Frances Bula header image 2

The yes and no debate over the Vision/COPE deal

September 11th, 2008 · 1 Comment

For those of you who don’t have “Tim Louis” and “YouTube” on Google Alert, here’s a link to Tim’s argument for voting no against the proposed agreement on splitting the slate spots among Vision, COPE and Green for the Nov. 15 civic election.

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.

Categories: Uncategorized