Who should you vote for? A guide to the attack dogs, workaholics, and more of Vancouver city council
November 17, 2011
francesbula.com
Everyone uses a different value system and set of criteria to decide who they want to vote for. I wouldn’t presume to give people a list of “best” candidates, because my best will never match your best. I’m not endorsing anyone either.
Some people are going to vote straight Non-Partisan Association or straight Vision/COPE slate because they know what those parties are offering and they want to make sure there’s a majority elected to ensure the party can carry out what it promised.
They don’t need my help or anyone’s.
Nor does anyone need my help deciding on whether to vote for Gregor Robertson or Suzanne Anton. They’ve had ample coverage and everyone who’s planning to vote has a sense of their leadership style by now.
This list is more for others who are considering not voting straight slate but are still confused about those beyond Robertson and Anton.
So here is my very idiosyncratic, sometimes frivolous, occasionally crabby guide, to the candidates so that you can mix and match (or not) according to what it is you’re looking for.
YOU WANT TO REGISTER A PROTEST VOTE AGAINST DEVELOPMENT
You’re mad about a big new project planned for your neighbourhood, you’re mad about the way the city just seems to be getting busier and more crowded all the time, and you feel like developers control everyone on council.
You want to punish Vision/COPE for having brought the latest round of development to the city, but you don’t want to vote for the right-wing NPA. (They’re just as bad, n’est-ce pas?)
You probably won’t elect anyone, but your protest vote will be visible, may result in some Vision councillors not getting elected, and will perhaps act as a caution to future councils that they need to spend more time working with neighbourhood groups. (Or maybe not. Other parties that have run on a slow-growth or anti-development theme in the past have only netted about 8,000 votes, not enough to make anyone change course visibly.)
You’re less concerned about the fact that the people you’re voting for yet developed a very precise plan about how thousands of new people will be absorbed in the city while they are consulting extensively with neighbourhoods on how to bring in density that won’t bother anyone.
Mayor: Randy Helten, who rallied the West End to object to new towers planned for the area and has since carried that campaigns for improved citizen participation, better planning, bans on developer contributions in elections, and a region-wide fight against Metro Vancouver’s growth strategy. Running with a group called Neighbourhoods for Sustainable Development.
Councillors: Elizabeth Murphy (NSV), Nicole Benson (NSV), Marie Kerchum (NSV), Terry Martin (NSV), Adriane Carr (Green), Tim Louis (COPE)
(Helten’s group has also endorsed Louis and the other two COPE candidates, RJ Aquino and Ellen Woodsworth, independent Sandy Garossino, and NPA candidate Bill McCreery, but all of those people, with the exception of Louis, are likely to be slightly more nuanced in their approach to development.)
YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A CONTRARIAN PITBULL
COPE’s Tim Louis, the NPA’s Mike Klassen, and NSV’s Randy Helten are your men. All are political WWF contenders, who have no hesitation in taking out the enemy – even if, occasionally, the enemy is on their own team. Tim Louis has been involved in COPE politics forever and was bitterly opposed to the peeling off of some COPE members to form the new Vision party. He’s maintained radio silence about Vision during the campaign, but don’t expect that if he’s elected. Klassen brought a new kind of attack politics to Vancouver with his CityCaucus blog (co-written with Daniel Fontaine) and it would be fascinating to see if he can turn his pitbull instincts to good use at council. Unlike Louis, who has a pretty straightforward leftwing agenda that he’s stuck to for decades, Klassen hasn’t made it clear what he’d fight FOR besides the right to go after his opponents. (Better planning, nicer neighbourhoods isn’t really an agenda.) But maybe the three years will give him a chance to develop one. And Helten has shown himself to be relentless in pursuing his idea of how the city should be run. God help the person who disagrees with him, even about comma placement.
IF I’M GOING TO VOTE RIGHT, DANGIT, I WANT RICH PEOPLE FROM THE WEST SIDE WHO DRIVE SUVs
Sorry, I have no one to recommend. A few live on the west side — Suzanne Anton, Ken Charko and Elizabeth Ball – but none are corporate fatcats.
GREEN-COLOURED GLASSES
Saving Planet Earth takes precedence over almost anything else in your life? Andrea Reimer, Heather Deal from Vision Vancouver; Adrianne Carr from the Green Party.
SUSPICIOUS OF NEW-AGE GREENIES, PREFER OLD-STYLE LEFTIES BUT ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE A CHANCE OF BEING ELECTED
In descending order of leftiness: Tim Louis, Ellen Woodsworth, RJ Aquino from COPE; Raymond Louie, Kerry Jang, Geoff Meggs from Vision (though Geoff’s on the cusp, with all his bike-riding these days).
CANDIDATES WHO HAVE WORKED HARD FOR THE CITY AND THEIR COMUNITIES
Aha, here we are. The serious category.
Okay, this is where my biases kick in. First off, yes, I tend to judge based on what I see people doing on the public stage: at council, in news coverage, in their tweets and blogs. But I don’t think that’s the worst bias to have. People who are going to be on council need to demonstrate they can communicate who they are and what they’re doing.
Second, I like candidates who take stands, even if they’re unpopular, and don’t just repeat their party’s policies like a bunch of Occupiers doing mic checks.
Third, I tend to favour people who have demonstrated over more than just a period of two months that they have an interest in the city. I wouldn’t hire someone as a babysitter or carpenter just because they showed up at my door, looking eager and promising to learn what they’re supposed to do on the job.
Councillors manage a billion-dollar budget and have to balance the desires and financial constraints of 650,000 different people. In my years of watching council, what I see happen when newbies get elected is they get led around the nose by two groups: city staff or the most forceful member of their party.
I just don’t feel good about electing someone to the difficult task of making decisions on my behalf if they haven’t spent any time learning about the city or council or at least their neighbourhood. Or if they seem only half-interested in the job.
That’s why I can’t bring myself to recommend people like Tim Stevenson from Vision Vancouver, who seems to have lost interest in council the past three years. (I would have said the same about COPE’s David Cadman, but COPE members already did that job for me.)
Or candidates like George Affleck, Joe Carangi, Ken Charko, and Jason Lamarche from the NPA, who all seem like nice enough people but who didn’t show up at city hall until last month or even appear at a community meeting. While some, like Carangi and Charko, have campaigned hard, I don’t get any sense, from talking to them about what they’d like to accomplish as councillors, that they know much about how city hall actually works. Affleck seems to have just coasted along, with nothing more than retweets from NPA head office, and Lamarche did not distinguish himself in this campaign.
Similarly, Adrianne Carr from the Green Party has not spent any time I know of getting involved in local city issues. She seems to have jumped at the last minute onto the anti-Vision, anti-development bandwagon that Randy Helten drove out of the barn long ago. The only things I’ve heard her talk about are the need to develop better neighbourhood consultation for development and the possibility of banning bikes on certain arterials.
As I noted above, you might want to consider (depending on your politics!) one or more of the three candidates I listed above as the strong offensive linemen: Mike Klassen, Tim Louis, and Randy Helten. Like the following people I’ve listed here, they have learned a lot about the city and aren’t afraid to take stands. They do tend to be strong partisans, though, and haven’t shown so far a huge interest in talking much with people who don’t agree with them. That could change, especially with Klassen if he wants to move on in politics. He did tone down his style during the campaign.
