More than ten years after this blog was put on indefinite suspension, I feel the irresistible need to begin again.
The telling of this tale will involve exposing the ugly underbelly of developer driven municipal politics, but should also should give us all hope that the Vancouver electorate is capable of intelligent thoughtful decision making in rejecting business as usual. Both the fake left party Vision Vancouver and the fake non-partisan party NPA thought that they could vote split and triangulate their way into saving their power, and the Vancouver electorate saw right through their games.
The by-election of 2017 and the municipal election of 2018 are excellent examples of the power structure being defeated by smart voters making smart choices.
In 2010 I moved back to my beloved home country of Canada, and settled in a city that was new to me... Vancouver.
The telling of the many adventures I have had in this last decade will have to wait... for now I must put down my thoughts on a municipal political elite that has become far too clever by half.
To tell this story, I must go back in time to the by-election of 2017.
In the lead up to this election, it was clear that Vision Vancouver was in trouble.
The municipal political juggernaut of the last ten years, Vision had dominated the mayor-ship and city council since Robertson first won in 2008.
OK, lets go back in time a bit more. We need to know where Vision came from, and why they got into so much trouble. Here is a bit more historical context...
Vision Vancouver broke off from the REAL progressive municipal party - COPE - in 2002. The Coalition of Progressive Electors had just won an enormous victory. Larry Campbell had defeated his NPA opponent by nearly 2 to 1. Vancouver seemed well on its was towards an independent progressive council that would guide it through the beginning of the new turbulent century.
Who did they defeat in 2002?
The NPA - Non-Partisan Association - had never made any bones about its alliance with big developers. Excessive and unnecessary tower projects that largely destroyed Vancouver as a livable city in False Creek, Yale Town, and the West End were all begun under the previous decades of NPA rule. The NPA had non-partisan in its name, but unlike TEAM in the decades before who had actually fought for a livable Vancouver and honestly attempted to be non-partisan - the NPA was a developer driven party from start to finish.
Then came COPE in 2002. Despite completely dominating city council and electing a massively popular new mayor, the honeymoon did not last long. Infighting started almost immediately within this new council.
In 2004, Larry Campbell and Councillors Jim Green, Raymond Louie and Tim Stevenson made their deal with the devil. This group quickly became known as "COPE-lite" and made deal after deal with other developer friendly Councillors to push through massive tower development and the destruction of Vancouver that we see today.
In the end, Larry Campbell oversaw the towering unaffordable edifice constructed on the grounds of the old Woodwards complex which is now universally viewed as a failed opportunity at urban renewal. Instead it became a massive edifice of force-able neighbourhood cleansing. Vision Vancouver would make big business out of this kind of forced relocation of the poor.
Vision Vancouver WAS COPE-lite.
Vision Vancouver never was a real party of the left.
They would have to wait a full election cycle before gaining power back from NPA, and in doing so they created the future that COPE was created to prevent - the wholesale giveaway of Vancouver land to anyone with a backhoe to build tower after tower after tower of unaffordable properties., and to displace as many low income people as they could in the drive to create more homeless residents.
Although Robertson's singular campaign promise of 2008 was "ending homelessness", Vision did nothing to build affordable housing, did nothing to alter or increase services for homeless people, did nothing to curb the avarice of condo developers but instead continued to green light any development plan anywhere in the city with no requirements for affordability.
Robertson was a elected again in 2011 in a rout against Susan Anton from the NPA. Why would developers risk giving their money to the NPA when they had a perfectly positioned fake left party that was going to give them all the keys to the kingdom anyway?
Vision somehow maintained its position as the only choice on the left by extremely effective and Machiavellian green washing. Bike lanes and posturing against pipelines became a proxy for real progressive values.
It was OK to displace poor renters. It was OK destroy neighbourhood after neighbourhood as long as Gregor was pro-bike and against global warming.
Vision Vancouver thought that this would fool all of the people all of the time, and so did their big corporate donors.
Tides Canada - a "non-profit" with ties to big American eco-business interests created Gregor out of whole cloth as a champion of green washing, and they got exactly what they wanted. All their developer buddies flooded in to gut this beautiful city and build this most unaffordable playground for the wealthy.
Gregor coasted and coasted - for ten years - offering only the bare minimum of lip service to progressive issues until finally, BC politics was changed forever by the election of the NDP in the spring of 2017.
Shortly after being elected, the NDP, with the help of their Green partners, enacted a piece of singular legislation that banned both corporate and union donations in BC elections.
This meant that developers could no longer call the shots so blatantly as they had in the past.
If you think I am over exaggerating the impact of these donations, just look at Visions public donation list from the years between 2008 and 2017. It speaks like a who's who of the architects of Vancouver's affordability crisis.
Again, you might think that I have a jaundice view, perhaps an overly cynical view of the past. Believe me, I have direct face to face experience with the Vision municipal juggernaut. I saw how individual CoV planners were ordered to ignore community input. At the same time, any developer could get any meeting with any city official for any reason. I am a veteran of one of the "community plans" that Vision Vancouver faked over the years and I know for a fact that they listened to precisely no one that wasn't filling their pockets.
Fast forward to the municipal by-election of October 2017.
This was one of the first major elections after the new BC election law and would be a critical test for the ruling juggernaut under these new conditions.
Vision put up a young new candidate Diego Cardona. He checked all the cynical boxes. He was young, he was an immigrant, he was progressive. How could he lose in lefty lefty Vancouver?
He also had the full weight of the Vision machine behind him.
The trouble was, the Vision machine no longer had their corporate developer donations to keep them afloat.
The trouble was that the people of Vancouver had ten years to learn that Vision had no intention of creating a livable city. They were laughing all the way to the bank and the voters smelled it.
Then, knowing they were in trouble... They tried to be too clever by half.
They were most afraid of a move from the left. If voters found out that there was an alternative on the left that would actually do something, then they knew they were toast.
Jean Swanson was a big favorite to win the open seat in this by-election.
She had a 40 year career fighting for causes in the downtown eastside (DTES) of Vancouver and now was one of the city's most outspoken and famous housing advocates.
For a city in the middle of a massive housing crisis, she was a natural choice.
In order to combat this, Vision launched and supported their own independent housing advocate to bleed away votes from Swanson.
Judy Graves, a municipal employee for years that oversaw Vision's failed homeless policy, was funded and supported and pushed to run by all the old Visionistas.
This was their plan...
Swanson and Graves would split the independent housing advocate vote, and Vision would triumph up the middle with their new star Diego.
Instead, NPA candidate Hector Bremner barely won over Jean Swanson with 27% versus 21% of the vote.
But for Vision's transparent antics, Swanson would have won this council seat handily.
Too Clever By Half.
Vision candidate Diego Cardona barely cracked the top 5 with 11% of the vote.
Vision had died as a political party, and they knew it.
Without their corporate donors they had no hope of an election victory in this traditionally left of centre city.
Too Clever By Half doesn't work.
Too Clever By Half will always turn off the smart voter.
Last night's municipal election was a prime example of NPA trying exactly the same tactics.
The most accurate pre-election polls showed NDP candidate Kennedy Stewart with 30-40% of the vote, NPA Ken Sim with around 20%, and Shauna Sylvester with around 10-15%.
Essentially, after Vision candidate Ian Campbell withdrew from the race in early September, the last of the moderate left had nowhere to go. Most of them chose Kennedy Stewart.
Now, lets look at NPA being too clever by half...
Shauna Sylvester is MORE left than Kennedy Stewart. No doubt about it. She criticized him for not going far enough in creating more social housing, and was clearly running a campaign to outflank him on the left.
So why did she get so much vocal NPA support?
That's right, you read this right... vocal NPA support.
Peter Ladner, mayor candidate for NPA in 2008 was at her victory party.
George Affleck (NPA councillor) kept singing her praises during the all day new coverage of the election.
Come on guys. Do you really think the voters are that stupid?
Do you really think that the NPA which is diametrically opposed to Sylvester's policies would actually support such a candidate?
The more likely answer and much more sad and cynical is that the NPA realized that the only way they had a hope of winning was if the majority left vote was split between Sylvester and Stewart.
Too Clever By Half, NPA, Too Cleaver By Half.
Last night Kennedy Stewart narrowly won the 2018 Vancouver municipal election against an otherwise uninspiring and unpopular Ken Sim of the NPA.
If you add up the progressive left of centre votes in just the top three candidates, they beat the centre right by a mile.
The NPA needs to learn what Vision learned in the last by-election.
The voters of Vancouver are not so easily fooled.
Peter Ladner never supported Sylvester. Peter Ladner was sent in like a trojan horse by the NPA establishment to try and convince gullible voters that Sylvester had non-partisan appeal to bleed just enough votes away from Kennedy Stewart to allow a Ken Sim minority victory.
Too Clever By Half.
