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Mayor’s doomsday COVID-19 scenario is good for a laugh at Vancouver’s expense

On the one hand, I don’t think anyone would want to be mayor right now. On the other hand, I wish the fellow who was elected would. We seem to have Mayor Kennedy Worrywart on our hands.
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On the one hand, I don’t think anyone would want to be mayor right now.

On the other hand, I wish the fellow who was elected would.

We seem to have Mayor Kennedy Worrywart on our hands.

Kennedy Stewart’s cry-wolf briefing Wednesday about city finances was an anxiety-laden soliloquy of scare tactics steeling us for a mirage apocalypse, riddled by his confusion that telling us the worst is telling us the truth.

The trial is on and the evidence is still upon the court of public opinion concerning Stewart’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, but based on his recent days we can’t be far from a condemning judgment. I’ve talked to three snarky mayors from surrounding communities and they won’t go on the record for good reason. No wonder there is radio silence in Stewart’s plea for senior government shekels; they may have their flaws, but they’re still anchored in the realm of reality.

Vancouver is the first major Canadian community to be confronted by COVID-19, one of the last to declare a public emergency, and first to surrender to the spectre of the worst-case scenario.

On the long weekend – it felt less a holiday or observance this time – Stewart released a survey suggesting one-quarter of property owners weren’t sure they could pay more than half of their property taxes. Six per cent suggested they couldn’t pay at all.

This was a hardly a preview of cataclysmic default. Besides, it’s a matter the province could, might, probably even should address by permitting property owners to defer taxes for a year or two or three and make the city’s coffers whole with an IOU Victoria. Weirder deals are being struck right now, and you’d think the province would snap to its senses on this shortly.

But no matter to the mayor: he married that poll finding – and ballooned his hyper-hypothetical hole in his $1.6 billion budget to about $325 million – to a staff report showing a Baby Bear, Mama Bear and Papa Bear trio of civic revenue and spending scenarios.

He went with the dark, dire option: the fantasy of a civic lockdown until the end of the year, with lingering budget effects through next April totalling $189 million, a circumstance no one is predicting and one that even my beloved neurotic late uncle would have waved off.

Stewart effectively declared the ship was heading for the iceberg with it barely on sonar. If it keeps the mayor awake at night, as he said, might we suggest a subscription to Disney Plus.

It stands to be a signature moment, a little like Toronto’s Mel Lastman calling in the military two decades ago to clear a blanket of snow.

In this tragic time, it at least helps the rest of the country laugh at us once more. It would float if it weren’t so full of holes and be more persuasive if it weren’t so incongruent with acts and facts.

Little-noticed in Stewart’s pandemic stewardship: he launched with fanfare then killed in silence a COVID-19 economic recovery civic task force. Sunk without a trace, so a business community that might help him navigate is officially incommunicado with City Hall.

Not unnoticed: the city sits on a $130 million contingency fund for blizzards, earthquakes and, well yes, pandemics. Stewart says staff want to use only part of it but, well yes, the city could use it all.

Also not unnoticed: his claim Wednesday that the city has already found more than $30 million in savings without developing a hernia.

So even the city’s worst-case is salvageable. Now, talk to the city’s denizens to see if they have at hand such salvation of their worst cases.

No question, Vancouver’s most vulnerable require extensive help, and Stewart has his heart in the right place in lifting their plights. What he forgets is to attend to those in business who have to do their own heavy lifting of starting and running, hiring and paying, and struggling and surviving.

The basic beggarly problem in the mayor’s approach is how it differs from how others have greeted these disruptive times. They have first looked to themselves, protected core functions, deferred what wasn’t urgent, squeezed the grape’s last drop, and then – and only then – sought help if every effort to find a viable path weren’t viable.

Most everyone in town is suffering, many are going down for the count, city council is defending no-strings-attached stipends for benefits, political leadership isn’t taking a big pay cut, and labour is reminding the mayor that you dance with the one who brung ya.

The pandemic has been a clarion call for our country’s leaders to show up and step up. If Stewart’s emergence is only to bring about sombre clouds, perhaps he’d be better to self-isolate.

Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial of Glacier Media.