It’s more like “Holy Shit. Now what?””

You don’t think they chose that one on purpose? There were plenty of moments during last night’s speech when Gregor was calm, composed and confident.

As for the NPA…..not so much.

“Gregor Roberson? Nice guy, looks good, speaks well. Has zero experience, zero knowledge to find his way around town,” De Genova said. “Thank God he has Raymond Louie and Geoff Meggs to run the show. But … we got another Sam Sullivan — a guy who is going to follow and not lead. But he looks good, and that’s what people wanted.”

“We worked very hard,” Ladner said. “We stayed on the high ground, we never resorted to lies and smears.”

Not sure which NPA campaign that was:

- radio ads running approx 20-30 times a day on all major radio stations for the final 10 days saying Gregor was going to raise taxes by 10%

- ads in Chinese media about Gregor and Vision adding more safe injection sites around the city

- Peter caught by Global on Bill Good alleging that Vision leaked the in camera info

- email blasts alleging that Vision was part of a campaign to overthrow the provincial government and was a stalking horse for unions

Amusing to hear about the party – I’m a total political naif, and even I wouldn’t be so stupid as to try to lobby someone at the victory bash.

Anyhow. Again. Gregor’s a good guy. This is a good result. But I’m not going to dance in the streets. The last council was so breathtakingly incompetent, so laughably partisan, that Vision would have had to completely blow the campaign to come out behind. And acting as though this is some Great Victory for progressive forces is, IMO, a bit much.

Re “not f-ing things up,” most of the new trustees have worked together for far longer than that on public education issues, so I have no doubt they’ll be very comfortable working together on the new board.

Very rewarding too, to see the relatively high voter interest in the school trustee ballots, after education issues were virtually buried in the pre-election media coverage — Vision’s Patti Bacchus got the third highest votes of any candidate, right after Robertson and Raymond Louie. Despite the lower voter turnout, all the elected trustees got more votes than in 2005.

Congrats to all – now the real work begins!

Think, perhaps that Ms. Anton may have had an alphabetical-assist…

Real question, after seeing the folks with deep pockets and big hats switch ballrooms, and after having a really good look at the divisional results map, is to ask ourselves if the NPA has, indeed, become little more than a RedRump ticket?

(and when looking at that map it is important to utilize the theatre of your mind to envision a third dimension that is not there…..density)

.

Charlie Smith who coined ‘COPE light’ for the [del]TEAM[/del] Vision
group said :

[ Gregor Robertson: Beware the power of the Kingsway NDP Mafia
X-URL: http://www.straight.com/print/170453?

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.