Vancouver Indecision 2008

What better way to spend a Remembrance Day than to exercise my civic privilege and research whom I should support in the upcoming municipal election?

After hours (and this is by no means exaggeration), I've finally come down to a list of all the people I'll be supporting in this Saturday's election. For those of you not living in Vancouver, you may be interested to know that Vancouver doesn't have a ward system, instead we elect our representatives at-large. In other words, we get a list of a bunch of people looking for our vote and we pick ten of them.

On the surface, it looks all very democratic, even holistic if I can use that word in this context. While in a ward system you have to deal with the perils of NIMBYism, Vancouver councillors must theoretically represent the whole of the city which should lead to decision making that places the betterment of the city first.

I don't really know if it all works out that way though. I'm still new here.

What I can tell you is that there's a very real division here between East and West. Acknowledged or not, culturally and economically Vancouver has been referred to as as a two-ward system. This fits well with the two-party system we have... well sort of:

There's the Non-partisan association, which is traditionally rather right-wing, and an alliance of left-ish candidates comprised of three parties: Vision Vancouver, The Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) and The Vancouver Green Party. The funny part is that alliance thing. Since this party system is all about who controls the council, Vision, COPE and Green have reached an agreement not to compete with each other and instead campaign as a sort of team. As a result, NPA is running 10 candidates for council, while Vision is running 8 and COPE 2. There are similar splits in the parks board and school trustee races.

The problem for me is that I really don't like COPE. I find many of their policies (and even some of their candidates) to be naive, and their priorities to be sorely misplaced. However, if I don't support the NPA (who brought us many notable problems like CCTV cameras in the streets, private police, panhandling bylaws etc.) then I cannot vote against that agenda without supporting COPE. Or can I?

There are independents running as well, many of them clearly unfit for office let alone my vote, and there is also the Work Less Party whose platform is very forward thinking and dare I say enlightened. Their only problem is that the group seams plagued with non-professionals incapable of actually doing the job for which they're attempting to get elected. Their policy paper is riddled with typos for chrissake.

So after much research and personal debate I have arrived at this list. If you think I've missed something worth noting, please let me know. Notably missing from here is Michael Geller, a charismatic, intelligent, well travelled candidate... who is running with the NPA. I couldn't in good conscience give my vote to someone who could potentially be motivated to support some of the more disastrous NPA policies either out of loyalty or political pressure. If he were running independent however, I'd support him in a second. Also, Lea Johnson, an independent, seems like a decent guy, but his website talked about his work in Ukrainia... He's probably best suited for working with RainCity anyway.

Notably on this list are Richard Mayencourt (independent) and two Work Less Party candidates: Geri Tramutola for council and Ivan Doumenc for park board. I had the opportunity to hear Tramutola speak last Friday at the VPSN's Last Candidate Standing event and was blown away by the passionate and eloquent nature of her arguments. It's clear that she knows her stuff and she's by far my favourite candidate. I only know Doumenc from his profile on the WLP's website, but his ideas for parks & rec appear to be in line with my own so I included him as well.

So that's about it. My basic strategy: Start with known favourites, then add Vision. If I needed more, I went down the list of independents and COPE people. If I needed fewer, I went through the Vision list and pulled out weak profiles. It's about the best I can do with 86 candidates and such a short period of time.

If you have different strategy, I'd love to hear it ;-) For those of you just wondering where you can get started, I suggest you take a look at the list of candidates and their profiles on the city's website.