Vancouver Green council candidate David H.T. Wong looks forward to the future after disappointing defeat

The only Vancouver Green candidate to lose in the October 20 election says he doesn’t want to look like a “whiner”.

Architect and author David H. T. Wong told the Georgia Straight by phone that he wonders if he might have been elected to city council—rather than coming 12th in the race for the top 10 spots—had he spent a little more time campaigning.

“I had to take a week off to do my book tour in Kelowna, then my son got married,” he said.

Wong also revealed that people warned him there would be a backlash against candidates with Chinese names because of media coverage of money-laundering in casinos and Chinese investments in the real-estate market.

“This was told to me before I even ran for office,” he said. “They said, ‘There’s going to be some sort of reaction.’ ”

Wong added that when media stories of vote-buying emerged during the campaign, he recognized that this could hurt his campaign. But he insisted that he didn’t want to cite his racial background as an “excuse” for his defeat.

He received 40,887 votes. That was 2,694 votes behind the 10th-place finisher, the NPA’s Sarah Kirby-Yung. Wong’s vote total was the highest among Vancouver council candidates with Chinese surnames.

Seven Greens with non-Chinese surnames in the election attracted more than 58,000 votes. The only other Green with a Chinese surname, school-board candidate Lois Chan-Pedley, received 48,409 votes. A Green council candidate, Michael Wiebe, was elected with 45,593 votes.

For Wong, it was tough watching Greens celebrate victories on election night as he lost. “I felt kind of down,” he admitted.

The Straight first covered Wong back in 1995 when he was part of a successful battle to stop the park board from cutting down hundreds of trees at the Fraserview Golf Course. He also appeared in this newspaper after he wrote a book, Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America, in 2012.

In addition, the Straight has covered his efforts to advance reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, awareness of Asian-Canadian literature, understanding about the Chinese head tax, and preservation of heritage buildings. Wong said that he’s been accepted as an honorary member of more than a dozen First Nations after building more than 150 residences in Indigenous communities.

“I’ve trained young people to build their own homes,” Wong added. “That, to me, is much more meaningful than all the accolades.”

Vancouver elects city councillors on an at-large basis, which means candidates must campaign across the entire city rather than in smaller electoral districts.

In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an at-large system in Georgia was unconstitutional because it discriminated against African Americans, a geographically concentrated racial minority.

“At-large voting schemes and multimember districts tend to minimize the voting strength of minority groups by permitting the political majority to elect all representatives of the district,” Justice Byron White wrote in his 1982 ruling.

Wong, a former Green candidate in the provincial constituency of Vancouver-Hastings, said that he’s a strong advocate of proportional representation.

He pointed out that if proportional representation had been in place in the last provincial election, he might have become an MLA for Vancouver. He based this comment on his vote count and percentage of the popular vote in comparison to other B.C. Green candidates.

And he's not going to wallow in what took place in the recent civic election—there are too many other important issues to keep him occupied as he looks to the future.

“I really don’t want to come across as a sore loser,” Wong emphasized.