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PrintLarry Campbell enters the Vancouver mayoral race: Not!!!
What a morning on CBC Radio's Early Edition program. First, Senator and former Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell told host Rick Cluff that he is entering the Vision Vancouver mayoral-nomination race.
This was just after the 6:30 news. Then after 7:00 a.m., Mayor Sam Sullivan declared how much he was looking forward to running against former mayor Campbell.
Sullivan said on a few occasions that it was "civil war" at Vancouver City Hall during Campbell's tenure as mayor from 2002 to 2005. During that period, Campbell often insulted Sullivan in the council chamber.
Then before the 7:30 news, CBC played a phone call from park commissioner Al De Genova, declaring that he was withdrawing from the Vision Vancouver mayoral-nomination race, and backing Campbell's candidacy.
I was hooked for a while, posted a blog item, and then realized the whole thing was an April Fool's joke when it wasn't covered on the newscasts.
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On CBC this morning, Rick Cluff interviewed Tim Stevenson live about Campbell's "bid" for mayor. Stevenson sounded like someone punched him in the gut, as he explained he was planning to announce his own mayoral bid this morning, and he had been counting on Campbell's support.
Was Stevenson in on the joke? If so, he should get a radio Oscar for the strained grief his voice portrayed. If he wasn't in on it, well, that probably sucks.
When Cluff brought Campbell in to the interview with Stevenson, and Campbell announced it was a joke ("to Charlie Smith at the Georgia Straight: Gotcha!"), you could almost see the lines around the former mayor's eyes crinkle in delight.
Now that Campbell is in Ottawa, and his proxy Dominic Da Vinci is off the air, something is missing in this city. Do any of the announced mayoral candidates have that je ne sais quoi? Can the city afford another term of that kind of quoi? Guess we'll find out...
Having said that, I like this joke even better:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/01/npenguin101.xml
and this one made the rounds of the computer geeks (my world):
www.google.com/virgle/index.html
So next year CBC will have to do some photoshop work to win any prizes, as good as the joke was this year!
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