Gregor Robertson's victory tempered by Vision Vancouver's failure to renew itself

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      Most of the same old faces are returning to Vancouver city council after last night's election. Mayor Gregor Robertson cruised to victory over the NPA's Kirk LaPointe and the Coalition of Progressive Electors' Meena Wong. More than 10,000 votes separated the mayor from his closest competitor, LaPointe.

      That's down significantly from his 19,000-vote margin over his last two NPA foes. But in 2008, the mayor wasn't facing a COPE rival, so Robertson's win this time was by a clear margin and his party held control of council with six veterans reelected.

      But things were not nearly as cheerful for his party, Vision Vancouver, which lost control over the park and school boards.

      Vision only captured 11 of the 26 positions available on the park board, school board, and council. That's down from the 17 seats it took in 2008 in addition to the mayor's chair.

      After last night's results were tabulated, Vision has one less councillor, one less school trustee, and four fewer park commissioners than were elected on the party slate in 2011.

      Vision faces a difficult future

      The election results raise some troubling concerns for Robertson and his advisers.

      Most importantly, Vision failed to renew itself with younger candidates, leaving a caucus who will be in their 50s and 60s when the next election takes place in 2018.

      The only newly elected Visionistas are retired school psychologist Joy Alexander to the school board and former library board chair Catherine Evans to the park board.

      They, along with Brent Granby, were Vision's three oldest new candidates.

      The next generation of Vision politicians—Trevor Loke, Cherie Payne, Niki Sharma, Naveen Girn, Sammie Jo Rumbaua, and Coree Tull—all came up short. This has throttled the party's attempt to renew itself.

      Vision's brand hurt by loss of diversity

      Significantly, each losing Vision candidate came from a diverse community that the mayor's chief of staff, Mike Magee, had hoped to bring into the party's fold for the future.

      Vision's brand is rooted, in part, in its diversity, and that was blown to smithereens in this election.

      Sharma and Girn were Robertson's only candidates of South Asian descent; Rumbaua was the only person of Philippine descent running for any of the three major parties; Tull, a lesbian, and Loke, a young gay man, would have helped Vision's standing in the LGBT community after Métis writer-activist Trish Kelly dropped off the ballot. But that didn't come to pass.

      In addition, Vision's only Mandarin-speaking councillor, Tony Tang, was defeated. He also speaks fluent Cantonese. This is going to hamper the party's efforts to woo the growing number of voters from China and Taiwan.

      Meanwhile, Vision's only candidate of aboriginal descent, Ken Clement, was defeated after two terms on school board. And Constance Barnes, who's of African descent, didn't run for reelection. The other Vision politician of African descent, Cherie Payne, lost her bid for reelection to the school board.

      Derek Corrigan succeeded where Robertson failed

      Contrast Vision's failure in this area with the success of the Burnaby Citizens' Association, which is led by Mayor Derek Corrigan. He has told the Straight in the past that his city does a better job of addressing diversity issues than any other municipality in the region.

      The BCA elected three candidates on council and school board who were born in Taiwan. Mainland China-born James Wang was elected to council with the BCA. And its two school trustees of South Asian descent, Baljinder Narang and Harman Pandher, were easily reelected, as was its only councillor of South Asian descent, Sav Dhaliwal. And Gary Wong is back on school board with the BCA.

      Vision still has some diversity in caucus, unlike the all-white four-member Green caucus. The Greens were hoping to get Strathcona Residents' Association president Pete Fry and lawyer Cleta Brown elected to council, but they ended up far back in the pack.

      Fry is the son of Liberal MP Hedy Fry; Brown is the daughter of former NDP MLA Rosemary Brown, the only woman of African descent elected to the B.C. legislature.

      The NPA's only council candidate of Chinese descent, Ken Low, came up short, but a bright young park candidate, Erin Shum, was elected for the first time.

      Vision's Raymond Louie, Kerry Jang, and Allan Wong are all of Chinese descent, which will help the party's profile in the Chinese-language media (even though Jang has been disparaged as a "banana" by one restaurateur irate over his efforts to ban shark-fin soup). 

      Tim Stevenson, who was reelected, has been a strong advocate for the LGBT community. But this could be his last term, given that he was first elected to the legislature in 1996 and made it to council in 2002. 

      The reality is that Vision is starting to look a lot older and a lot whiter after its recent efforts to diversify sputtered. Without any South Asian candidates elected, it won't attract as much coverage in media outlets serving this highly politicized community.

      Would the party have fared better had Barnes ran for council and if Sharma had tried for one more term on park board? We'll never know the answer to that question. Barnes managed to collect the most votes for park board in the 2011 election.

      Angry voters exacted revenge on Vision

      There are other questions that Vision officials might ask themselves. Was the youth movement on park board too much too soon?

      Was the last park board's heavy-handed approach with community-centre associations a factor in last night's setback, undermining Vision's efforts to elect fresh faces from diverse communities?

      Did the vote to ban breeding of cetaceans at the aquarium backfire by invigorating the NPA's fundraising machine?

      There are other questions raised by the results. Did the electorate want to inflict more damage on Vision's council slate, but decide to hold back after concluding that the NPA under LaPointe offered even worse prospects for the city?

      If so, did voters take out their anger on Vision's park and school candidates, concluding that this would offer an opportunity for vengeance without turning over the keys to City Hall to NPA president Peter Armstrong, who once locked out his railway employees for over a year?

      This is the most frightening prospect of all for Vision Vancouver because it offers a roadmap for the NPA to retake city hall in 2018.

      NPA can come back by copying Gordon Campbell's approach

      In the 1986 election, the NPA's Gordon Campbell trounced his COPE opponents by building up a left flank. He recruited progressive candidates, such as Nancy Chiavario and Al De Genova for park board and Gordon Price for council, to send a message that this wasn't a party like its forebears.

      Over three elections, Campbell sought out higher profile candidates from the East Side and from within the LGBT, Chinese, and South Asian communities.

      The big-money men who funded the NPA in those days—yesteryear's equivalent to Armstrong and developer Rob Macdonald—were kept in the shadows, not on the board of directors for everyone to see. And the NPA kept tight control over city hall until 2002.

      The only way the NPA can stage a renewal like this is if Armstrong shelves his ego and ceases being the party president and spokesperson.

      Former NPA mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton and LaPointe were in no position to stand up to Armstrong, but the three-member caucus (George Affleck, Elizabeth Ball, and Melissa De Genova) on council can do this now that each has won two consecutive elections.

      It will be the first real test of their political courage after another drubbing at the hands of Vision.

      LaPointe often said he was beholden to nobody, which sounded good at first. But after it was revealed that Armstrong—through his companies and personally—was responsible for more than 20 percent of NPA donations, LaPointe's claim started to sound a little hollow to some.

      Armstrong's appearance at the news conference alongside LaPointe about these donations reinforced a lingering impression that this party belongs to Armstrong, not LaPointe, who's a relative newcomer to the NPA.

      The NPA has lost three consecutive elections, mostly because it's perceived to be a party of rich white guys, some of whom sit on the board of the ultra-right-wing Fraser Institute.

      As a result, it's easy for Vision Vancouver politicians to portray NPA candidates as employees of these wealthy funders. The image of LaPointe on TV last night giving a concession speech in a sea of white faces didn't help matters.

      That would have never happened when Campbell was running the city. Unless the next NPA mayoral candidate can do a better job than LaPointe of distancing himself or herself from the party's funders, Vision could easily end up with its fourth consecutive majority.

      This is true even if voters are just as angry with the status quo in 2018 as they were in this election. 

      Comments

      14 Comments

      Yes

      Nov 16, 2014 at 11:29am

      Would the party have fared better had Barnes ran for council and if Sharma had tried for one more term on park board? We'll never know the answer to that question. Barnes managed to collect the most votes for park board in the 2011 election.

      -YES

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      Steven Forth

      Nov 16, 2014 at 2:14pm

      Excellent analysis. Will be interesting to follow how the parties evolve following this election.

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      Long-time Voter

      Nov 16, 2014 at 4:55pm

      What surprises me is how no one will remark on Green's political flip-flop. Where once they were part of a COPE-Green alliance against NPA in 1999, but will happily jump into bed with NPA to get elected.

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      IceManLikeGervin

      Nov 17, 2014 at 3:50am

      Ain't nothing changed but the weather.......

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      Dan

      Nov 17, 2014 at 4:46am

      Diversity... blah blah blah. We're all just people who want the best government possible.

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      critical thought

      Nov 17, 2014 at 8:42am

      It doesn't matter where on the spectrum a political party is, having one party with a stranglehold on council, parks board and the school board is an invitation to govern without listening. It would have been preferable to have one or two more non-Vision candidates elected to council to restore some accountability. But hopefully Vision got the message. Stevenson and Meggs' margin of victory over the 2 NPA candidates who finished behind them was razor thin. The result was hardly a ringing endorsement for Vision's approach during the past 6 years. Hopefully it takes a lesson from that.

      As for the school board, I hope that the NPA trustees support the Green candidate for Chair. This would go a long way to encouraging a more balanced direction to the school board.

      Finally, now that the dust has settled I think that we should all be grateful that so many women and men, regardless of the party, took the time and energy to run for office. It takes a lot of work and it is far from easy. And great to see an increase in the voter turnout. Democracy works.

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      ursa minor

      Nov 17, 2014 at 10:53am

      It's a bit of stretch to conclude that the failure of first-time candidates to be elected to Council equates to the impending ossification of Vision Vancouver. It matters far more that Vision skews far younger demographically among the people who vote for them than does the NPA.

      The NPA outflanking Vision on the left is also a stretch, given that control of the NPA is squarely in the hands of the Fossil Fuel Industry and the Fraser Institute. Vancouverites accept density, bike lanes, the need for mass transit to UBC, and safe injection sites, and they're too smart for the NPA's attempts at Tea Party-style fabricated outrage.

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      critical thought

      Nov 17, 2014 at 11:53am

      I think it's a bit of a stretch to conclude that Vancouverites accept density, ursa minor. I appreciate that it has become conventional wisdom among some people who regard themselves as green that the more density the better, particularly around transit nodes. That being the case, I would assume that one of, if not the, busiest transit node in Vancouver - Broadway/Commercial - is a no brainer for condo towers. Certainly the senior bureaucrats who instructed the planners to amend the community plan to include towers in the Safeway parking lot thought so. It doesn't appear that the Vancouverites who lived in Grandview Woodlands agreed.

      The outrage was not fabricated. It was very real. And the smart people who run Vision would do well not to dismiss it or next time out they'll lose more than the park and school boards. Vision needs to shed its appetite for 500 sq foot pens in concrete silos as a one size fits all solution to affordability.

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      OMG

      Nov 17, 2014 at 12:58pm

      @critical thought

      The one group of people that seems to left out of this conversation are the people who live in these condos. They don't appear to have a problem with densification nor the size of the condo.

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      xnexus

      Nov 17, 2014 at 2:09pm

      You are right usra minor. I support density, bike lanes, the need for mass transit to UBC, and safe injection sites. Which is the primary reason I voted "not Gregor" in this election. I support bike lanes, not private driveways for the richest people in the city. I support rapid transit to UBC, not the half baked Vision plan to end the line at Arbutus (the from nowhere to nowhere option). Which doesn't matter anyways, since the plan to fund it was the one plan the provincial government said was a complete no-starter (redirecting the existing carbon tax). Now that the election is over, we can expect another 4 years of no progress on this line, with Gregor blaming everyone but himself.

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