Bus driver and social activist  Mable Elmore won  a hard-fought  NDP nomination race  today (March 22)  over former B.C. Teachers' Federation president Jinny Sims.

In a meeting at John Oliver secondary school, Elmore won by more than 60 votes over Sims  for the right to represent the NDP in the mostly  working-class constituency of  Vancouver-Kensington.

In the past, Elmore has been the cochair of Stopwar.ca, which has been a harsh critic of Israel's conduct in the Middle East.

She has been a member of the Vancouver and District Labour Council. As an  active member of Local 111 of the Canadian Auto Workers, she has campaigned vigorously for more buses. More than 30 percent of Vancouver-Kensington residents rely on pubic transit, according to BC Stats.

For the May 12 election, the B.C. Liberals have nominated Syrus Lee, a longtime director of the Chinatown Merchants Association.

The NDP's David Chudnovsky captured Vancouver-Kensington in 2005 with 50 percent of the vote. The B.C.  Liberal incumbent, Patrick Wong, came second with 42.3 percent.  

The constituency  lies on the south side of East 16th Street and Kinsgsway, north of East 49th Avenue, east of Nanaimo Street and west of Main Street.

According to a BC Stats evaluation of the 2006 census, 78 percent of the residents of Vancouver-Kensington are visible minorities, compared with 25 percent for the entire  province.

Nearly 30,000 of the 56,715 residents of Vancouver-Kensington  trace their ancestry back to China. The second largest group are the more than 5,000 residents who trace their roots back to the Philippines. Elmore's mother was born in the Philippines.