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Vancouver’s centre-right party settles on a (surprise) winner, left agrees on council-slate numbers for parties

June 5th, 2018 · No Comments

Well, it was another exciting week in Vancouver civic politics, as the Non-Partisan Association, after weeks of roller-coaster drama, chose its mayoral candidate: the soft-spoken and unassuming-seeming Ken Sim.

That came as a surprise to everyone, including Sim himself, it seemed, on Sunday night. All the spin and whispers up to then had indicated that, once Hector Bremner and his 2,000 members were no longer in the race, Glen Chernen had the next highest numbers of sign-ups and then park-board commissioner John Coupar was next after that.

Yet Sim won with 977 votes out of 1,960 total, despite a very non-public campaign. That means either he’s got a fantastic network or the business community, which was by and large backing him, pulled out some phoning stops to get that many people out.

Here are my stories from before and after and then after again the vote.

Yesterday, as well, the Vancouver and District Labour Council and the five groups/parties on the left/centre-left came out with agreements on who will run how many candidates. (Some back and forth still going on about what the agreement means, exactly. See Pete Fry’s tweets for more.)

Aand, in other news, the group around Hector Bremner gathered at the bar in the Woodward’s building last night to rally the troops and provide an outline of the plan for the future. It is:

Week of June 11: Event Research presentation open to new party members

Week of June 18: New party is coming. Event: Policy forum

Week of June 25: Formally launch party (announce name logo, founding board, launch webpage, etc.)

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