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Vancouver
Confessions of incorrect thoughts
By Reed Eurchuk
Andrea Reimer comes in from the cold, while other candidates were frozen out from the start
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Andrea Reimer, ex-Green School Board member, recently won a nomination as a Vision candidate for city council. Reimer came in fifth among the field of eight elected Vision council nominees, scoring the highest among non-incumbent candidates. Reimer’s journey from “alternative” type outsider politician to an inner circle member of the Vision cabal is remarkable for its speed and her success. It comes with a steep price.
Already Reimer is rethinking old positions, apologizing for politically incorrect ideas. Reimer told the Courier’s Mike Howell that she had voted against the Olympics in the city- wide plebiscite. But she quickly reassured Howell that she is a patriot, after all “she cries when Canada wins gold in hockey.” And she went on, “I know I didn’t not want the Olympics, I just also wanted money going to these other things” like social programs. The clumsy use of a double negative hints at some anxiety on the part of Reimer. Now, however, she knows what she wants. She wants to make “this a really amazing Olympics that everybody in the city and province can be proud of.” Here Reimer descends into noxious boosterism.
At least when Reimer sells out she does it in style, no holds barred. Riemer hooked up with the most establishment elements within Vision. She, Geoff Meggs, Kerry Jang and Kashmir Dhaliwal ran as the insiders’ team. These three males were included on Vision council member and kingpin Raymond Louie’s personally-selected slate. A fake ballot was mailed out to potential voters to ensure they voted correctly. Dhaliwal brought three busloads of South Asian seniors to vote to the Vision nomination meeting. Jang handed out the fake ballot with each marked with an X as the seniors left the bus. Meggs is a well known back-room boy in many left organizations—the Fisherman’s Union, the Communist Party, Glen Clark’s NDP and, most recently, COPE. Meggs is a man well practiced in the art of internecine warfare. Many of the organizations Meggs worked with included nasty infighting during his periods with them.
In supporting characters like Meggs, Jang and Dhaliwal, Reimer turned her back on Vision nominees with a record of progressive politics, such as David Eby.
In another example of what the price of being with the in crowd at Vision entails, witness Reimer’s defense of developers in the same article: “There was a time in Vancouver where we had a surplus of housing and maybe developers were evil in that environment, I don’t know. But they sure aren’t now.” These are the words of a very confused person. Who ever said developers were evil? Cities and development are synonymous, and anyone who is against development should move out of the city. Developers build to make a profit, the maximum profit that they can make in any given context. It has nothing whatsoever to do with evil. The question is what type of development is best for the people of Vancouver. The problem, which Reimer seems to have missed, is that in the current context it is not worth their while to build anything that sells for less than $650,000. The reason for this is that over the last eight years the city government has allowed the property market in the downtown core to become an unregulated casino. Speculation drove prices through the roof, making the building of affordable housing for profit difficult if not impossible.
It is the role of city government to regulate the developers through a number of tools including taxation and zoning. It was the governments of Phillip Owen, Vision founder Larry Campbell and now Sam Sullivan that gave the developers the keys to the city and slept while they remade the city into a luxury playground.
Eby’s run lent Vision claims of reformism credibility.
David Eby’s failed run for a Vision nomination was from the outset a quixotic crusade. Why would a person who works hard for the homeless and those with insecure housing run for a nomination with the party that received the lion’s share of the developer’s loot in the last election cycle? These are the people who, with the municipal government’s sanction, have built no affordable housing over the last ten years (other than when forced to by council in order to qualify for development permits) and who have driven up property values in this town to the point where no middle income person can afford to move here.
Eby’s candidacy gave Vision something that ad agencies and backroom operatives cannot pull out of their bag of tricks: as an idealistic and passionate reformer, Eby provided Vision with spirit and the appearance of reformism.
On Frances Bula’s essential blog (francesbula.com) one of the defeated Vision nominees for Parks Board, journalist Hadani Ditmars, wrote the following as a comment:
“I ran for Park Board after receiving a phone call from Raymond Louie while I was in London this summer, writing about Vancouver and Vancouverism for the Guardian and the Globe, encouraging me to run. … (U)nbeknownst to me, the backroom boys had already cooked up a slate well in advance of my phone call from Raymond. I never heard from him again. I, like many other candidates, was just part of a political strategy to boost Vision’s power in their negotiations with COPE, among other things.”
Like Ditmars, Eby’s run provides Vision with credibility as they continue with their absurd attempt to present themselves as reformers.
COPE’S disgrace.
In order to ensure Tim Louis would not win one of COPE’s two council nominations, COPE insiders cooked up a “Louis proof” electoral system for use at the recent COPE nomination meeting. Rather than the traditional first past the post system, COPE substituted a complicated system that led to the need for multiple ballots. One COPE member of 15 years told me he does not recall this system being used at any other COPE nomination meeting. The lengthy process drove away COPE members who had other commitments, for example responsibility for children. On the first ballot, on which Louis was only four votes behind elected COPE councilor David Cadman, 322 members cast a ballot. Under the traditional method Louis would have easily won a nomination, together with Cadman. By the time of the third ballot, about three hours after the first ballot was cast, only 268 members cast ballots and Ellen Woodsworth, who had come in a distant third on the first ballot, managed to squeak by Louis by six votes. So between the first ballot and the third ballot, 64 voters left.
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