While the City of Vancouver’s power is shrinking in Metro Vancouver, the mayor of Vancouver is still the most important leader in the region. Who will that be after the November election, only eight months from now?
Remarkably, no candidates have yet stepped forward as credible challengers to two-term incumbent Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver majority. The NPA, the likeliest source of a winning opponent, has yet to name its leader, even though NPA president Peter Armstrong has been working hard for months laying pre-election groundwork. Still, he’s playing catch-up to Vision’s unrelenting fully staffed voter outreach team.
In the temporary vacuum, silver-bullet candidates’ names are flying around as Vision’s opponents dream of a win on the coattails of a popular public figure. None are biting so far. For my money, the likeliest NPA candidate is former park board commissioner Ian Robertson, a solid, decent Kerrisdale dad who just happens to be a former senior executive in Peter Armstrong’s Rocky Mountaineer company. Robertson versus Robertson. Do I hear echoes of Green versus Green in 2006?
While a strong mayoralty candidate is pivotal in attracting good council candidates, beating Vision also means coming up with a platform that gets beyond bike lane backlash. (Bike lanes are an integral part of the city’s Transportation 2040 plan, passed unanimously by this council.) The challenge for Vision opponents is that Robertson and his key people (Chief of Staff Mike Magee, Councillor Geoff Meggs and City Manager Penny Ballem) have been adroit in getting out in front of the key issues facing the city: affordable housing, transportation, visible homelessness and spending restraint.
Vision’s biggest weakness is the anger it has triggered in several neighbourhoods over plans for densification. Unfortunately, the people most angered don’t seem to be offering solutions beyond “we want better process.”
No matter how good the process, the next council will face the same challenge as this one: new development has to be in existing neighbourhoods. No amount of process will stop people from moving to Vancouver and wanting an affordable place to live. Without new places in existing neighbourhoods, housing affordability will become more ridiculous than it already is.
Anyone who’s serious about running Vancouver has to have an answer to housing affordability.
For all its efforts on this, Vision has never seriously challenged the evolution of Vancouver into a resort for international plutocrats and a club for homeowners and investors leveraging their spectacular real estate gains into a new generation of deals. Alas, the financing of municipal politics by the real estate industry delivers a developers’ agenda to whoever wants to win a municipal election. As a result, Vision has never dared to suggest we even gather data on who’s investing in housing here or how the resulting high housing prices are eroding all non-real-estate related businesses, families and middle class jobs. The NPA won’t touch this either.
Gregor Robertson may be vulnerable to an opponent promising to listen more to the neighbours, but better listening doesn’t dent the power of the dominant real estate industry to keep dictating terms to council. This is exacerbated by Vision’s failure to retool the planning department to a new culture of genuine citizen participation.
With Vision’s strength of incumbency (a strong factor especially in ethnic communities), uncertainty on the right, a COPE split on the left and no high profile opponent in sight, at this point Gregor Robertson looks hard to beat.
In their candid moments, NPA insiders admit that unless Mayor Robertson follows the rumours into federal Liberal politics, the best they can hope for in November for is two or three more council seats. •
