After about a month of campaigning, COPE still hasn't provided any concrete and practical solutions to alleviating homelessness. An absent condo owner tax doesn't address how money is collected and can it be collected? If the money from the tax isn't available, does the homeless situation stay status quo or God forbid worse? There is also no convincing platform for job creation. The $15 per hour minimum wage is provincial jurisdiction, but to play Devil's advocate, let's say make it so, then employers may choose to lay off or reduce hours. Companies wanting to invest in Vancouver are put off by higher minimum wages, do not do so. So where is the job creation coming from?

There's the five points above and also the matter of their election platform reading like a Robin Hood-esque children's fable.

Let's just stop and re-read that line in the context of a democracy. "They don't have nearly enough money". That is most likely why the countries with the best democracies have strict limits on election spending.

Ah, Charlie: You know all of this because of why? It's been some time, apparently, since you had any sense of what the "left" is about in Vancouver. This last analysis of COPE is not improving your standing in this regard. Alas...

It's a very serious tragedy that the left vote was ever divided in Vancouver. It has disenfranchised the underprivileged and economically challenged residents of Vancouver. Ironically running a COPE mayoral candidate will throw Vancouver into the hands of the extreme right. What COPE needs is strong level-headed long term leadership to rise again. 2018?

6. A lot of their campaign promises are outside of local government jurisdiction, and some would require the BC Liberals to modify the Vancouver Charter to allow left wing policies that the current provincial government adamantly opposes (i.e. a $15 minimum wage).

Their transit pass proposal would need buy-in from all the TransLink member municipalities and the provincially appointed Board, and would also require billions of dollars in increased transit capacity to cope with increased demand (keeping in mind that the feds and the province haven't even pledged to fund the modest transit improvements proposed in the Mayors' council transit plan).

Hey COPE it's called identity politics. I'm a bloody socialist but I wouldn't vote for you guys in a million years.

Drop the stupid identity politics platform (I need rights because I'm a victim--boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo...) Your victimization is not only bad politics, it makes people run the other way--fast. I give my sympathy at work and I have no time for yours.

Left wing politics means supporting arts and culture, providing public financing for education, giving a hard left hook punch to the Fraser Institute and oil interests, and working to persuade evil corporations to do their social duty.

I think COPE's time is gone - ideally the leftist or progressive forces in this city will form around a new party. Also ideally, the same would happen to the NPA. It's a dinosaur that's only still walking because of the piles of money pushing it along. Politics in Vancouver need a serious revitalization.

Yes, that's all true. But left-leaning voters should still vote COPE to make sure that the important issues it is raising in this election have a voice on the next Council. Politics, ultimately, is about which ideas, and whose interests, will prevail. So if I want to register support for a tax on vacant residential properties, if I want to see the City build "council houses" like hundreds of European cities do, and if I want to see a universal bus pass, then COPE is the logical choice. To vote Vision or NPA or Green would be to cast one's vote against those ideas.

People mustn't allow themselves to be bamboozled into voting against their own best interests. Granted, the establishment parties have slick campaigns (financed by developers); they have candidates with name recognition; and each of them implicitly claims to be the lesser of two evils. But so what? Forget about "strategic voting" and treat the election like a plebiscite on competing platforms. That's the truly rational way to vote.

COPE are in trouble because their ideology requires that they view most residents of Vancouver as cash machines for their failed policies. Socialism is dead folks, neither Cuba nor Venezuela is a model to follow yet hang around COPEies for a few years and you will learn that societies that can't provide enough toilet paper or electricity are what we should be striving towards. The fringe of the party, the Cadman types willing to trade their ideological certitudes for a taste of power, defected to Vision and doomed the COPE to irrelevance except as spoilers.

COPE have yet to learn the eternal rule of electoral politics: the "disenfranchised" don't vote. Repeat that a few times and get it through your heads. All the years of handing out protest signs and rewarding marchers with a sandwich and coffee haven't increased COPE support and the years of insisting taxpayers must pay more than we already are have soured many soft-lefties. The guilty middle-class vote now goes to Vision because they are so darn "green" along with the money vote and the cycling vote. Isn't it hilarious how Vision has used a range of left-wing groups to advance their agenda to enrich their 1% donors?