Vancouver Yawns, Blames Gregor Next

What a pathetic turnout for the municipal election on November 15! When more than 75% vote “none of the above” by staying home, it’s really time to ask why this is happening. Could it be that everyone, after years of Olympic boosterism overriding any sanity in decision-making (and dealing with the Cambie Street Canyon and other long-term construction sites while the bills pile up and up) figures it doesn’t matter any more who’s in charge? Perilously close to they don’t give a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut for us, so “why should I care?”.

I voted — in the advance poll, even, knowing I would be away from the west coast on election day. One of the factors that had guided my support for various candidates was a firm desire to “reward” the prior NPA council under Mayor Sam Sullivan for the civic workers’ strike of 2007. Corners of my garage still carry a whiff of odeur des ordures despite repeated airings, but that’s what a fourteen week buildup of waste can do for you. The NPA members had supported Sam in his “no debate, no discussion; the public has no business meddling in the strike” attitude. (Vision Vancouver and COPE members on that council had been willing to air the dirty situation in a council debate.)

So former NPA councillors did not get my vote (except for Peter Ladner, who was competing for Mayor). Returning Vision and COPE councillors did. I then voted for some new NPA candidates along with one more Vision one. Similarly, on the Parks and School Boards, I voted for a mix across all the civic parties. Party politics at the municipal level is a plague brought on by our wardless civic structure — candidates need the “brand” to back their campaign efforts — but councils and boards ought to operate in a “non-partisan” manner and work together. Alas, the corrosion of faction, as it was called by George Washington in the early days of the United States, is alive and well: institutions diverge from, and corrode, the tradition they support.

I’m not dissatisfied that Gregor Robertson won over Peter Ladner: it was a hard choice as to which to support as I like both and think either would make a good mayor. Having voted for a council balanced toward the Vision/COPE stream, I ultimately decided an NPA mayor would be a good way to achieve non-partisanship. Anything to put the “us-vs-them” of the Sam years behind us!

But Gregor has been dealt a cruel hand, for the mistakes of the Philip Owen, Larry Campbell and Sam Sullivan mayoralties (at the very least) are about to come crashing down on him and his council. Needless to say, of course, the cupboard is bare thanks to the idiocy of putting the Olympics first, last and always, and needing to bail out shady developers (Millennium) and hedge/private investment funds (Fortress) in the process as the most recent on a pile of “you’re stuck with it” in the city.

Municipalities are the new backbone of the twenty-first century. Large-scale governments — nations and provinces/states — will find it increasingly hard to exercise authority. More and more issues will fall to cities whether they want them or not. At the same time, they are not even really a “level of” government: they exist at the pleasure of (and under the thumb of) the province. Eventually this will change: in the meantime, everyone will scream as the wholly-inadequate funding base of the city is strained beyond hope.

Now, on the one level, you could (as did CKNW commentator Bruce Allen) opine that “if you don’t vote, you’ve got no right to complain after the fact”, but that misses the point. Who are your municipal candidates? Parties formulate their candidates’ lists weeks before the election, and their policies likewise. (Note that Suzanne Anton of the NPA is the lone survivor from last council’s NPA members: she expended campaign resources with a barrage of radio advertising just before voting day. It probably built just enough name recognition — coupled with appearing in the top three names in the ballot thanks to alphabetical order — to squeak her home.) There is some logic in not voting for nobodies — and that’s who most of these are to most voters. They are just a party label. Why not? — it’s that way provincially and federally, too, although the ballot is generally much shorter.

So the complaints will come — and they ought to. But what needs to change is the system:

We need wards: Local voting areas — wards — mean that an elector is faced (as they are with their other ballots) with a much shorter list of candidates. These candidates, in turn, need not campaign all over the city to win election. We might actually get to know who’s running. (A good local candidate would also be a viable contender to be elected as an independent, too.) Meanwhile, region-blanketing advertising (Anton’s radio adverts reached six times as many people who couldn’t vote for her as could) would be less cost-effective, removing that point of influence.

We need new methods of civic financing: It’s time to move past the property tax as the essence of civic funding. The answers here are difficult: American cities have tried city income taxes, city sales taxes, etc. All of these come with serious problems, but they all recognize that cities do more today than pave roads, put in water/sewer lines, and run police/fire departments. (Some cities, like Toronto, have taken on far more than they should — and some have experienced the distortions of provincial downloading without funding [Toronto again, for one].) This will, in turn, lead us to …

Cities must become a true level of government: Cities must become the equal to provinces and the federal government, with a division of powers and true fiscal authority. As we move more deeply into the end of cheap energy (and don’t let the recent price declines fool you; the long-term trend is to constrained supply and more expensive extraction and refining) life will become more local. Land use patterns, transit patterns, local employment: all of these are civic in nature, best decided locally.

So, I wish our new council well. I know the noise level will be high. They will try to patch the mess left by the past and that will lead to new screaming. We’ll end up blaming them for failing. But until the game itself is changed, that’s all we’ll be able to do. No wonder people don’t care to vote!

Eminem Touches in Falcon’s Mouth

For those of you not in BC, the title of this post is likely enigmatic. For those of you in BC, it’s likely still enigmatic — but in a different way. So, to the decoding:

Kevin Falcon is the Transport Minister in the BC Liberal Government. He is also generally Gordon Campbell’s designated “mouth”. If any BC Liberal is likely to go too far in public trashing someone else, it’ll be Falcon. Some say he only opens his mouth to change feet, but I disagree: he merely suffers from a nasty mixture of athlete’s tongue and vitriol breath.

After the by-elections last Wednesday, the BC Liberal Party held its regular get-together, this year in the large and blossoming town of V0N1V0 (to use the title of a book about the place), or Whistler. There, Falcon went on — and on — about the deficiencies of the BC NDP and its leader, Carole James. The woman, in his mind, has no claim to any experience at anything, as he dismissed out of hand her prior tenure on the Victoria School Board of Trustees, and leading the provincial Trustees’ organization. Therefore — he carries on — she has no right to hold opinions contrary to those of the BC Liberal Party, i.e. his own.

Now there is a certain amount of such miserable rhetoric that is a part of what passes in place of political discourse today, especially when the job of the speaker is to throw raw red meat at the howling lions in attendance. What prompted me to write about this, actually, is the way he carried on into this week, trashing the Governor of our neighbouring state, Alaska.

(Goodness knows, Governor Sarah Palin’s “performance” over the past two months as John McCain’s running mate didn’t exactly strike a chord of confidence in her on my part, but she does run a government of some interest to this province’s government, of which he is a part. Qui est le stupide ici? In general, it is considered bad form to want things from someone and to negotiate by insulting them, their capabilities, their intelligence, their … well, you get the idea.)

None of this, of course, is new to Falcon. And so (did you think I’d forgotten the Eminem reference?) to him I say, “Would Minister Falcon please shut up! Please shut up! Please shut up!” Slim Shady didn’t hold a candle to this liability, and Gordon Campbell should realize that sending the Mouth that Roared out there isn’t doing his Government — or his party, which faces the electors next May — any favours.

Ultimately, the BC Liberals are running on the same sort of “empty” that the Federal Liberals are. The Federal Liberals, as you may remember, have now run three elections on the meme “Stephen Harper has a hidden agenda … Stephen Harper is George Bush … Stephen Harper is dangerous”. In 2004 it worked just well enough to allow them to eke out a minority; in 2006 they lost government, and in 2008 their decline continued. The Campbell BC Liberal mantra — ably carried forward by the likes of Falcon — is “The NDP have a hidden agenda … The NDP will ruin everything … The NDP are dangerous”. But when an NDP party leader uses the Government’s own financial numbers to put forward spending alternatives, the last thing you can say is that the numbers were made up. Nevertheless, the charge has been tried, even as the Finance Minister moves the goalposts on the revenue estimates.

Yesterday — and when CKNW takes over the schedule to run six-plus hours of live US election results, complete with reporters in the field it seems clear to me at least that they believed their BC audience was paying attention to the US election — the election of Obama charted, if only for a moment, the promise of hope. That does not meld well with a negative, churlish spitting out of the same old phrases hoping to stretch yet another win out of old news. Earlier this year I wrote on the subject of respect.

If the BC Liberals want to form another government — not, mind you, that I’m saying they either should or shouldn’t at this point — they had better shape up and put a muzzle on the childishness of a Kevin Falcon (and others like him, including the Premier from time to time). Otherwise, the same dumpster that contains the Dion campaign of 2008 will need to make room for the ex-Government of BC in 2009.

“Done Voting for 2008″, I Hope

I went off to the advance poll for the November 15 municipal election here in Vancouver today. It was necessary, as I’ll be three time zones east of here on election day, and although much of the information about municipal politics comes out at the last minute I did my research and made my choices.

There was a fair-sized crowd using the advance poll set up for my part of the city this morning, and in talking to the returning officer on site they’d had a continuous flow since opening at 8.00 am. It’s gratifying to see a little enthusiasm for civic affairs, especially considering how “electioned-out” many of us in this city are feeling: a federal by-election, two provincial by-elections, a federal general election, now the municipal election, plus the campaigning for next spring’s provincial election already starting up and the spill-over, in the news, of the American elections … just exactly how many ads and signs are we expected to process, especially in this decade of “negative campaigning” as a first-strike option?

But here in Vancouver we have a number of excellent positive choices on the ballot, as opposed to the usual round of ho-hum-oh-well candidates — and, it seems, fewer diversionary candidates. Even the ones running for notoriety seem to be taking a serious look at affairs this time around, for which I’m thankful.

In the race for the Mayor’s chair, we’re blessed with two sensible and viable candidates in the NPA’s Peter Ladner and Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson. Either Gregor or Peter should make a fine mayor; while I’d like my choice to win the day (don’t we all want our candidates to be the winners?) I will be happy with his opponent as well. Indeed, I spent a good two minutes in the voting booth going back and forth between the two one last time before finally inking the page. I devoutly wish I am faced with this same problem at all future ballots I am asked to cast.

I will say nothing much about the candidates for City Council, the School Board or the Parks Board. (For those not from around here, Vancouver has no wards, so all candidates are elected city-wide: the top ten vote getters for Councillor, for instance, become the new Council — and our Parks and Recreation system has an elected set of “trustees” much as does the Vancouver School Board. Then, too, we have party politics in Vancouver, so we’ll have voters who vote a near-straight party ticket [the parties don't always run a full slate of candidates].) We had good people offering their services for all of them, scattered around the NPA, Vision and COPE — plus a smattering of candidates from other parties and a number of independents. What I will say is that every vote I cast was a positive one, in that it was cast for the candidate (not the party) and on that candidate’s merits.

Ideally, we will wake up on the morning of Nov. 16 and discover that the Mayor must face a “minority” council — one where they must find support from Councillors who are members of other parties — rather than our last few councils, where party discipline could create sheep-like votes. It would be good for Vancouver to need to do some coalition-building around the issues.

The three referenda on spending were the most interesting part of the ballot. Municipalities in Canada have very limited revenue potentials and are generally left to plead for pennies from senior levels of government, yet it is in municipalities that our future lies, not in larger national or provincial entities. In this city, despite the fact that we are already burdening businesses and property owners with too much of a take relative to other communities’ options, we really do need to invest in our ageing community centres, in our ageing water/sewer/transport infrastructure and in our community housing. (We also need to invest in more regional transportation options, but that’s at another level of government.) No, the numbers don’t add up, but the Council must have some freedom to act, and that’s the referenda questions that were asked: do you approve our taking action without further consultation. I said “yes” to all three — and let’s hope a divided Council, Parks Board and School Board, in turn, will intelligently reach courses of action that all sides of the debate, from NPA through Vision to COPE, can approve of. It would be the beginning of a civic infrastructure that could handle the demands of the 2010s.

So I shall enjoy the rest of the candidates’ campaign, even having voted. But I do feel good about this one. A little residual “Obama hope”? No — some real hope that maybe, just maybe, we’re maturing as a community. 2009-2011 will tell me whether my hopes are real — or misplaced.

A Rock in the Mayoral Race in Vancouver

The NPA mayoral candidate, Peter Ladner, tossed a large rock in the middle of the mayoral race this week, by stating one of those things that political correctness (and fear of backlash) leads almost everyone to never say.

His message? (No doubt it’ll be referred to a Human Rights Commission as a hate crime by some idiot.) “The Downtown Eastside needs to become a mixed income community — simply building new housing for the homeless and poor won’t fix it.”

For those who don’t know Vancouver, the DTES is Canada’s collection of poorest urban postal codes. It is filled with the addicted, the homeless, the poor, and the indigent as well. It is a community, not merely a colleciton of derelicts — but it is seldom more than a photo op or an afterthought for anyone in politics.

Now, Ladner has spoken a truth which I have personally experienced. In the mid-1980s, in Toronto, I lived on Toronto’s closest equivalent to the DTES. This area was under going some measure of gentrification — I lived in a heritage brownstone which had been renovated for market-priced flats — but the area also contained many overnight shelters, assistance areas, much prostitution and drug-dealing, and many rundown properties and what some would call “slum lord” conversions into single-room occupancy flats.

In other words, it was (and is: it is recognizably the same in 2008) very similar to the DTES.

What saved this area of Toronto, ultimately, was the mixed income element. I recall “the man” — I never learned his name, as he wasn’t talkative, but he trudged, winter and summer, up and down Shuter Street with his worldly possessions in a plastic grocery store bag and wearing his great coat — who saw this as a community. Working from home one day, I heard a ladder bang up against the brownstone next door. A cable TV truck was on the street. I spotted “the man” watching carefully, then moving at what was (for him) a brisk pace to the payphone on the corner. Shortly the police arrived — and arrested the burglars masquerading as cable TV staff. He knew his neighbours, and cared for them, even if he didn’t want particularly to engage with them directly.

Ladner’s point is simply this: it is the mixing of “classes” that makes the difference.

Interestingly enough, this was part of the original design of Vancouver, with its mid-block lanes. The poor lived in over-carriage house or over-garage apartments; the wealthier lived facing the street. Outgoing Mayor Sam Sullivan’s EcoDensity plan also called for a return to this mixed structure. Jane Jacobs noted the value of mixed neighbourhoods in her seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Need I go on?

By saying the unsayable, Ladner had actually made it possible to discuss a real issue, something that almost never happens in a political campaign. Good for him!

I don’t know whether this will turn back Gregor Robertson’s apparent lead in November, nor am I myself even sure if Ladner should be given a vote based on one moment. (He has quite a bit to answer for as an NPA councillor who voted with Sullivan in the outgoing council. I still remember the civic strike of 2007 — and fourteen weeks of garbage in my garage.) But I do know this has made him more worth consideration.

May a little honesty, plain speaking and dealing in issues emerge more often, in more situations. We all, as citizens, deserve it.

After all, if it did happen regularly, maybe more of us would go out and vote.

Municipals 2008 in Vancouver

There’s still a few forlorn — whether for the winner last Tuesday or one of the also-rans, it matters not — election signs left around our neighbourhood, but, with the municipal vote coming fast on November 15, I came home on the weekend to see a raft of “vote for…” signs for the mayor’s chair, the city council, the school board and the parks board.

For those of you not in Vancouver, a couple of pointers to keep in mind: first, we have party politics (municipal parties) dominating municipal elections; second, everyone is elected on a city-wide basis (there are no wards). As a result, this weekend’s growing signage is a reasonable proxy for how well the party-led campaigns (there are no shortage of independent candidacies as well) are getting off the mark.

From that point of view, Vision Vancouver — the new(ish) party — has their act together.

The neighbourhood, notorious for its reflexive voting for any NPA (the party that has controlled Vancouver politics for most of the last seven decades) candidate, is nevertheless full of signs for the Vision Vancouver mayoral candidate, Gregor Robertson, as well as Vision candidates for other offices. I saw only one candidate for city council for the NPA who as yet had supporters taking lawn signs. COPE (the left side party) and the NPA were conspicuous by their absence.

Now, it’s early days yet — if I was running a campaign, I’d have waited until after the Federal show was out of the way, too — and perhaps when I make it home this weekend the sign balance will have changed. (I’m also expecting to see billboards and bus shelter ads in place.) Still, this ought not to have been a surprise to anyone, and I am surprised that more candidates, and the parties, are so slow off the mark.

There’s been indications that this year could be Vision’s year to shine: it will be interesting to see if the sign imbalance continues, especially in my west side neighbourhood, an NPA stronghold.

Intermixed with this is a by-election to replace Gregor Robertson in Vancouver-Fairview, where he had been the MLA prior to stepping down to run for mayor. Some of those signs were actually up prior to the Federal vote. The governing party in BC has always styled itself as the “BC Liberals” to distinguish itself from the Federal ones; this time around the provincial NDP candidates are also styling themselves as “BC NDP”. A smart move, I think, given that the by-election has to contend with the Federal vote and the municipal one, and one I expect to see carry over into next year’s general election.

As for the content of the municipal race, I find myself in a bit of a pickle. I like to see reasonable alternations of power, and in addition there are good reasons in the Vision platform for me to vote for Vision to control the civic apparatus next session. (I also like a council and boards with multiple voices on them, and thus intend to support candidates from all the parties.) But I have also always liked Peter Ladner (the NPA mayoral candidate, and the man who managed to wrest the nomination away from Sam Sullivan, the current mayor). We may have party politics in Vancouver, but the vote (at least for me) is anything but reflexive, and I suspect I will be weighing the options right up until I walk into the polling station in mid-November.

In any event, it does wash the taste of our recent Seinfeldian Federal exercise out of my mouth.

Hundreds of Thousands Too Far, Mr. Premier

Summer drifts lazily by — as it should. Alas, for those obsessed with every nervous twitch, “um” and twitter of the chattering class and their political enablers, summer has led to a flurry of articles and interviews, and, in the blogging community, charges and counter-charges.

Ah, well. I had hoped to be able to keep relaxing. Unfortunately, Gordon Campbell, the legend-in-his-own-mind Premier of British Columbia, has taken me from my reading of philosophy to react to his latest act against the people of this province.

I refer, of course, to the massive pay hikes given to the cadre of Deputy Ministers and Assistant Deputy Ministers in the BC civil service.

If this had been the only one, I would almost assuredly not be upset. I am aware that these pay increments come but sporadically, and therefore must come as a high percentage increase when they do. I’m also aware that, despite the public’s general impression of civil service work as a realm where two newspapers must be provided so that “there’s something left to do after lunch”, the reality is that a Government Department is a very large enterprise indeed, often with far more “lines of operation” than any sane operating company would take on. These are complex jobs: paying for the demanded skills and talent is appropriate.

Alas, two massive increases in two years is just not on.

Here’s the issue: the skills required to succeed in public sector executive management — including making the Department taut, good at execution, and good at policy anticipation — are quite different in nature from those in being a private sector enterprise executive. (Crown Corporations, of course, offer a blend of the two: a simultaneous need to master both sets of talents. Good luck with that: it’s a rare person indeed who can move between public and private thinking on a minute-by-minute basis and be good at both.) So, despite all the rhetoric about “attracting the best from the private sector” and “making sure our deputies and assistant deputies are not poached” there really is very little movement.

Indeed, the movement is far more likely to be between Departments in the same province than to another province. It’s also — to be clear — not been an issue here in BC. There’s been little movement out of the top echelons of the BC civil service of late.

No, this is all about paying off the cronies, rewarding the sickeningly supplicant, and leading, in turn, to yet another round of escalation in salaries of city managers, and between provinces “competing” with one another, and in competition with the equivalent “CEOs” of Crown agencies, than it is about stemming a tide of resignations.

Let’s start with the obvious: few, if any, of these public sector executives are hired by the private sector. The fact that, in BC, it’s David Emerson who is constantly cited as a deputy minister who landed a CEOship of a publicly-traded company overlooks two points: one, he’d been a CEO before going into the civil service, and two, that was quite a long while ago — it’s certainly the path less followed since.

Ah, some might say, but we have to reward these people for the complexity of their jobs. We expect a lot from them. I suppose this is yet another “pay equity” argument of some sort.

Well, riddle me this, then. Gordon Campbell’s deputy minister just got a $105,000 per year raise (retroactive to August 1) to $349,000 yearly. What is she doing today that she wasn’t doing on July 31 for $244,000? In other words, where’s the value to the BC taxpayer?

You see, if there is value to me as a taxpayer — perhaps this is the price to be paid to shave a thousand million from the provincial budget and lower our tax rates, and to slash the size of the bureaucracy and the impact it has on us — then I am quite prepared to pay $349,000 to the person who can weave such magic. You’ll pardon me, I presume, however, for not believing it’s happening here, since (after all) it didn’t happen when her pay was raised to $244,000 last year.

Then there was the timing of this announcement. Friday afternoon last week, as the Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies were on. Talk about “burying the lead”. Compliantly, of course, the local press has done precisely that, since they seem to follow the local mantra of “we can’t let the NDP back in”.

In discussing this over coffee this morning my fellow sipper said “Oh, belt up, Bruce, you just don’t get how the system works.” Well, yes, actually, I do. Far too many people in this province are determined to vote for a cardboard cutout of a politician with a BC Liberal slogan plastered on the image rather than do what needs to be done with such effrontery: boot the bahstids out.

Of course, as I sat down to write this, it’s not as though our Opposition Leader, Carole James, has promised to roll these back and put an end to this kind of sucking at the public teat, either.

If you’re like me, and you expect a parsimonious approach to tax dollars (and their use to build infrastructure for the future), Gordon Campbell and his BC Liberals are the last choice come May, 2009. There may not be a reasonable choice to put in in their place: flaws are everywhere. But after seven years of Campbell I know one thing: he’s the same kind of spend-thrift, “papa knows best” Liberal that I detest Federally.

Boot him out. It’s how we get to say “you went too far”.

ADDENDUM: Today on CKNW “Mr. Premier” remains resolutely unrepentant. “Out of touch” doesn’t begin to cover it. As far as our BC Government is concerned, we can get over it. Such hubris deserves the response of nemesis. It will be interesting to see if enough BC citizens will get over their fear that there’s “no choice but Gordon” by next year.