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The Vancouver city council candidate count

August 11th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Lots has happened on this front in the five weeks that I’ve been off, with more council (and school board and park board) candidates coming out for Vision than anyone knows what to do with. I heard there was a candidates’ meeting at mayoral candidate Gregor Robertson’s house that was so packed it was standing room only. Okay, it was a small room but still …

Those of you locally will know who all the candidates are for council, but I’ll go through it anyway for my international readers. The four current ones, course: Heather Deal, Raymond Louie, Tim Stevenson, George Chow (still no definitive word on whether George is actually going to stay or not, though he did turn up for the Pride Parade). Geoff Meggs, Larry Campbell’s former staffer, started his campaign quite a while ago. Then there’s Kerry Jang, who’s been in the wings for the last three years, and Andrea Reimer, Gregor’s campaign co-chair, who have teamed up to endorse each other as part of the jostling for alliances that is currently going on furiously. Pivot Legal’s David Eby announced quite a while ago. Two surprise candidates were former federal Liberal nomination contender for Quadra, Catherine Evans, whom everyone thought was going to go for school board, and Heather Harrison, the Kwantlen philosophy instructor who appeared to be not interested in running again (she was the only Vision candidate not elected in 2002) but who suddenly popped up, to the dismay of those who had already promised themselves to other alliances. Then there’s Rey Umlas, from the newly energized Filipino community, and Demitri Douzenis, who’s active in the city’s Greek community. Hope I didn’t miss anyone in the crowd.

And apparently there are more to come.

That’s making it look increasingly unlikely that Vision and COPE are going to work out an amicable ballot share for the 10 council spots, since COPE already has four announced candidates in the running: existing councillor David Cadman, then former councillors Ellen Woodsworth and Tim Louis, plus newcomer Meena Wong.

In the Non-Partisan Association corner, it’s been pretty quiet, although I’m assured that when the announcements come, they’ll show signs of quality over quantity. At any rate, the only new council candidate to emerge in recent weeks is Lenore Copeland, who was at the Pride Parade with the rest of the balloon-decorated NPAers. Copeland, for those who are not regular readers of Malcolm Parry’s social columns, is a staunch federal Liberal supporter. She’s also president of the False Creek Community Association. Alas, that will do little to dispel the notion some people have that Peter Ladner’s new NPA is “the political arm of the Arbutus Club,” as one reader put it. But Ladner is courting Syrus Lee of the Chinatown BIA and there’s rumoured to be another candidate in the works from the Chinese community.

The deadline for NPA candidates is Aug. 13, i.e. two days from now, for the Sept. 13 nomination meeting, so presumably more names will emerge by then.

Vision’s deadline is Aug. 20, for their Sept. 20 meeting, so that leaves only nine days for any more hordes of candidates to put their names in.

Then COPE will be next up, with its nomination meeting set for Sept. 28. Besides council, there’s also likely to be a tussle over school board, since COPE wanted to split the ballot 5-4 with Vision and it appears unlikely Vision’s going to go for that.

I know I’ve left out all the school and park board candidates but I’ll get there soon.

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