That’s quite a sign of renewal for the party and surely something Vision Vancouver will keep its eye on. A lot of people on the left, while sort of supporting Vision, are not sure where this new party is really heading. “Liberals in a hurry,” I heard one left supporter sniff once. That kind of latent preference for a real left-wing party is what COPE is counting on in the future. If Vision gets just a little too pragmatic, (read moderate, read hopelessly mushy), then COPE will be waiting to pick up the left-wing pieces.

And the answer is, once again: Mostly the development industry for the two major parties. Unless Vision Vancouver surprises us on Monday, with the news that the bulk of its money has come from organic carrot farmers, yoga-mat producers, and graphic designers.

VV’s details on its rumoured $1.5 million campaign aren’t in yet — deadline is Monday. Nor are those of the Coalition of Progressive Electors, which has said it spent $300,000 on its campaign. (By the way, that works out to a cost of just under $100,000 per successful candidate for VV and a bargain basement $50,000 per successful candidate for COPE.)

But the Non-Partisan Association filed its disclosure today, as have a few of the candidates, notably Peter Ladner, Kim Capri and Elizabeth Ball. You can look at the documents here, which the city has helpfully — thanks to a motion last May — started providing on the web this year instead of requiring us to down to city hall dressed like Queen Victoria and copy out the numbers with quill pens, as was the previous practice. (Sorry, I just had a beer with dinner and am feeling silly.)

All very helpful, except that the NPA has many documents laid out in such a way that you have to turn your head sideways to read them and keep scrolling back and forth to figure out which development company donated $10,000 and which only donated $2,000. But I quibble.

I can’t quite tell what the total NPA spending was, because they file for the party and for candidates but the candidates give money to the party, though not everything they raise and so on. But it appears that the party raised just over $1 million, Peter got brought in $200,000 after paying his money to the party, Suzanne about $70,000 in total but she gave some to Peter’s campaign and then some to the party, etc., so I’m going to estimate the total was around $1.3 million. The list of the city’s prominent figures in the development industry is fairly complete.

Bob Rennie appears to be the biggest donor, having turned over $35,000 worth of his advertising pages (I presume in the Vancouver Sun) to the party. Developer Rob Macdonald gave at least $12,625; Imperial Parking kicked in $12,500 ($7,500 to the party; $5,000 to Peter); Concord Pacific gave around $12,000, Jimmy Pattison’s company, $10,000; Henderson Developers gave $12,500; the Keg restaurants gave $10,000. There are a couple of newcomers (to me, anyway, it seems) on the scene with big money. The owners Harbour Centre Complex, the Sears tower to oldtimers, gave $10,000. That’s odd, considering that the directors of the company, Rainer Hackert and Carl-Gustav Staelin, are from Missassagua and Germany respectively. Another newcomer donor is David Sidoo, the ex-football player, investment banker and owner of DB Bistro Moderne. Those last two also gave $10,000 apiece.

What does new NPA president Michael Davis make of all this? Well, he’s glad the party’s not in debt. They came out of the debacle with about $3,000. But he’d like to see a limit on donations from unions, developers and businesses. Gee, maybe there could be bipartisan support for this idea at last.

Now we’re waiting to see what Vision will file.

BTW, for those waiting to see what Sam Sullivan and Raymond Louie spent on their failed campaigns to run for mayor — keep waiting. Davis said the current law does not appear to require Sullivan for sure and Louie, maybe, to file. A candidate who runs for a nomination and loses has no requirement to file later, so we will never never find out who Sullivan’s great supporters were. (I should note that he gave $15,000 to the party through donations.) As for whether Louie, who ran for a mayoral nomination and lost but then ran for a council nomination, got it and then was elected, has to file his expenses for the mayoral nomination — that’s not at all clear, says Davis.

I would like to note for the record that I spent a quarter tank of gas, plus the cost of a coffee (with an NPA organizer) and a lunch (with a Vision organizer) on the day of the election.

As people in the Downtown Eastside know too well, those who have been sleeping on the streets are often the most troubled. So there’s often a lot more to housing them, even in shelters, than just opening the doors. Those who live in the Gastown area will remember the difficulties caused after the COPE council, in another quick move to house the homeless shortly after being elected in 2002, put 200 people who had been squatting around Woodward’s into the Stanley New Fountain and left it to the Portland Hotel Society to run.

With few resources and an extremely challenging group to deal with, the Stanley turned into a nightmare for all concerned. There were police calls, neighbourhood disruptions, and burned-out staff trying to do too much with too little.

The situation finally eased after a couple of years when the Portland got more staffing and resources for the building. The Portland, which manages several hotels in the area, was also able to cope with the situation better than some because it could deploy staff over to the Stanley from other buildings, if there was a real emergency, and its staff had also had years of experience in dealing with some of the Downtown Eastside’s most difficult residents.

One of the more amusing double-events of the night was the B.C. Federation of Labour-organized rally in favour of the coalition government (and against Stephen Harper’s politics, hair, and everything else) held at Canada Place, which just happened to be across the street from where the province’s big developers were holding their annual wingding at the Fairmont Waterfront.

The Urban Development Institute party attracts the who’s who of the development world, which includes a LOT of mayors and councillors.

So several Vancouver councillors got to do double-time, managing to attend both the rally and the UDI party. Vision’s Heather Deal, Geoff Meggs and Andrea Reimer, along with COPE’s Ellen Woodsworth, all hustled from one side of the road to the other to make both events, each of which was quite well attended. The UDI event offered yummy dim sum and pasta snacks, however, which the Fed rally did not.

Here’s a precis of the events at the rally. No speeches at the UDI party, just lots of anxious talk about the gloomy immediate future of development.

There were also questions about how long it would be before its representatives started making motions about weapons in space and other non-civic issues that gained them some public notoriety in their last administration.

Here’s what David Cadman had to say about where COPE is going:

“This is a very clear signal that if progressive forces work together, they can win. It worked for everybody. Both Ellen and I are going to be true to our base, but I really hope we’ll have the kind of respect from Gregor that we didn’t have from Sam, that he’ll talk to each one of us about what we want to accomplish and make that possible. That’s the way I always remembered council.”

He’s already contacted Gregor with ideas he has on shelter space that might be available in Vancouver quickly for homeless people.

Some of the ideas they’ll be driving forward:

- a free bus. “During the Olympics, there is going to be a push for a free bus to get people around so I think we could set that up before then.”

- sustainability measures. The Olympic athletes village has a district heating plan that extracts heat from the sewers. Cadman would like to see Vancouver do something innovative on the green front by creating district-heat systems for other neighbourhoods.

- taxes. Cadman remains opposed to a shifting of taxes from business to residential, something that the Vision group has said it will support.

“I don’t think we’re going to shy away from being who we are,” said Cadman. “But I don’t want a position that says Vision majority and COPE opposition. I hope we can come together and say this is a good idea and that’s a good idea. That’s my real hope for this council. People don’t want a stand-off.”

Here’s hoping to sweetness and light. Wouldn’t that be weird.

And, at those lower levels, one of the more fun moments of the past week was the Last Candidate Standing event organized Friday night by Vancouver Public Space Network and Simon Fraser University’s City Program. I was a judge for the night, along with architectural writer Trevor Boddy and West Ender reporter Jackie Wong.

An amazingly large crowd (200? 250?) came out to SFU Harbour Centre to listen to candidates of every stripe answer questions about which city bylaws they have broken, which cartoon character they thought should run the city, and what should be the next step in densifying Vancouver after laneway houses. In between, performers walked on stilts, juggled, and played musical instruments.

Unfortunately, a lot of the mainstream candidates who had promised to show up didn’t, which meant there was a preponderance of independent candidates, ranging from the truly thought-provoking to the truly bizarre.

We got personal revelations (“It just takes one guy like me to degentrify a whole neighbourhood” – Leon Kaplan), bad dirty jokes, rants against gangs, admissions that No. 5 Orange is a favourite drinking spot, and, from Marijuana Party candidate Marc Emery,  warnings of impending financial calamity at the city.

His best line: “I’ve had 21 arrests and six raids — I’ve got the resilience to deal with the major shit that’s going to hit the fan.”

In some kind of glitch, Emery was declared voted out in the first round (don’t understand that, because two of the three of us judges voted for him), which prompted huge booing from the crowd. One woman even gave me the finger — hmm, perhaps Project Civil City isn’t just a bad idea after all.

Environmentalist and Work Less Party candidate Betty Krawczyk then left in protest.

In the end, the three “serious” candidates — Michael Geller of the Non-Partisan Association, Ellen Woodsworth from the Coalition of Progressive Electors, and Sean Bickerton, also of the NPA — made it to the final round. (Geller had a serious and well-paid cheering section present, which helped once the decisions moved to an audience-response basis.) So did two interesting independents: Lea Johnson and Geri Tramutola of the Work Less Party.

Lea, the kind of nice guy who would actually probably really be elected in a smaller town with his background in engineering, international humanitarian work and Downtown Eastside vounteerism, told some lovely stories. Geri came across as incredibly articulate and informed on many city issues — someone asked after why Vision hadn’t snaffled her as a candidate. (Maybe because she lives in Burnaby.)

In the end, the final question from Trevor that decided the winner was “Thinking back to Mr. Peanut’s campaign to be mayor, which cartoon character would you pick to run city hall?”

Michael picked Fritz the Cat: “He’s entertaining and disgusting — not unlike some of the people I’m running with.”

Ellen picked Superwoman.

Lea picked Goofy: “He’s quite a philosopher.”

Sean Bickerton picked Barney. “Superman would impose solutions but Barney is probably a better example. He’s friendly to children and transparent and open in his decision-making processes.”

And Geri chose Lisa Simpson, because she’s intelligent and well-informed.

The audience cheering was the loudest for Geri, with one of Michael Geller’s supporters saying he just couldn’t bring himself to ramp up the whistling for his candidate after Michael chose Fritz the Cat.

She was duly crowned the winner — one of the few in this weird campaign.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case. I dropped by three of the four advance polls today where everyone was reporting higher turnout than the last election, which drew a respectable 132,000 voters.

At Dunbar, the election official running things there told me it had been steady all day. She’s worked previous elections and had never seen such a high turnout. The count was at 942 by 6 p.m., with more people coming in all the time. Lots of young people, said the nice woman.

Over at Trout Lake, the count by 7 p.m. was 505. That was 100 ahead of the total for the same poll in 2005.

“We’re assuming people up up election fever from last night,” said Raymond Milne, who was running that voting station. There’s a theory — rather than being worn out by elections, yesterday’s election of Barack Obama as U.S. president was so exciting and energizing that it encouraged a lot of people here to run out and vote.

At city hall, the woman running things there, Judy, said that was their best guess as well, since they were also definitely running ahead of 2005, with 782 people voting by 7:30 compared to 527 at the same time three years ago. (Very precise records these people keep.)

I didn’t have the energy to run over to the West End, but Judy said it was definitely Dunbar in the lead with the other three advance polls at lower levels, all around the same numbers. That means likely close to 4,000 voters for just the first of three advance polls. The higher numbers could potentially be attributed to the new rules, which say that anyone who wants to can now vote in an advance poll, not just those from out of town, but I highly doubt that anyone even knows about those rules.

For more reading on the connection between Barack Obama and the local Vancouver election, you can read the post on my CTV blog about the Vision?COPE party last night to celebrate the win and motivate the troops — which didn’t go 100 per cent as planned, though almost.

For people who want to look at the historical record on turnout, there’s a good table from the city here. People who think there was some huge drop in turnout between 2002, when Larry Campbell was elected for COPE, and 2005, when Sam Sullivan was elected for the Non-Partisan Association, should note that there isn’t really that big a difference. About 140,000 people voted in 2002; about 132,000 in 2005. The difference is that someone the city put 130,000 new people onto its eligible voters list between the two elections, so that it appeared as though turnout dropped from 50 per cent to 32. But it didn’t really.

David Cadman’s YouTube “Vote Beard” video (posted earlier on this blog) is probably the prize-winner so far. David says that the viral success of this video, which has earned him responses from Europe and India, has proven to him that “I know nothing about anything” when it comes to what works in political campaigns.

Gregor Robertson arranged for himself to get a TransLink ticket for paying the single-zone price when he was travelling two zones, in order to get a little needed media coverage. (For the humour-impaired, the preceding sentence is a paid political joke.)

Now Michael Geller, who has been advertising his campaign on Vancouver’s abundant fallen leaves, and Peter Ladner of the Non-Partisan Association are getting their hipster kids to hold a pub night down at the Cambie for their dads. (These would be the kids and their friends whom both Geller and Ladner said earlier on in the campaign were more inclined to support Vision Vancouver.)

Michael’s email to me this morning gives the details:

COME MEET MY DAD. The Geller girls and the Ladner kids are inviting their friends and other ‘millennials’ to a gathering at The Cambie Hotel on Thursday November 13 at 7:30.  The purpose is to get youth a bit more engaged in the municipal election campaign, and hopefully get a few more youth votes.  Ladner and I will be ‘pulling the taps’ and serving behind the bar.

I’m sure the oppo researchers in each campaign are hunting down anything that looks damaging, so I’ll leave that to them. But, in the interest of public information, I did do a search on the house values of the two major mayoral candidates, Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson, along with the leading Coalition of Progressive Electors candidate, David Cadman, just to see where they stand in the world of real estate. Then we’ll know where they’re coming from when they talk about affordable housing.

Peter Ladner of the Non-Partisan Association clocks in with the most expensive house of the three, unless future research shows me that Betty Krawczyk or Marc Emery have real-estate empires. Ladner’s home a few blocks from the beach in Kitsilano, which he co-owns with wife Erica, was assessed at $1.6 million for the 2008 roll. The two bought it in 1999 for $480,000.

Gregor Robertson of Vision Vancouver, whose house near King Edward between Cambie and Main is actually owned by a corporation, Ohana Partners, that lists his wife and someone in California as directors, is assessed at $1.24 million. It was bought on June 29, 2005, for $420,000. That means he hasn’t gained as much as Ladner overall, but the gain has been made in a much shorter time.

David Cadman of the Coalition of Progressive Electors, who played with the possibility of running for mayor and is his party’s best-known candidate, has the most modest personal real-estate value. His house, near Commercial Drive, was assessed at $545,700. But he’s made the biggest percentage gain in value, since he and his wife bought it for $80,000 in 1981.

You’re welcome.