The Internet's Most Famous Feline Pundit emerges from convalescence to comment on the recent civic election in Vancouver and beyond.
Q: First, how are you feeling?
A: Fine, thanks. My appetite has returned, especially with a renewed interest in canned food, and my energy levels are back to normal. That's good, because not only am I now running around the apartment chasing a ball, string and crumpled up pieces of paper, I can also get back to researching my latest epidemiological paper. I've presenting it at a conference and rally in Bogota next week which I need to get ready for.
Q: So, what do you think about the return of the NPA to power in Vancouver and the defeat of Jim Green and Vision Vancouver and the decimation of COPE?
A: Actually, what I think is more interesting is that Vision Vancouver's master plan almost worked. That's the bigger story, not some half-baked idea that the city embraced the NPA's "message" (which was vague at best) or its candidates. The Vision party, which really isn't a party in the standard sense of the word since it has no membership or constitution and is really a slate organized by Jim Green and friends, elected four of its five candidates for council and came within a spoiler's share of votes of the mayor's chair. If the mayor's race had gone 3,700 votes differently, Vision would have had a lock on council if you include COPE's David Cadman, who is closer to the centre than some of his party's counterparts. Vision gambled and lost, but it was in some ways a clever, calculated gamble, and will be one of the great "what ifs" of Vancouver politics for decades. It's the Operation Market Garden of the Vancouver left.
Q: So Green and the other councillors were right in splitting from COPE to run as a separate left-centre party? Didn't the breakaway split the left, hurt morale among members and volunteers and therefore reduce the left's effectiveness in running a coherent campaign?
A: It absolutely did. While it was an interesting gamble to form a breakaway slate, thinking that you could run two left-centre parties (which shared much bitterness toward one another) against a unified and refreshed right-wing party is nuts. It confused, demoralized or disenchanted all the people who came out to vote for COPE the last time in 2002. It's why, for example, the Georgia Straight, of all media outlets, backed Sullivan. All the NPA folks had to do was show up to make this a contest, and given that they again had lots of money, and a fresh set of new faces that is more diverse than COPE and with less baggage than Vision, meant they had the upper hand going in.
Q: What about the independent mayoral candidate James Green's role as a spoiler because of his nearly identical name to Jim Green of Vision?
A: He lost the election for Jim Green. Why he ran is a mystery, since like any independent candidate he had no chance, and while there's no evidence of an NPA-linked conspiracy to back him as a spoiler, James Green's boasts that he was going to pull off a major upset were ludicrous. But as Jim Green said on election night, James Green had a right to run in a free democracy. And while a lot of voters ticked off his name by mistake, you could also suggest that some voters purposely voted for James Green as a form of protest. They were pissed off at Jim Green for splitting COPE, but didn't want to vote for the NPA's Sullivan. Voting for the obvious spoiler was an obvious way to show just how royally pissed they were.
Q: What about the NPA victories at parks board and school board?
A: Those are side effects of the overall NPA win at council, smaller waves from an overall flood. Neither parks board nor school board had any major calamities this year that merited major changes like that. From a non-partisan point of view (no pun intended), there were some good candidates elected, although I'm sorry to see Andrea Reimer, the smartest trustee in the past decade, go down to defeat. I hope she reappears somewhere else in civic politics. I'm also worried that an NPA board will be lukewarm on a junk food ban and will overturn COPE's corporate advertising policy. Hello, Coke, come to Vancouver's schools and sell your stuff to us.
Q: What about outgoing Larry Campbell? What will be his legacy?
A: I'm not convinced Campbell is a real person. I think he's a fictional character, and that for the past three years, we've been living a dress rehearsal for Da Vinci's City Hall. He was a celebrity candidate coming in and is a celebrity mayor going out. It was fun while it lasted, but what did it really do for the city? I mean, what has he changed, besides shepherding the admittedly pragmatic supervised injection site into existence? Before he showed up, the NPA had a lock on civic politics, and now that he's gone, the NPA has a lock on civic politics again. The past three years have been a dream, and now it's over, and we're back to a business-friendly civic party in power. For most of the issues that the left cares about, it's just like the situation I faced last week when the vet put on his rubber glove ...






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