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A lovely non-partisan event

August 14th, 2008 · 2 Comments

A multi-political crowd came out for a nice little evening party in Douglas Park last night to launch Sarah Blyth’s candidacy for a Vision park-board nomination, with cake out on the playing field. The DeGenova family (Allan, Wendy, Melissa) was there to support her, even though Melissa is now running for the Non-Partisan Association park-board slate after having campaigned with Vision through the spring to support her dad’s mayoral-nomination run. But Sarah also did yeoman work on Allan’s mayoral campaign, so the family came out to return the favour, as did a DeGenova campaign organizer, Ian Baillie. Several Vision candidates came also came out, including Andrea Reimer and Catherine Evans (council), Mike Lombardi, Stepan Vdovine, and Patti Bacchus (school board). And so did a few other NPA park-board candidates like Wai Sin and Chris Richardson. And Green Party candidate Stuart Mackinnon rounded out the crowd.

Park-board politics are always so much pleasanter than council’s. Even though they’re from different parties, the park board people always seem to be able to get along and avoid the cliche’d mud-slinging that characterizes council and even, sometimes, school board. (Little known to most people is the fact that COPE park commissioner Loretta Woodcock and DeGenova were great buddies at park board, even when Al was still with the NPA.) Sarah, a candidate with a lot of heart and sincerity, seems to have tapped into that spirit in particular. For more info on her, Sandra Thomas has a nice profile in today’s Courier.

One other little glimpse of that has been from NPA council candidate Michael Geller, who seems determined to run a non-standard political campaign. Geller, while staunchly praising NPA mayoral candidate Peter Ladner, has taken the time to have a visit with Vision competition Gregor Robertson and says he plans to vote for Vision councillor Heather Deal.

Categories: 2008 Vancouver Civic Election