When the Vision Vancouver team got into the elevator at the Wall Centre to travel down to the basement level where the victory party was going on, things looked pretty good. They were in charge of the school board, they had three people apparently in line for seats on the park board, and the councillor people had feared was a goner, Geoff Meggs, was 4,000 votes ahead of the 11th-place finisher.
By the time they got off the elevator, they’d lost the majority on school board, been all but wiped out on park board, and seen the gap between 10th and 11th place shrink to 600 votes, as a big advance poll dominated by NPA voters came in.
But it all could have been much worse, as various people from the party told me here.
I understand that Vision polling indicated early that the park board would be a struggle, as the aquarium’s people activated its considerable network to mobilize people to vote against the party that wanted to stop them from breeding cetaceans. (Maybe better for Trish Kelly that she got dropped.)
The school board and council were supposed to be okay, but then things got really tight in the second-to-last week before the election. The team — between leaking polls, getting Gregor to apologize and warn people not to split votes and elect the barbarians, and ramped-up advertising — managed to turn things around in the last week.
The school board’s odd results, by the way, are not an indictment of the Vision board. People who care the most about the school board have always skewed a bit more left — all those teachers who used to be in COPE have some pull. So the Vision loss of a majority at the school board is likely not a big swing right, but more a case of people who were voting Vision also throwing their votes around to COPE and the former COPE Public Education Project candidates. That was enough to see Ken Clement lose his seat by less than 300 votes.