Living in a three-storey walk-up rental unit in Burnaby is kind of terrifying. You’re afraid to ask for repairs, afraid to complain about problems, because you don’t want to provide the owners of your building with even the slightest incentive to sell out to developers.

The toilet is broken? Try to jerry-rig a fix. The sink is plugged? Maybe Liquid-Plumr will do the trick. Whatever you do, don’t give anyone reason to decide to demovict you: as you watch buildings identical to yours get knocked down left and right, you learn to live with a perpetual insecurity, with an eye towards where you can move next.

I was impressed, last time I sat down with Joe Keithley, to interview him for a German punk magazine, to learn that demovictions in Burnaby were one of his highest priorities.

At that point the long-time D.O.A. frontman was still thinking of running for mayor of Burnaby. Sitting at his kitchen table, he assured me that the Greens would put a moratorium on runaway condo developments.

"If developers want to develop, okay, let’s play some hardball with them and get a real deal, so that people who have lived there forever have somewhere to go," he said. "There’s people in the area who have been there for 40 years, and they don’t have anywhere to go. They don’t have money. What’s going on right now is so heartless, and the mayor [Derek Corrigan] doesn’t care; he’s proved that again and again.”

As a Burnaby resident myself, I was looking forward to finally getting a chance to vote for Keithley, and was shocked, a few months later, to discover he’d stepped down from the race. At first I thought it was because the Greens had decided to run someone else for mayor.

How impressive to learn, then, talking to the Greens manning at a table at a Maywood town-hall this last Tuesday, that in fact they had no mayoral candidate at all this election, since they didn’t want to take votes away from the man most likely to beat Corrigan, former firefighter and union man Mike Hurley.

To ensure Corrigan doesn't get in for another term, they told me, it was important to not siphon votes away from Hurley.

I walked over to where Keithley was standing: "So do you endorse Mike Hurley for mayor?"

“Absolutely,” he said.

Keithley followed up by email after the town-hall was over: “Mike is a good solid candidate that has spent a lot of time helping regular people thoughout his life, so there is a common thread between him and me. It actually felt great to step aside and concentrate on what I see as a pretty good chance of getting elected as councillor. And remember, a councillor's vote counts as much as the mayor's.”

There were some candidates with anti-SOGI 123 signs up around the hall, so it seemed worthwhile to check with both Hurley and the Greens on that. The initiative on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, designed so that queer and trans teens will feel safe and included in high schools, has been a divisive issue in B.C.

I asked Hurley in person what he thought of SOGI, without tipping my hand as to my own opinion; without batting an eye, he said he supported it unequivocally. 

Turns out, so do the Greens, Keithley tells me: “Canada is a great country and one of the reasons is that all people have rights, and I would go through the wall to support that.”

Anything else the Greens are campaigning on? “We want to invest in and help co-op housing and affordable rental units get built, as well as facilitating more daycare. We also believe that seniors have been ignored for too long, and we want to help them: they built this country of ours.”

It was interesting to see Keithley at work without a guitar in hand, the other night; he makes a pretty impressive candidate, actually. It was also eminently useful: now I know who I’m going to vote for, for mayor, for council, and for the school board, come October 20.

I mean, my apartment’s not great, but I’m not ready to move out just yet.