02) LEFT FACES NEW CHALLENGES AFTER VANCOUVER ELECTION
By Kimball Cariou, Vancouver
Municipal elections in Vancouver resemble a three ring circus, with simultaneous city‑wide campaigns for Council, School Board and Park Board. This year was no exception, as a close race drew 180,000 voters to the polls on November 15, a 44% turnout compared to 35% in 2011. With no campaign finance limits, the major parties spent an estimated $5 million, the most expensive civic elections in the country. Contribution and spending limits have been promised by provincial governments for nearly 20 years, but this change seems no closer today.
The election saw a range of political winners, losers and survivors. In the critical race for Council, Vision Vancouver beat back a challenge from the right‑wing NPA, the city's long‑time "natural" ruling party. Mayor Gregor Robertson was re‑elected to a third term, defeating NPA candidate Kirk Lapointe by 83,529 to 73,443. Vision won six out of ten council positions, a loss of one from 2011, and below the two‑thirds majority they used to limit budget discussions in previous terms. The NPA gained one council seat, up to three, and the Greens' Adriane Carr topped the polls, winning re‑election with 74,077 votes.
Many observers thought the outcome might be closer, perhaps costing Vision its majority. Since sweeping into office on a wave of anger against the NPA in 2008, Vision has often minimised public consultation over hot button issues, making crucial decisions behind closed doors. The result has been dismay over top‑down plans for massive redevelopment, even in areas which remain Vision electoral strongholds.
This phenomenon reflects public distress over the impact of development on the quality of urban life, unaffordable housing and childcare costs, homelessness, inadequate public transit, and other issues. Despite its lofty promises, Vision has been unable to resolve such problems, which are rooted in the inequities of the capitalist system. Serious progress on housing, social programs and mass transit requires a full commitment from provincial and federal governments, which instead continue to download responsibilities to municipalities and school boards, while imposing neoliberal cutbacks and massive tax breaks for the wealthy and the corporations. This contradiction has left Vision ‑ a centrist coalition of NDP and Liberal supporters ‑ in a difficult position, but one partly of their own making.
What saved Vision was justified fear of the alternative. Once again, the NPA was strongly backed by the most reactionary forces in Vancouver, including the far‑right Fraser Institute, the big resource monopolies, a large part of the developer industry, and local allies of the Harper Tory machine. The NPA accused Vision of corruption for receiving donations from public sector unions, a bizarre claim which was played up heavily by the corporate media.
However, this did give Robertson an opening to appeal for broad support against the NPA's drive to give full support to tar sands extraction and exports, to attack municipal workers, and to reverse environmental initiatives such as expanded bike lanes. Vision kept its Council majority with the backing of relatively lower‑income neighbourhoods, women, trade unionists, and other sections of the population which reject the NPA's far‑right policies. But Vision was nearly wiped out at the Park Board, winning just one seat to the NPA's four and two for the Greens. At school board, the defeat of two Vision incumbents leaves the party with 4 trustees, along with four NPA and one Green who now holds the balance of power. (See sidebar article).
For left‑minded readers, the results for the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) and the new OneCity left party are of interest. OneCity candidate R.J. Aquino, who ran for COPE last time, pulled in 30,050 votes, a high number for a new party. OneCity won wide respect for its thoughtful platform based on the needs of working people, and the party is clearly here to stay.
In light of their frequent anti‑labour comments, COPE's current leaders appeared oddly shocked when the Vancouver & District Labour Council backed the Vision slate, giving support to just two of COPE's 18 candidates. Civic and teachers unions donated only a small fraction of their former contributions, leaving COPE to run a shoestring campaign. Mayoralty candidate Meena Wong used right‑wing rhetoric to lash out at "labour bosses" for not backing COPE, further alienating union members from the electoral organization they had worked to build for over 40 years.
A telling response to Wong's statement came from Leanne Toderian of CUPE Local 15, who wrote "That is not building bridges. As president (not labour boss) of approximately 5,700 members who work for Vancouver School Board, City of Vancouver and Parks, she never reached out to me? All I got were some inflammatory tweets that I have turned my back on my members... As a former member of COPE, I cannot support the `new' COPE. Many decades-long members of COPE have left the party for various reasons. This is not the COPE I worked and supported for many years... As president I owe it to the members to encourage members to vote for candidates who we can work with."
Even so, COPE appeared to gain traction early in the campaign, with some innovative policy planks and a diverse group of candidates. But that momentum faltered after COPE jumped on the right‑wing "anyone but Vision" bandwagon. By completely ignoring the dangers of an NPA victory, the COPE leadership lost further ground among union supporters and other traditional progressive groups.
In the end, Wong won just 9% of the votes, far below the results of past COPE mayoralty candidates, such as Harry Rankin (1986, 43%), Jean Swanson (1988, 37%), Jim Green (1990, 45%) or Carmela Allevato (1996, 29%). Even in the 1996 NPA sweep, COPE's Tim Louis received 28,480 votes, less than 8,000 from being elected to Council. This year, he took only 31,650 votes, even though the total number of ballots nearly doubled, and was over 25,000 short of victory. COPE's Lisa Barrett came closest to a council seat, with 35,240, just over 19% of the total.
COPE calls these results a huge victory, arguing that it raised crucial issues and alternatives, and that it has built a new, energetic membership base. There is an element of truth to this argument, and the numbers point to a certain level of support for radical civic reform policies in Vancouver. On the other hand, right up to election day, COPE supporters were being invited to join the "victory celebration". The yawning gap between these predictions and the final result may be difficult to bridge.
The outcome also shows that merely nominating a large, diverse slate of progressive candidates, as COPE did, does not guarantee any positive result. The ballot included a huge range of centre to left candidates, running against a smaller number of right‑wing candidates.
In Vancouver electoral math, the result is often gains by the political right, and less diversity among the winners. Those elected this year are overwhelmingly white, straight, upper‑income west side residents with Anglo‑Saxon names ‑ even more so than usual in Vancouver. Among the defeated Vision incumbents were Tony Tang, a Chinese‑Canadian city council member, school trustees Ken Clement (the city's only Aboriginal elected official) and Cherie Payne (a Black woman), and Parks Commissioner Trevor Loke, a prominent figure in the gay community.
The next question for the political left in Vancouver is where to go from here. There are urgent calls to discuss ways to build stronger left‑centre unity leading towards 2018, and some preliminary talks are expected early next year. But at this point, the COPE leadership appears determined to avoid discussions with other forces, including the labour movement.
(The above article is from the December 1-31, 2014, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)