 |
Front Page » Archive » Vol
2 No 52 » here
Vancouver loves a character, not COPE
by Kevin Potvin
The Republic
The people today aged 55 to 65, who voted so heavily in the
civic election, and voted strongly left, are the parents of
anther group aged 25 to 35 who are just now discovering teachers
and taxes and civic politics. Today's retirees were in
their 20s at the height of the social revolution of the 1960s.
All the things they poured into their kids' minds back
then have, by now, fermented and are coming back out with
an impressively frothy head.
At around 30 years old is when one stops making a big case
about distancing oneself from the opinions of one's parents,
and to start rationally assessing the value of what they taught.
Therefore, wild ideas of how to build a better city, for example,
which was a hot topic in the 1960s, are also vaguely familiar
to this younger age cohort. This why the neighborhoods more
populated by young families, like the West End, Kits, and
Grandview, also voted so overwhelmingly for the all-new visage
of Larry Campbell. Together, these two age cohorts powered
the biggest revolution in the city's history.
There should be no mistake made by anyone elected on Tsunami
Saturday that anything else besides the generous coattails
of Larry Campbell--like the COPE policy manual, for example--got
them where they are today. This was not a vote in favour of
COPE policies, and it was definitely a vote against politics
as the buddy system, dispensed patronage, sweetheart zoning
deals, or job creation. If the new leadership in the city
is to avoid squandering the glorious opportunity Larry Campbell
has made possible by bringing on-board the whole electorate,
they would do well to consider what is best for the city,
and not what is best for COPE, or contributors to the support
system that kept COPE breathing long enough to have this windfall
land in its lap.
Larry Campbell pulled this page out of Mohammed Ali's
book on the sweet science, not because he waved around the
COPE policy manual, which he studiously didn't, but because
he has character by the shovelful, and wittingly or otherwise
tapped into the unique confluence of demographic trends suddenly
making a majority of the electorate activist.
Vancouver has always loved characters, and has always rewarded
them most generously. In Vancouver, it has never mattered
much which song you sang, so long as you belted it out loud.
How else could it be that all of Vancouver equally loved two
recently passed characters about as opposite to one another
as two people can be: Murray Pezim and Harry Rankin? Lotus
Land has always been a place where it's a toss-up whether
bread or circuses hold greater appeal for one's last
dollar. People can still impersonate Faye Leung and trace
the path of Sniffy the Mouse. We love that shit here.
Larry Campbell knows he won this election with a quip. When
he said at a public meeting during the campaign, "Jennifer
Clarke's idea of a solution to gridlock traffic is valet
parking," he had the city eating out of his hand--not
because it's a good rejoinder to the crème-de-la-crème
lady, which it is, and not because it points to a crucial
issue in the economy of the city, which it does, but because
it was really funny. Moreover, it looked like he just came
up with that one off-the-cuff, and everybody's hoping
for more funny zingers like that one, regardless if he can
solve anything.
It's a very rare opportunity Vancouver has walked into.
The last time a cornucopia of ideas flooded town, Mayor Tom
Terrific did everything possible to drain it off. Jennifer
Clarke represented the last of that line of thinking, and
she, as well as all she represents, has been thoroughly (and
finally) rejected.
Now, precisely when the tide of ideas is breaking over the
city again for the first time since 1967, one of our own is
the mayor. For the first time in this city's history,
new ideas will actually be welcomed and, be still my heart,
tried. Wake the kids and call the neighbours. It's about
to get really fun and really interesting around here.
Front Page » Archive
» Vol 2 No 52 » here
top of page |
|
