Vancouver mayoral candidates Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson keep emphasizing a theme about their campaign. For Ladner, it’s “experience.” For Robertson, it’s “change and leadership.” I had a story in the Globe Friday that looks at why code words like that get used. As University of Victoria political-science professor Dennis Pilon points out, those kinds [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s the full list of candidates, all, for those of you not in direct communication with city hall. As you’ll see, it looks like it will be a relatively clean election, since there is no “Pete Ladner” or “Gregory Robertson” in there to muddy the waters. I’ll skip the boring parts (“two parties with exciting [...]

[Read more →]

It was the Non-Partisan Association’s annual fundraising dinner tonight, even though that fact went unrecorded by all media but me as far as I can tell. Time was it was a routine item for coverage. (Remember three years ago when Sam Sullivan apologized to the banquet crowd for his misjudgment in letting a drug user [...]

[Read more →]

The city’s civic parties aren’t spending a lot of money on advertising at the moment — not much point when all the noise of the federal election is going on. “We can barely get the attention of the local media,” NPA campaign manager Paul Wilson told me. “There’s a lot of clutter out there. It [...]

[Read more →]

With 21 candidates out of 37 who didn’t get elected yesterday for Vision Vancouver, there’s a lot of disappointment out there. But different candidates are handling that disappointment differently, as you can see from emails that went out from two of them today to their supporters. From: Facebook [mailto:notification+ooya6t96@facebookmail.com] Sent: September 21, 2008 3:50 PM [...]

[Read more →]

Vision council candidate David Eby disappeared quickly last night, after the voting results from the day showed that had, for the moment, lost to Kashmir Dhaliwal by only 17 votes for the eighth and final spot on the slate. Since then, I’ve had any number of comments from his diehard supporters saying they can’t believe [...]

[Read more →]

Just over 1,300 people had voted by 1 p.m., so the numbers are continuing to be diluted by the rain. In spite of that, there’s a fairly jolly atmosphere down here in the parking lot and streets around Tupper secondary as people stream in to vote, volunteers hold mini-tailgate parties nearby and all kinds of [...]

[Read more →]

This is a bit late, but since I spent four hours of my short time here on earth listening to this stuff, you should at least get the benefit. As all you political junkies know, the NPA acclaimed most of the final set of candidates on Saturday and had a vote-off among the four park-board [...]

[Read more →]

It wasn’t even close, which some people thought it might be. Nope, the huge majority of the 400 Coalition of Progressive Electors members voted in favour of the Vision-COPE-Green non-aggression pact. Even Tim Louis, when I talked to him afterwards, acknowledged that the vote was “strongly in favour.” So you know it’s true. We in [...]

[Read more →]

A few people have emailed to ask me how many school-board candidates the Non-Partisan Association is actually running. It’s a bit confusing, since the news release that went out this afternoon listed newcomer Joanne Pulis as the party’s seventh candidate. That’s in addition to veterans Clarence Hansen, Carol Gibson, and Ken Denike, along with first-timers [...]

[Read more →]