportunities for public input, potentially introducing significant delays to any real change.
The delay, he said, was “a defining moment for this council” and a “huge mistake.”
Tuesday night's press release, the one about the NPA crushing dreams, was the first to come from Mark Hosak, director of engagement for Team Kennedy Stewart 2022.
“We're gearing up for that run, and I'm the first hire,” Hosak said this week.
Hosak, who volunteered with Stewart's 2018 mayoral campaign and worked on his federal campaigns when he was an NDP MP, said he started working for the 2022 re-election team in September, two years out from the next election.
Asked if the email represents the kickoff of the 2022 campaign, Hosak said: “In many ways, we feel like it's already begun.”
Hosak pointed out that Ken Sim, the NPA'S 2018 mayoral nominee who lost to Stewart by fewer than 1,000 votes, has already announced his intention to run again.
Sim says he plans to run against the NPA, having grown disillusioned with the party's current leadership. But the NPA, Vancouver's oldest party and the one most traditionally associated with the city's business establishment, seems to be the main target of Stewart's campaign material.
It was the NPA that was singled out, repeatedly, in both Hosak's Tuesday night press release and a Wednesday morning email from Stewart to his supporters.
Noticeably, the Tuesday and Wednesday statements from Stewart's team didn't mention the Green party at all, although the NPA and Greens each had three councillors vote to refer the motion to staff.
Only Onecity Coun. Christine Boyle voted with the mayor against the referral.
Both messages from Stewart's team this week painted the NPA as the party standing in the way of progress on housing because they felt his “modest” 100-home pilot project in a city of almost 70,000 single-family lots was “too much, too fast.”
Instead of moving forward with gentle density, Stewart's messaging said, “the NPA led the charge to keep building expensive multi-million dollar homes.”
As Stewart's team is probably aware, the idea of introducing “missing middle” options into low-density neighbourhoods is widely popular among Vancouver residents, according to surveys done before and after he took office in 2018.
Vancouver's previous Vision-majority council approved a Housing Vancouver strategy that already contemplated moving in that direction, but before leaving office, they took only the first small step of allowing duplexes in most low-density neighbourhoods.
Even before Tuesday's meeting, Stewart's Making HOME materials used similar language about how “60 per cent of residential neighbourhoods are reserved for homes that only the top 2.5 per cent of income earners can afford.”
Since his proposal didn't pass, he seems to be painting the NPA as the party of that 2.5 per cent.
Not everyone likes that strategy.
One member of a Dunbar residents email group this week wrote he was “pretty sick and tired of the implied class war in this type of messaging.”
But if this week was an indication, we might be hearing more of that kind of discourse between now and the next election. It's only 740 or so days away.