A mid-term byelection is usually considered a referendum on the ruling party.
Vancouver’s ABC (A Better City) municipal party had better hope not. It has 18 months to make sure not.
To use the party’s acronym here, let’s just agree the rookie crew has found governing to be A Bigger Challenge than it expected.
To be honest, the party was never formed out of A Basic Coherence of ideology or purpose. Mainly it just didn’t want to be its oddly distracted, encumbered civic predecessors who had a fetish for trying to solve the world’s problems instead of the city’s: climate change, social equity, market economics. What the eclectic party stood for was more or less about whatever its rivals hadn’t: cleaner and safer streets, fiscal prudence and financially viable development couched in wisdom.
But it hasn’t proven to be A Broadly Consistent administration on balancing the need for more housing with the need to not offend every neighbourhood that beckons it. It has levied taxes far outstripping cost-of-living increases, failed to quell street safety and hygiene issues, met off-site against civic rules, waged war on its integrity commissioner, frozen the construction of new supportive housing, hasn’t attracted business despite its business-minded ethos, and served notice (against what it campaigned on) that it wants to kill the city’s park board once the province consents.
For heaven’s sake, it has even defunded a school lunch program, as if Canada’s most expensive territory is somehow also Canada’s most properly fed. (As the chair of a not-for-profit society dealing with food insecurity for the city’s children, I invite council to recognize reality.)
To no one’s surprise, ABC’s capacity to maintain its lineup has proven A Bit Chaotic – firing a councillor, and driving three park board commissioners and one school board trustee to resign. There may be other defections and dismissals.
No surprise, then, that Saturday resulted in A Brutal Clobbering.
To sense how far public opinion has come since the party’s first electoral test, remember that it swept into office in 2022 every one of its 17 candidates for the mayoralty, council, park board and school board. Utter, breathtaking triumph on its first try, a mandate underwritten by evidenced confidence to fix a small city with big-city problems.
Its 2022 candidates finished ahead of everyone else. On Saturday, not one polling station in any neighbourhood had ABC’s two candidates ahead of everyone else.
Despite a well-financed electoral machinery, the inherent advantage of incumbency and a seasoned campaign manager imported for the task, its candidates finished sixth and seventh.
And indeed, it now appears to have A Burgeoning Crisis on its hands, a worry that it might be one and done if something major isn’t done by the next general election.
The byelections to replace two progressive councillors from the One City and Green parties ended up with, well … two progressive councillors from the One City and COPE parties. The result isn’t fatal, even if the byelection and its dismissal of one of its councillors from the party means it doesn’t have a supermajority to exercise the same financial agency. But it is formidable in signalling much more than the simple one-off butt-kicking Mayor Ken Sim suggested.
His strikingly serendipitous announcement Monday was to create a task force of business leaders to contend with the hot mess of the downtown. Its mandate is to study the situation for six months and bring back “actionable” measures to be implemented “as quickly as possible.” In my experience, a task force is a recourse, what you convene when your government hasn’t got its finger on the pulse, isn’t properly consulting the usual suspects, and can’t properly synthesize the perspectives and ideas to pragmatically address problems.
I think it’s a reasonable fear that six months of study and months more of reacting in this Trump era will see the ground shift and shift, as the city shuffles and shuffles. But I get it: the measures will arrive in time for the next campaign.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism. He ran for Vancouver mayor in 2014 and finished second. He is vice-president in the office of the chairman at Fulmer and Company.
