Frances Bula » Vancouver 2008 civic election

Kashmir Dhaliwal defeat a difficult one for the team

Frances Bula — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:56:26 +0000

Many many Vision people, in the midst of celebrating last night, were talking about how disappointing it was for them that the only one of their council candidates not to be elected was Ross Temple president Kashmir Dhaliwal.

Andrea Reimer called it a “heartache” that is a sign of a submerged problem in city politics. Mike Magee said the inability of Vancouver voters to elect someone who is a leader in his community is a sign that something is amiss in the political culture. And others just expressed general regret, saying that Kashmir had worked incredibly hard for all of them.

Kashmir, by the way, came in 11th, about 1,020 votes behind Ellen Woodsworth. Although he did better than any other Indo-Canadian council candidate in recent history, it still wasn’t enough to get him onto council. (On a cheerier note, Raj Hundal, on the park-board slate, did get elected)

Kashmir’s campaign manager, Jonathan Ross, posted this message in the comments section, but I’m putting it up here to make sure people see it.

Last night was a bittersweet moment for myself and many others that have worked tirelessly with Kashmir Dhaliwal for the past many months.

First, I would like to congraulate Gregor, and to say how happy I am to see new faces like Kerry, Andrea and Geoff as councillors…this is going to be a phenomenal team with veterans like Raymond, George, Tim and Heather.

That being said, once again, Vancouver voters have shut out the South Asian council candidate, and from my dozen years in politics, I have never seen the ugly overtones of division like I have in this particular civic race.

I am not sure if wards are necessarily the be all, end all answer, because at the end of the day, it seems to me that certain ethnicities can only get elected in Vancouver if they are relegated to certain sections of the city (a la Vancouver South federally or Vancouver Fraserview provincially). This is in stark contrast to cities like Burnaby or Surrey, where my good friend Barinder Rasode got elected last night for example.

There is much more to say, but the moment that will continue to stick out in my mind over this whole process is one that occurred at the Vision nomination that elected the slates of candidates back in September.

A caucasian, middle aged couple from the west side of the city came up to me and one of the candidates, and passionately and angrily stating that if people cannot speak “proper english,” they shouldn’t be able to vote. They also said how this was “our country.”

Seeing how I am an individual born of a mixed marriage who proudly represents both my South Asian and Jewish heritage, this was an incident, and an experience, that I will not soon forget.

Possibly the funniest civic-election ad ever in Vancouver history

Frances Bula — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:10:20 +0000

The question on my mind after watching this video: When is David Cadman’s campaign to elect only people wearing garish and bizarre ties going to start?

Comparing the platforms of Vision and the NPA

Frances Bula — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:14:29 +0000

Here’s my story in today’s Globe that has a succinct overview of the platforms from Vision Vancouver and the Non-Partisan Association. There’s much more to say on both of these, both of which show that we are fully in the grip of policy wonks. (Each platform contains over 50 points and refers to strategies like density bonus and tax-increment equivalent grants.)

I also have a post on my CTV election blog I’m writing that compares what the two mayoral candidates, Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson, had to say about how to supports arts in the city.

Vancouver election brings out 86 candidates and Nude Garden Party

Frances Bula — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:49:46 +0000

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 and diverse slates of candidates are set to do battle”) and go directly to the real news.

First off, the Nude Garden Party has returned to the scene.

As expected, Marc Emery is back to collect the mayoral votes of disgruntled marijuana fans who can remember where the polls are and what day to vote. Environmental firebrand Betty Krawcyzk is also running for mayor as promised, along with perennial election hopeful and persistent emailer Golok Buday.

I see that Jamie Lee Hamilton has decided to run as an independent for park board after having been turned down by the Non-Partisan Association for what she claimed was their discrimination against transgendered people and sex-trade workers. She’ll be joined by another candidate rejected by his party, Thomas Lockhart. Lockhart got the lowest number of votes in the crowded and competitive race among the Vision Vancouver candidates for park board, but he hasn’t yet claimed that party members discriminated against tattoo artists. They will also be joined by Lorne Mayencourt’s brother, Richard.

The race has also brought out some people with causes. Audrey Jane Laferriere, the Downtown Eastside resident who has been on a one-woman campaign to have the empty Storyeum turned into a homeless shelter, is running for council. Olympics critic Chris Shaw is running with the Work Less Party.

Finally, I see that the NPA were unable to find a final school-board candidate to fill out the roster of nine. Two more were announced at last week’s NPA dinner, former SFU continuing-ed director Margit Nance and former long-time teacher Eileen Le Gallais. There were rumours around they were trying to recruit Catherine Evans, but either that wasn’t true and it was and they were unsuccessful.

It was slightly tougher for candidates to go through the nomination hoops this time, as the city now has a requirement that 25 people have to sign your nomination papers instead of the previous two. It must have been causing some distress because at least four candidates asked me to sign theirs, which I unfortunately had to decline so as to preserve my reputation as Objective Snarky Person. However, I see the new requirement didn’t stop previous determined loners like Wendythirteen and Steve Wansleeben.

Ladies and gentlemen: Your candidates

City of Vancouver News Release
October 10, 2008

86 candidates file for City election

Nominations closed at 4 pm today for positions on the November 15, 2008 ballot for the general local election in Vancouver. A total of 86 candidates filed nomination papers by the deadline (compared with 96 candidates who ran in Vancouver’s 2005 municipal election).

On Election Day, Vancouver residents will be asked to elect one Mayor, 10 Councillors, seven Park Board Commissioners and nine School Trustees for a three-year term (December 2008 to December 2011), and to vote on 3 borrowing questions.

Below is the unofficial list of candidates from Vancouver’s Chief Election Officer. From now until 4 pm on October 14, 2008, candidates may withdraw their nomination, have their endorsement by the elector organization withdrawn, or have their nomination challenged.

15 Candidates for Mayor
(1 to be elected)

BRITTEN, Patrick C. (Nude Garden Party)
BUDAY, Gölök Z.
CAISSY, Menard D.
EMERY, Marc
HANSEN, Mike
HATOUM, Joe
JIMENEZ, Angel L.
KAPLAN, Leon
KRAWCZYK, Betty (Work Less Party)
KUAH, Jeff
LADNER, Peter (NPA)
MAXWELL N BUR, R. H.
RITCHIE, Bill
ROBERTSON, Gregor (Vision Vancouver)
YEE, Scott

32 Candidates for Councillor
(10 to be elected)

ANTON, Suzanne (NPA)
BALL, Elizabeth (NPA)
BICKERTON, Sean (NPA)
BOYCHUK, John T.
BOYER, Marc
CADMAN, David (COPE)
CAPRI, Kim (NPA)
CHOW, George (Vision Vancouver)
COPELAND, Leanore (NPA)
DEAL, Heather (Vision Vancouver)
DHALIWAL, Kashmir (Vision Vancouver)
GELLER, Michael (NPA)
GREGSON, Ian (Work Less Party)
HOUGHTON, Korina (NPA)
JANG, Kerry (Vision Vancouver)
JOHNSON, Lea
KADIOGLU, Matt
LAFERRIERE, Audrey Jane
LEE, David (NPA)
LOUIE, Raymond P. (Vision Vancouver)
MEGGS, Geoff (Vision Vancouver)
ORACLE, Bud
REIMER, Andrea (Vision Vancouver)
SHAW, Chris (Work Less Party)
SIDHU, Daljit S. (NPA)
STEVENSON, Tim (Vision Vancouver)
TRAMUTOLA, Geri (Work Less Party)
WANSLEEBEN, Steve
WENDYTHIRTEEN
WISDOM, Timothy (Work Less Party)
WONG, Kanman (NPA)
WOODSWORTH, Ellen (COPE)

20 Candidates for Park Commissioner
(7 to be elected)

ANDALIS, Juliet Victoria
BARNES, Constance (Vision Vancouver)
BLYTH, Sarah (Vision Vancouver)
DE GENOVA, Melissa (NPA)
DOUMENC, Ivan (Work Less Party)
HAMILTON, Jamie Lee
HASKELL, Peter Raymond
HUNDAL, Raj (Vision Vancouver)
JASPER, Aaron (Vision Vancouver)
LOCKHART, Thomas
MACKINNON, Stuart (Green Party of Vancouver)
MAYENCOURT, Richard
MCDIARMID, Laura (NPA)
RICHARDSON, Christopher (NPA)
ROBERTSON, Ian (NPA)
ROMANIUK, Anita (COPE)
SHUKLA, Naresh (NPA )
URTON, Sharon (NPA)
WOODCOCK, Loretta (COPE)
ZLOTNIK, Marty (NPA)

19 Candidates for School Trustee
(9 to be elected)

BACCHUS, Patti (Vision Vancouver)
BARGEMAN, Bill (COPE)
BLAKEY, Al (COPE)
BOUEY, Jane (COPE)
CLEMENT, Ken (Vision Vancouver)
DENIKE, Ken (NPA)
GIBSON, Carol (NPA)
GREGSON, Sharon E. (Vision Vancouver)
HANSEN, Clarence (NPA)
HASKELL, Peter Raymond
HOLDEN, Heather (NPA)
LE GALLAIS, Eileen (NPA)
LOMBARDI, Mike (Vision Vancouver)
NANCE, Margit (NPA)
SINGH, Alvin (COPE)
SINGH, Lakhbir (NPA)
STARK, Robert Allan
WONG, Allan (COPE)
WOO, Sophia (NPA)

List of Elector Organizations:

COPE (Coalition of Progressive Electors)
Green Party of Vancouver
NPA (Non-Partisan Association)
Nude Garden Party
Vision Vancouver
Work Less Party

This list, along with nomination documents, candidate profiles and contact information for the candidates, is on the City’s website at vancouver.ca/vote.

Due to a legislative change in 2008, the City is no longer required to black out personal information in nomination documents that are posted on the website.

NPA turns down Jamie Lee Hamilton as a candidate: Protest scheduled

Frances Bula — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:33:48 +0000

This email went out yesterday from NPA hopeful Jamie Lee Hamilton, who had been hoping to run for one of the three remaining NPA park board spots on its slate. Hamilton, who once ran as a Coalition of Progressive Electors candidate, has been a vocal NPA supporter for the past three years. She had come out strongly in favour of Councillor Peter Ladner, as he challenged Mayor Sam Sullivan for the mayoral nomination. I spoke with an NPA board member yesterday, who was wistfully hoping that the party would be spared a flaming by Hamilton but it appears such will not be the case.

From: Jamie Lee Hamilton
To: undisclosed recipients: ;
ReplyTo: Jamie Lee Hamilton
Sent: Aug 30, 2008 16:04
Subject: Hamilton Denied Candidacy – Rally At Little Sisters

Hi Friends and Supporters

On Friday, August 29 at 5pm I was called by the NPA board and informed that they were denying me the opportunity to run as a candidate for municipal office this November 2008.

The reasons that I was turned down was based on my sex worker history and an old online advertisement from 2000 which appeared on a transsexual website called She-male Canada.

I honestly thought that we had overcome these types of issues 40 years ago when Pierre Trudeau stated the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation but apparently the NPA hasn’t accepted or adopted this thinking.

Jim Deva, co-owner of Little Sisters Bookstore who is a personal friend was outraged when he learned of this human rights violation as was I.

This issue goes to the very core of disrespect, intolerance, bigotry and injustice. For a party in 2008 to be displaying these types of human rights abuses is absolutely outrageous.

So please come out and voice your concern and displeasure over these disgusting attacks on visible minority communities.

So mark your calender for Tuesday, September 2 at 7 pm in the parking lot of Little Sisters for a rally against intolerance and bigotry. Bring your drums, whistles, rattles and wear your most colourful outfits.

Rain or Shine! Pass on to your contacts.

Confirmed speakers so far include:

1) Jim Deva of Little Sisters Bookstore
2) Sue Davis Leader of a Cooperative brothel for sex workers
3) Raigen D Angelo Transgender Activist
4) Mike Harding, past Executive Director of the Centre

Others will be added over the weekend including political leaders

Jamie Lee

“I believe you change the world One man at a time”

Vancouver temple president considers a run for council

Frances Bula — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:42:01 +0000

For those of you who didn’t see this already (get your subscription to the Globe, folks, step right up), I had a story in today’s Globe and Mail with Ross Street temple president Kashmir Singh Dhaliwal talking about his decision on whether to run with Vision Vancouver. VV would desperately love to have him, given his federal Liberal connections and his role in the community, but he’s got some hesitations, given the sad history of South Asians in getting elected in civic politics here. Charlie Smith at the Georgia Straight wrote the definitive piece on the string of electoral defeats for South Asians a few years ago.

Where in the world is Jim Green?

Frances Bula — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:36:21 +0000

Three years ago at this time, the one-time Downtown Eastside housing activist was getting ready for what looked like, at last, a successful campaign to be Vancouver’s mayor at the head of the gosling Vision Vancouver party. As everyone knows, he ended up losing to Sam Sullivan by about 4,000 votes. There was a lot of talk over the three years about whether he would run for council or, for a few brief minutes of conversation, whether he should take another crack at running for mayor.

That flame was quickly extinguished and, a couple of years of pondering, so has any thought of running for council, says Green. That’s partly because he’s just too busy. Green is spending a lot of time in the Queen Charlotte Islands these days, where he is working at the CEO of the Misty Isles Economic Development Society, a newly formed group aimed at broadening the islands’ economy.

“It’s exciting because I live half the time in Haida Gwaii now,” said Green. He’s also been working with the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, which was successful in getting $9 million recently for its expansion — “my first great victory as a consultant,” Green jokes. He’s also working on a housing project with one of his favourite organizations, Bladerunners, which helps place aboriginals from the Downtown Eastside in construction jobs around the city.

Green says he doesn’t have any development work currently on his books. He had worked with both developer Rob Macdonald and Concord Pacific to pitch the city on Downtown Eastside projects, which asked planners for extra density in exchange for providing some social-housing units in the projects. Neither one of those has gone anywhere so far, although hints are that Concord Pacific — after having run into protests from DE housing activists over its project on Hastings — will come back with some form of the proposal Green helped develop. So then the city and the people in the Downtown Eastside who were critical of Concord for not providing social housing in its complex will have to decide if they’re willing to accept that new trade-off.

My portrait of our two mayoral candidates

Frances Bula — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:10:40 +0000

The September issue of Vancouver magazine, one of the pillars of my new journalism life, is now out with my feature story on our two would-be mayors, Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson. We’re going to learn a lot more about these two candidates in the next three months (yes, folks, less than three months to D-Voting Day, Nov. 15) as they sharpen their positions and various pieces of flotsam and jetsam from their pasts come drifting in on the election tide. In the meantime, here’s my take on some of the essentials.

Civic candidates hunt desperately for alliances

Frances Bula — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:35:54 +0000

Will you endorse me/support me/help me in any way? That seems to be the cry these days among Vancouver’s civic candidates, who are all looking for ways to get votes for their nomination meetings.

The whole issue of how to campaign is a difficult one for both sides. As both Vision and NPA candidates have told me, they have no access to their party’s membership lists and they frequently don’t know if the people they’ve signed up have ultimately become members because those people often send their money and application directly to the party office.

So these poor hopefuls are wandering around out there, trying to figure out how to connect with the masses and/or connect with another candidate who has a collection of known sign-ups with whom they can combine forces. (Tragically, this puts them at the mercy of anyone they believe has access to an audience — me, CanWest, any blogger who doesn’t appear to be actually insane.)

That’s particularly true for Vision candidates, whose numbers are now up to the low three figures I believe (WARNING: JOKE), as they try to distinguish themselves among the masses. Existing councillors are feeling a lot of pressure to endorse newcomers. But Tim Stevenson and Heather Deal tell me that they’re not going to endorse anyone, because it’s just too problematic and there are just too many good candidates.

Raymond Louie, however, has decided on a different policy. Louie, who got a lot of help from various sectors during his run for the mayoral nomination against Gregor Robertson, is endorsing the following people: Ross Street temple leader Kashmir Dhaliwal, if he runs (as all the political buzz indicates he’s going to do); his fellow councillor George Chow; Geoff Meggs, Larry Campbell’s former aide who was part of the original band that decamped from COPE; Kerry Jang, who’s been working with Vision since the start; and Heather Harrison, the only Vision candidate who wasn’t elected in 2005. Louie also said that, depending on how many council spots Vision decides to field, he will support Filipino candidate Rey Umlas.

Notable by their absence from his list are Heather Deal, Tim Stevenson and Andrea Reimer, who all worked on Gregor’s campaign. Maybe it’s because they’re high-profile enough that he figures they don’t need his help.

But Andrea gets a secondary boost anyway, because she and Kerry Jang have joined forces (I trade you 1,000 Greenie voters for 1,000 Chinese from southeast Vancouver.) Most recently, they got quite a smack of publicity over their call for regular citizens to apply to be on the TransLink board. Clever piece of political theatre that tapped into a lot of public disgruntlement over the current imperial-seeming TransLink appointment system. I’m sure others candidates are wondering if they should form their own doubles’ teams to try to maximize their vote-getting ability.

That quiet sound you hear is membership sign-ups

Frances Bula — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:57:50 +0000

The deadline for signing up Non-Partisan Association members is tonight at midnight (ignore the time stamp on this post, it’s wrong and not midnight yet by my clock). For COPE members, it’s Thursday. And for Vision, it’s a week from today. So, while not achieving the frenzy of the sign-ups for mayoral races in May, the city’s aspiring council, school and park board candidates are out beating the bushes for anyone with even a tangential interest in politics who didn’t get caught in the spring driftnet catch.

But one deadline that ISN’T happening tonight is a deadline for NPA candidate nominations. Even though the NPA’s own website said so, a decision was made at the NPA board meeting last night that that was a misinterpretation of the rules. New NPA president Ned Pottinger says there is no defined deadline at this point, except for the legal one set by the city for candidates to declare. (Early October sometime.) The party may have had an interest in getting rid of a tonight deadline because it is still trolling for school board candidates, with five spots left to fill, and for council candidates, with three left to fill. Non-Partisanians tell me that the reason the council spots haven’t been filled yet is because the party wants to make sure it has quality candidates and so some enthusiastic but less seasoned candidates are being gently discouraged.

But mayoral guy Peter Ladner acknowledged last week that it’s been hard to get people for school board because the issues are so difficult. I hear that Heather Holden, formerly of the park board, is considering putting herself up/having her arm twisted to run for school board. Crueller people than I might say the NPA is having a hard time recruiting because things are not looking good for the party, as it tries to hang on to power after three years of heavy shelling over Mayor Sam Sullivan’s reign.

However, the party isn’t having a hard time getting people to run for park board. It already picked four people for its slate in June. Now there are another four people minimum interested in the remaining three spots, including Melissa DeGenova, Wai Sin (who was surprised to hear today that the nomination deadline wasn’t in fact tonight as she’d been told), Marty Zlotnik and Naresh Shukla. And no one knows yet quite what Jamie Lee Hamilton is doing. Though she’s been signing up members and held a campaign event on the weekend, board member Douglas Leung said that as of yesterday she hadn’t applied or had an interview.

Okay, that’s enough for this post. More news of Vision and COPE anon.