Within six minutes Wednesday morning, emails arrived hailing the candidacy of Mark Marissen for mayor and the launch of ABC (A Better City) Vancouver as the vehicle Ken Sim will use for his candidacy. Last week Sim’s former party announced John Coupar as its mayoral nominee.
Yes, the race for the fall municipal election has entered high gear.
Wait. . .what? The election is NEXT fall? As in 2022?
Early in a marathon, why a stampede? One candidate last week, two this week. Three next, four the following? Might another gender diversify the all-male field?
For anyone who doesn’t want to absorb some inside-baseball Vancouver politics, this is a good place to stop reading. Come back in a year when the campaign is real.
But for those tricked by that last paragraph, let’s play.
Full disclosure: I ran as the Non-Partisan Association (NPA) 2014 mayoralty candidate. Start to finish, my campaign was four months long, and we’ll never know if that was too long or too short. But 18-month campaigns? Way too long, even if the mayor has been running for re-election two years now.
Other full disclosure: I know all three, so at the risk of losing two friendships, I won’t vouch for one over the others. Not that it would matter much.
One other declaration: the happiest camper right now is Edward Charles Kennedy Stewart. (Bet you thought his first name was Kennedy, bet you can figure out the political reason to use that third name).
Stewart’s 2018 victory margin of 957 votes over Sim seems slim, but that also had something to do with a strong, progressive third candidate, Shauna Sylvester, who earned support from more than 35,000. So far – and yes, it’s early days, we could have several more in the race before I’m finished writing this – there isn’t a clearly progressive alternative to Stewart.
Vancouver is a progressive city politically. No Conservative MPs, only two BC Liberals among 11 MLAs, and a left-of-centre municipal leader for more than a dozen years. There are now three and counting candidates to Stewart’s right. It is hard to fathom, even with the generally low marks he has received for his pandemic leadership, how the vote-splitting by the three others in the race won’t ensure his victory – unless substantial progressive candidates surface. Even then, there will be more entering to his right.
The NPA candidate has finished second in the last four elections, and in traditional circumstances its candidate would be the logical challenger. But recent in-house squabbling has been anything but helpful to its cause.
At the party’s 2019 annual meeting, a slate of directors was elected and with like-minded directors assumed board control. They bolstered their edge when four directors resigned.
The party has gone now two years between general meetings, and the elected caucus members recently demanded one. In response, the board secretly co-opted one of the caucus members, Coupar, a three-time park board commissioner, to be the mayoral nominee. Unlike the two previous nominations – in 2014 by board vote among three candidates, in 2018 by member vote among three candidates – there was no race this time. The caucus, save Coupar, heard the news only at the last minute. Not exactly textbook team-building technique.
At least two NPA councillors wanted to test the waters to scout the nomination, as did others outside of the caucus, and they may yet. Three of them publicly complained the next day, and a fourth has suggested Coupar’s candidacy could still be thwarted after the next general meeting. It is an open question now if Coupar can heal the rift or if the board will even sign their nomination papers next election. Coupar is a poison pill defence for the board. If anyone tries to take down the board at the next general meeting, then take down Coupar, it will more likely lay waste to the city’s most successful party.
Sim, of course, might have been in the front seat to become the NPA candidate, but he chose to walk away and start ABC (a name, by the way, coined by Coleen Hardwick five years ago through her PlaceSpeak online survey platform; she subsequently won a council seat for the NPA in 2018).
There is a curious catch in Sim’s candidacy, though. He professes profusely he is not the designated nominee of the party and there will be an open contest for the position this fall, even though the party is his baby. This will take some convincing of others. At the moment it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like one. How is it not a duck?
Marissen, whose former spouse is our former premier, is the architect of many successful political campaigns (Clark, Stephane Dion, etc.) but has never been the frontman. He created YES Vancouver last election as a vehicle for Hector Bremner, who had been deposed by the NPA as a sitting councillor. A YES rebrand is under way, which will now serve as Marissen’s vehicle, and he is trying to hoover up the former Vision supporters and federal Liberals in the city. He, like Sim, has been consciously trying to create a big political tent and isolate the NPA on the right. Coupar will likely have something to say about that, too.
All as Edward Stewart smiles.
To borrow a comparison, we need to remember this is a marathon and not a sprint. We can expect a second and third wave. But in this case, it’s not clear we get through this together.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
