Always great to get postcards from abroad, so here is his blog post today and his impressions from his trip last week. Maybe we could get a matching set by having Tim Louis’s take on today’s Cuba — or Gregor Robertson with a few Twitter posts about life and the environmental movement in Dubai.

But Louis had clearly put a lot of work into organizing voters. Noticeable among them was a group of Indo-Canadian men at the back of the room, which provoked some muttering among the anybody-but-Tim crowd in the room about their sudden group appearance. (I’m looking forward to the day when I cover a political story in Vancouver when people from the ethnic communities complain to me about how all these white people keep showing up at the meetings in their fleets of Volvos.)

The men, who told me they worked in trucking, not the taxi industry as the whisperers assumed, said they came out to support Tim because he had always been a good councillor for them, someone who was always ready to take their calls and respond to their questions.

“He listened to our voice,” said Gary Grewal.

With the support of people like that, along with others like Lenore Clemens, who also thought he was just a good, hard-working councillor when in office, Louis got 157 votes, compared to David Cadman’s 161 in the first round. That produced a fair amount of consternation in the room, friends. Most people were reluctant to talk publicly about how much of a disaster they thought it would be, except for reliable Phil Rankin, who always calls it as he sees it.

“It would be unworkable,” said Rankin, as people were waiting for the results of the second ballot. Rankin is one of many who has a lot of doubts about Vision Vancouver and what it really is. (“I don’t think it has the ability to be a civic party of the left. It’s a centrist party. It’s not NDP.”) But, as he said, “we’re in survival mode right now.” And having Louis running as part of a coalition that he was publicly railing against until recently would be a hopeless proposition. And he doubted that Louis could moderate his position. “He’s inflexible.”

While some people were freaking out at the thought of a Louis win, others in the crowd were more phlegmatic. As a couple pointed out to me, Louis had topped out at 157 votes. The first candidate to drop off was Terry Martin and presumably everyone supporting him had already voted for Louis, so he wasn’t going to get any more there. And people who were supporting Cadman, Ellen Woodsworth or Meena Wong were unlikely to switch from an “accommodation” candidate to someone who has always made it plain that he thinks Vision is a sell-out, traitor party.

So the second-ballot results were a relief to the worriers, since it clearly showed that the votes were shifting away from Meena Wong towards David and Ellen. The second round, with 302 ballots cast, produced 211 for David, 141 for Tim, 136 for Ellen and 98 for Meena.

But voters were leaving the room all the time, with the question still open as to whose supporters were hanging around. Just before 6, the answer came — a very few more of Ellen’s than Tim’s. She got 137 votes, he got 131. There was an immediate majority-approved motion to destroy the ballots, quickly taken while a few Tim supporters were yelling “Recount.”

The results came as a huge relief to the pragmatists who see this election as one where COPE is just going to tread water and hang on for the next three years, waiting to see whether Vision succeeds or implodes. If it implodes, well, the Copesters will be there to pick up the pieces as they did after TEAM fell apart. That’s the way they see it.

By the way, for those who care, Loretta Woodcock and Anita Romaniuk are the park-board candidates. There was no vote because John Irwin dropped off, something about having twins in the spring. Gee, why would that stop anyone from running for office?

At school board, the five candidates will be current school trustees Al Blakey and Allan Wong, former teacher Bill Bargeman, parent advocate Jane Bouey and student Alvin Singh.

Okay, everyone, now we can all take our weekends off with all three parties having held their nomination meetings. I’m sure it will rain from now until November every weekend.

More in a moment.

The way the voting will work is that candidates will only be selected for nomination if they have over 50 per cent of the votes cast. So if one candidate (say, David Cadman) gets over 50, but the other four split the votes among them with none getting over 50, then the person with the lowest number is dropped and there’s a second round of voting. Theoretically, that means there could be three rounds of voting for council, because if the three candidates in the second round still split the votes relatively evenly, the lowest of those three will have to be dropped. Presumably, once it’s a vote between only two candidates, one of them will get over 50 per cent. (Thanks to Ivan Bulic for kindly walking me through this whole process while both of us were waiting in a line-up at VanCity yesterday.)

It’s a bit of a guessing game who the second nominee might be. There’s obviously going to be a bit of split in votes going for the two previous councillors — Woodsworth, who has been heading up the conciliatory-to-Vision group in COPE, and Louis, who’s been fighting what he sees as a bad deal with Vision down to the last ditch. Wong has been campaigning hard (and was the only COPE candidate who showed up at the Vision meeting last Saturday, presumably to make nice with future campaign mates). There’s some speculation that the moderates, for lack of a better word, might split their votes between Woodsworth and Wong, allowing Louis to come up the middle and win.

That means voters may have to stick around for quite a while this afternoon. However, it shouldn’t take as long to count the votes today as the Vision counters took last week, when the original count Saturday went from 4:30 until midnight and the recount Monday started mid-afternoon and went until 2 a.m. or some ridiculous thing. COPE currently has about 1,000 members in good standing and another couple thousand who are lapsed but who could vote today simply by showing up and renewing their membership. However, since the big meeting two weeks ago on whether to accept the slate deal with Vision only drew about 400, it would be surprising if this vote brings in more than that.

The meeting starts at 2:30 and is scheduled to wrap up at 6 at the latest. Location: Ukranian Hall on East 10th between Main and Quebec.

We in the media didn’t get to hear the actual debate, since we were turfed early in the proceedings (a relief to some, I suspect, allowing them to spend a pleasant hour and a half in the sun talking about the fortunes of our troubled industry, instead of listening to arcane debate). But I imagine it boiled down to what we heard a lot of people talking about before and after, as people milled around on the sidewalk in front of the St. James community hall.

Meena Wong, who is still going to be gunning for one of the two council spots, said it wasn’t a great deal, but it was better than nothing and it would allow COPE to pull itself together over the next three years and regroup. You read Bill Bargeman’s comments here earlier, that it wasn’t COPE’s finest hour, but it would insure that it wasn’t the party’s final hour — a comment that Ruth Herman echoed to me before the meeting started.

Libby Davies said she reminded everyone about the party’s history. She was on her way to a meeting when she talked to me after, so I didn’t ask her to summarize it. But I had brought my handy little yellow book– 1968-1993 COPE: Working for Vancouver — with me, so I knew some of it already. I don’t know if this is what Libby referred to, but I did notice that one period when COPE had five councillors was in the early 1980s, when the party had no mayoral candidate. (Instead, Mike Harcourt, who ran as an independent, was endorsed by the party.) And it seems to me that the party’s fortunes have gone up and down in relation to other dyanamics in the city and province, whether it ran a mayoral candidate or not. It depended on whether the province had an NDP government (COPE got shut out in 1996, when the NDP had been in power for five years) and it depended on whether the mayoral candidate was strong (the only other time it had five councillors was the 1990 term, when Jim Green ran for mayor and did well, capitalizing on the concern over loss of rental buildings).

The meeting also saw people like Judy Darcy from HEU, George Heyman of the BCGEU, and former MP Margaret Mitchell show up, presumably to pull in support for the deal.

On the other side were people like Tim, of course, Terry Martin, John Yano, Alicia Barsallo and others, trying to block the deal. They tried at the beginning of the meeting to challenge the ability to have a vote at all, saying it was unconstitutional, but were over-ruled.

Louis said he plans to respect the wishes of the membership, as he always does. Whether someone else might challenge the party legally over the constitutionality of the vote, he can’t say.

People poured out of the building mostly with a sense of relief, it seemed like. The mood seemed to be, “Now we can get on with things.” (Well, except for the woman who stomped away yelling “Sellout” repeatedly, while David Cadman was being scrummed by the little media pack while he was talking about what a positive step it was.)

The next interesting steps are going to be 1. Who wins at COPE’s nominations for council on Sept. 28. Some have speculated that Tim Louis was so vocal about challenging the agreement in order to try to win a nomination from those who might see him as someone who will provide a different perspective on council and defend the party 2. Whether COPE members endorse Gregor Robertson at the same meeting 3. Whether Robertson finds some way of sort of or actually endorsing the COPE candidates 4. What kinds of joint policies and platforms the two parties might campaign on, which is part of the agreement.

And now, I’m going to enjoy the last of the sunshine here. You all should too.

My first venture into the blogsphere:

The question of whether or not COPE should run a mayoral candidate and the number of council, school and park board candidates is a matter of tactics, not strategy. COPE’s strategy in this election should be to election every one of its nominated candidates. The tactic best suited to meet that strategy is not to run against Vision. Yes, this is not COPE’s finest hour, but accepting this deal will insure it does not become COPE’s final hour.

I’ve been a COPE member since 1971 and have proudly knocked on doors and worked the phones to help elect Tim Louis to Park Board and Council, but Tim has it wrong this time.

Essentially, he’s saying he’s not against an agreement but that this is a bad agreement, presumably because it leaves COPE with so few seats on council — two of the 11, essentially, since Vision will have a mayoral candidate plus eight council candidates. Tim doesn’t say it in the video but he told me yesterday that he would like to see COPE run five people for each of the three slates, council, school and park, with a mayoral candidate as well. He believes that the party doesn’t have a chance without a mayoral candidate who has COPE attached to his/her name in some way.

On the other side, I just ran into a couple of people who are promoting the Yes side for this vote, who agree that it’s not the greatest deal but that it’s probably the best that COPE could manage at this point. One of them was surprised the two parties even managed a deal at all, given the fact that there’s a certain group in Vision that treats COPE like the 98-pound weakling on the beach. (They didn’t mention it, but the fact that COPE has only about 1,000 members to Vision’s 16,000 and that it has no money in the bank might be a factor as well in the way things went down.) Yes, it doesn’t give COPE many candidates, but the party has gone through that in the past, said one. Both predicted that if the members turned this down, the party would essentially self-destruct. In spite of that, both were predicting a close vote.

The interesting part of this news is the way Louis identifies what is the almost the only issue that the two parties really seem to disagree on any more: development. The issues that originally split the two — gambling, the RAV line, and the Olympics — are all faits accomplis, with little left to argue. (Although I suppose they could start up a brawl about the 10-years-off Millennium line.)

But what stance to take about development — oppose it all, try to shape it, let everyone run wild — that’s still an ongoing debate. For years, COPE was the stalwart anti-developer party and it even won votes from the west side for that.

But the people who eventually joined Vision tended to have a different approach. When I was talking to city councillor Heather Deal today about what the two parties actually disagree on, growth and development was the only one that she came up with easily. I remember Anita Zaenker (former COPE board, later Vision supporter) saying to me once something along the lines of, “The fact is that Vancouver is a growing city. Are you just going to oppose everything or are you going to try to work with the good developers and get them to build something that adds to the city in a positive way?”

Louis still talks about developers as though they are unmitigated demons from hell and blasts Vision (or “the NPA lite,” as he calls it) for accepting so much money from them. He says that he would push to get 8,000 new units of social housing in the city instead. While that’s a noble goal to fight for, it’s hard to imagine that it will ever happen — or at least not in the time frame that Louis would like.

But whether it’s possible or not, the issue of development is going to be an interesting one to watch the two parties dance around during the campaign.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Joint Statement
September 8, 2008

Cooperative Agreement between COPE and Vision Executives

(VANCOUVER) The COPE and Vision executives are announcing a tentative agreement for cooperation for the 2008 election. Both organizations feel that the agreement is an important step to create the kind of campaign that can return progressive government to city hall.

Members of both organizations have consistently sought a cooperative effort and the executives of both Vision Vancouver and COPE have endorsed an agreement that will see the following:

1)    COPE, Vision, and the Green Party have agreed to run less than a full slate of candidates for each level. The breakdown is as follows:

a.    Mayor: Gregor Robertson
b.    Council: 8 (Vision), 2 (COPE)
c.    School Board: 5 (COPE), 4 (Vision)
d.    Park Board: 4 (Vision), 2 (COPE), 1 (Green Party)

2)    Vision and COPE will cooperate around specific policy issues, including a strategy on homelessness.

“Vision Vancouver believes the issues in this upcoming election are too important to be ignored. With this agreement, we can work with COPE to maximize our chances to bring progressive government back to Vancouver,” said Mike Magee, co-chair of Vision Vancouver.

“It is crucial that we work together to return progressive government to city hall, park and school board, said COPE Councilor David Cadman. “We want to work with Gregor Robertson and Vision to cooperate around areas of common concern. With this agreement we can avoid splitting the progressive vote and create a better Vancouver.”

The cooperation agreement is subject to ratification by the COPE membership at their Sunday, September 14 policy conference.