Late last week, I was walking home from work when a group of young people stopped me at Main and Keefer, and asked if I would sign their “petition for affordable housing”. Oddly, however, the document on their clipboards was not a petition; it was simply a sheet with a Vision Vancouver logo, spaces for names and contact information, and nothing else.

Veterans of political campaigns might chuckle at this, and tell me that much worse happens all the time. For me, however, this episode is emblematic of the way in which our city government continues to try to mislead Vancouverites on housing issues. It was also the moment that I made up my mind to seek a COPE nomination for city council.

Also last week, the mayor’s office sent out a press release announcing an “affordable housing surge”. That assertion has so many problems that it’s difficult to know where to start, but I’m going to cover just a few key deficiencies.

We could start with Vision’s philosophical definition of “affordable”, as expressed by Councillor Kerry Jang: “Affordable housing is something that somebody can afford.” In other words, in their hands, the term “affordable” is so relative as to become meaningless. If someone is making six digits a year, and they can afford their home, then bingo, it’s “affordable housing”.

Pressed for clarification, council decided that a $1,433-a-month studio apartment or a $2,061-a-month two-bedroom unit is affordable housing. Keep in mind that almost 40 percent of renter households in Vancouver earn less than $30,000 per year. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, in order to afford the “affordable” studio, your income should be over $55,000 a year, and for the two-bedroom, over $81,000.

But Vision also said there was a surge in “social housing”. This has also been accomplished by fudging the definition. The new Vision definition of social housing says that 70 percent of these units are not for low income people at all; they can be priced at “market rate”. The remaining 30 percent are also pegged to “average market rent”, currently estimated at $875 per month (although I defy you to find livable rentals on the market for that amount or less).

And most importantly, the “surge” is not a surge in actual new units. After six years with a majority on council, and after pouring developer subsidies into the STIR and Rental 100 programs in the hope that these gifts will make developers decide to focus on less-lucrative market segments (they haven’t), all that the mayor’s office can point to is an increase in approvals of projects which may take years to build.

On the social-housing side, these are provincial government projects, the same 14 projects that the province has been announcing every few months for several years now as if they were new initiatives. As the provincial government has now declared that they will not be building any new social housing, and the city displays no intention of picking up the slack, the surge is no surge at all, just a brief blip on a dismal record of increasing homelessness, demolitions, renovictions, and housing costs that rise much faster than incomes.

COPE is the only party proposing decisive action on housing. It’s your choice—fake petitions and fudged press releases, or policies that create housing that we all can afford.