Where are the Vancouver Civic Greens when you need them?

The Vancouver Civic Greens made one of the most lopsided deals in political history in 2008 when they agreed to form a united electoral front with Vision Vancouver and the Coalition of Progressive Electors.

In return for their support for Gregor Robertson's mayoral candidacy, the Greens agreed to run only one candidate for the 27 available positions on council, school board, and park board.

Strong, effective voices from the community, such as former Green candidates John Whistler and Richard Campbell, were sidelined in the 2008 election to clear the way for Vision and COPE to snare all the council seats.

The greenest former politician in Vancouver history, former COPE councillor Fred Bass, also sat out the election, which helped the Robertson slate.

Supporters of the united front will no doubt point to the election of former Green Andrea Reimer, Vision's Heather Deal, and COPE's David Cadman as evidence that the strategy worked. They all have distinguished themselves on environmental issues in the past.

However, true Greens also have a tendency to be fiscally prudent as well as being cautious about harming the environment. Many of them practise the precautionary principle with tax dollars.

And recent news stories suggest that the current crop of politicos in charge of Vancouver City Hall have not demonstrated themselves to be prudent money managers.

There was one story about the city spending $260,000 to improve the offices of the mayor, council, and the city manager.

Bloggers Mike Klassen and Alex Tsakumis broke another story about how the city hired a former Vanoc executive on a $1,000 per day untendered contract to provide advice around a range of Olympic initiatives. The total bill to taxpayers exceeded $180,000.

Yesterday (August 31), there was a third example. The Vancouver Police Department bought four full pages in the Vancouver Sun without any bidding process to publish its annual report.

In the past when I've written about this, the bill to taxpayers has exceeded $25,000. Naturally, the four-page ad included photos of Robertson, who chairs the police board. It would have paid nearly half the annual salary of a police constable.

Virtually every other public agency (here are a few: Workers' Compensation Board, B.C. Hydro, ICBC, and B.C. Lottery Corporation) seems satisfied with publishing annual reports on-line and, on occasion, creating a few printed copies. That's the green way to do business in the 21st century.

But that's not good enough for the VPD and the police board chair, who seem to feel that the public has an unlimited amount of money to blow on their behalf.

True Green politicians would speak out about this type of waste. Unlike the Vision Vancouver crowd, they would also raise hell about the at-large electoral system, which rewards deep-pocketed campaign contributors and undermines local democracy.

In the interest of fiscal sanity, perhaps it's time for the Civic Greens to rethink their electoral alliance with Robertson and Vision Vancouver. At the very least, the Greens should hold out for one seat on the council slate.

This would ensure that somebody on council would be paying attention to taxpayers' money being poured down the drain in questionable ways. Currently, the so-called greenies in the Vision caucus keep their mouths shut about these issues because their party places such a premium on maintaining caucus solidarity.

Meanwhile, Cadman is angling to renew COPE's electoral alliance with Vision, so it's not in his best interest to portray Vision councillors as spendthrifts.

If Vision Vancouver plays hardball and selfishly refuses to offer up one council seat to the Civic Greens, they should respond by running a full slate for park board and two or three members for council.

It would be a nice payback for the lack of respect that Vision politicians and their henchmen have occasionally shown to Green park commissioner Stuart Mackinnon.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.