Kirk LaPointe is getting ready to do battle.
The 56-year-old LaPointe recently added more strength training and boxing to his regular workout schedule, an effort, he says, to stay fit for the gruelling work of campaigning for mayor of Vancouver.
But it remains to be seen whether the Non-Partisan Association (NPA) candidate will succeed in landing a knockout punch to unseat Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson.
Vision Vancouver has dominated Vancouver city council since Robertson was first elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2011. Robertson is the first Vancouver mayor to serve more than one term since Philip Owen’s three-term run in the 1990s.
Robertson was elected on a platform that included a pledge to end homelessness and make Vancouver the greenest city. But after hitting an approval rate of 47% in July 2012, Vision Vancouver’s approval rating has steadily declined, hitting 38% in April 2014, according to polls from Justason Market Intelligence.
Recent polls show Vision has become vulnerable on issues like transparency and homelessness, and the city has been hit with numerous lawsuits from disgruntled community groups unhappy with the way council has made decisions on park lands and development.
In contrast to recent NPA recent mayoral candidates Suzanne Anton, Peter Ladner and Sam Sullivan, who had all served as Vancouver city councillors, LaPointe is a political newbie who is largely unknown to Vancouver voters.
LaPointe has yet to finalize his platform. But he insists that as leader of the NPA, the party and the campaign are his to shape.
“I’m pushing for a more progressive agenda that matches with a more fiscally prudent approach,” LaPointe said. “We’ll borrow ideas from the left, right and centre.”
LaPointe may have his work cut out for him if he plans to appeal to voters outside the NPA’s traditional base: polls show support for Vision is strongest among young people, renters, cyclists and downtown dwellers, while the NPA has highest support among voters over age 45, property owners and non-cyclists.
LaPointe may not be well known to the public, but he is familiar to Vancouver’s journalists. He was managing editor at the Vancouver Sun from 2003 to 2010 and CBC ombudsman from 2012 to 2013; he is currently publisher and editor-in-chief at North Vancouver-based Self-Counsel Press. He also teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism.
LaPointe started his career as a reporter at the Ottawa bureau of the Canadian Press; later he went on to hold an array of editing and executive positions at the Canadian Press, the Hamilton Spectator, National Post and CTV.
At the Spectator, he turned around a struggling paper and increased circulation; he set up the National Post’s newsroom. Sometimes he held down two jobs at once, as when he worked as Ottawa bureau chief for the Canadian Press and hosted a weekly political affairs show on CBC Newsworld.
LaPointe’s rise to the top stands in stark contrast to a childhood marked by poverty.
Born in Toronto to a single mother who had to decide whether to keep him or his older brother (his brother, who was 12 when LaPointe was born, was sent to live with friends in New Brunswick), LaPointe remembers often going to school hungry.
“She’d get paid on a Thursday night … so we’d have food Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” LaPointe said. “But by Monday the cupboard would be getting bare and by Tuesday and Wednesday I was living on things like peanut butter or butter and sugar sandwiches, which were quite common back then.”
When LaPointe was 12, his mother got married and the family moved to suburban Etobicoke. Life became more stable; LaPointe also gives credit to the helpful neighbours and teachers who realized he was a child in need.
“I was found in a lot of ways,” he said.
He put out a newspaper as a school project in Grade 6; by high school, LaPointe was writing a column for a community paper in Etobicoke and hosting a television show about music and bands on a local cable station (he also edited Billboard magazine for nearly a decade). He went on to study journalism at Ryerson University.
“My writing and my capacity to entertain and inform became a way not only to indulge my curiosity,” LaPointe said, “but a way to find my way out of poverty and meet people who were interesting and find a job doing it.”
Those childhood experiences have inspired an ambitious policy idea LaPointe said he will make a key part of his platform.
“One of the things I want to do for the city is make sure we have a full-fledged program in which children don’t go to school hungry; they’re not in the classroom with hunger pangs,” he said. “We have a patchwork of programs right now that still leave thousands of children in a rich city like this without the capacity to have meals, and then we send them home on the weekend on the assumption they’ll be able to find food. That’s an assumption that isn’t valid.”
LaPointe would also like to create a comprehensive mentorship program for school-aged children.
“I’d like to set up what would be, I hope, one of the world’s great networks of linking children with their passion,” he said.
As he was at several points in his career, LaPointe was recruited for the mayoral candidacy. Before being asked to run, LaPointe said he hadn’t planned to become a politician, but he says he sees parallels between politics and journalism: at their worst, both can have a defensive, just-trust-me culture. At their best, they can effect positive change in society.
“I look at it as a transition between a period of my life where I was looking for solutions, and now I can furnish some of those solutions and answer the questions,” he said.
The Issues
Party platform planks
NPA mayoral candidate Kirk LaPointe has yet to reveal his full platform, but here is where he stands on some of the key issues.
Housing affordability
“The affordability issue is not simply one of the cost of a house. It’s in a lot of cases the type of housing stock that’s created. I’m quite intrigued by a lot of the work lately under the Urban Development Institute, some of the new prospects that they’re proposing that would be innovations in housing design or in some cases bylaw changes that would permit different types of housing and different types of zoning.”
Transparency
LaPointe has said he would create a new position at city hall to focus on making city decisions and budgets clearer to the public, including a more detailed line-item annual budget.
Taxes
LaPointe told Business in Vancouver he would freeze tax rates until the city’s books were opened to the public.
Coal and pipelines
LaPointe believes Gregor Robertson has gotten “distracted” on issues that are outside municipal jurisdiction, such as the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion and railway coal shipments. “The mayor needs to focus on the things the mayor can do things about,” LaPointe said.
Homelessness
“The homelessness issue needs an entirely new conversation and it needs a conversation that is going to involve the federal government ... the province ... and the private sector.” On the Downtown Eastside: “I see a fairly substantial layer between those that are dispersing the money and those that ought to be receiving it. I think we need a new conversation, we need an audit and we need a new champion down there who will take charge of it.”
Transportation
LaPointe has criticized Robertson for pushing for a Broadway subway line without support from the provincial or federal government. While he has said he will take a second look at the way the decision was made to put a bike lane on Point Grey Road, he says he “believes in the bicycle as a viable form of transportation” and wants equal emphasis placed on efficient movement for cars and bikes.
