Local politics has been overshadowed for the last several months by two provincial leadership races and now a federal election. That’s been rough for the NPA, whose adherents, thanks to CityCaucus’s energetic attacks on Vision, had been getting some traction last summer and early fall in their efforts to show Vision Vancouver and Mayor Gregor Robertson as less than perfect. Now, it seems like all I talk to is political campaigners telling me they’ve got no energy to jump into the local scene because they’re wrung out from the leadership races or preoccupied with the federal campaign.
As you politics junkies know, the NPA nominating meeting is set for June 5 and any candidates who want to run under the NPA banner have to declare themselves by May 4, two days after the federal election. I understand the phone lines have been burning lately as the NPA exec tries to get the uncertain to make up their minds what they’re doing.
The trick for party members is to identify what they stand for that people besides their rock-solid base of 30,000 voters — who will never vote for any party they view as being even mildly left and who hate the bike lanes — are willing to come out to the polls for.
So far, the rumours about mayoral candidates have been about three possibles: big-time developer Rob Macdonald; councillor Suzanne Anton, of course; and one name that I’ve been hearing more about, Rick Peterson, an investment adviser who runs the Burgundy Club lunches popular among the plugged in, also a one-time candidate for the B.C. Liberals in the Vancouver-False Creek riding that Mary McNeil eventually nabbed.
For Macdonald, the challenge would be overcoming the perception that he’s the left-winger’s stereotype of what the NPA is (west-siders in bed with developers) and in developing a broader platform than he’s articulated so far (against the way the downtown bike lanes were done, against Vision’s management of the Olympic village).
For Anton, the challenge is how she differentiates herself from Vision Vancouver platforms, being the cycling, laneway-house, anti-plastic-bag advocate that she is. Most of her attacks on Vision, which frequently run parallel to CityCaucus commentaries, are about process rather than fundamental differences in goals.
Peterson has been the only one I’ve heard so far who articulates what might become a broad election issue: concern about the rising cost of living and doing business in Vancouver.
What any of those mayoral candidates need behind them as well is a team that has more than just business people and/or developers on it — again, because the NPA is stereotyped as the well-off west-siders’s party, it has to work doubly hard to counter that image. So it needs people from all parts of the city and needs people who have a strong background of community work.
A couple of months ago, the rumoured candidates I was hearing about did not fit that bill at all.
But it looks as though Francis Wong, well-known in Chinatown, is preparing to run. And Sean Bickerton, who ran last time and has been a big part of the anti-casino movement, is preparing to run again, if the notice of his important announcement about municipal politics to be made tomorrow is any indication.
I realize the conventional wisdom is that parties don’t get voted in as much as ruling parties get voted out. But I still think the NPA has to come up with something to vote for, not just against.
I’m waiting to see if anyone is going to try a Rob Ford, West Coast lite version, of “the gravy train stops here” with a focus on the economic and tax issues. Or if anyone in the NPA can come up with an identity for the party besides “We’re not Vision.”