Yep, Mayor Gregor Robertson will seek re-election in the fall.
It’s something he told me a couple of times last year.
He also made it known that, no, he wasn’t interested in running for the leadership of the provincial NDP and, no, he won’t be joining Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals — at least not anytime soon.
Simply put, the guy likes being mayor and he wants a third term in the big chair at city hall.
But nothing like a good ol’ press release sent out last week by his party to confuse some media types into believing Robertson just made up his mind to run again. It’s old news, folks.
In fact, the release came with a headline announcing Robertson was hosting another so-called telephone town hall meeting with his supporters. So, if the intent was to bury the lead, his party people sure did.
And I quote: “I’m running for re-election because we need a mayor with experience in business and government who can take our city to the next level. More than anything, that means getting the Broadway subway built, taking a strong stand against the Kinder Morgan pipeline and continuing our work on homelessness and becoming the greenest city in the world.”
And if that doesn’t excite/anger/unite/bore voters, there’s more:
“There will be a clear choice in November’s election between Vision and the NPA. The NPA simply don’t get the Vancouver of today. They’re against Vancouver’s greenest city plan, against better transit, against new affordable housing. The only thing they’re not against is Kinder Morgan’s massive expansion of oil tankers in our harbour.”
OK, that’s enough rhetoric for now — they’ll be more to come as we get closer to the civic election in November. Plus, the NPA hasn’t named that “game-changer” of a mayoral candidate — former park board commissioner Ian Robertson? Former health minister Margaret MacDiarmid? — to respond to Robertson’s comments.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Robertson’s party still hasn’t officially anointed him as its mayoral candidate.
Prior to the 2011 election, Vision Vancouver held what it called a leadership review. That meant Vision members could vote on whether they wanted Robertson to lead the party. The result was 96.3 per cent of voting members saying hell, yeah, give the guy another shot.
“OK, who are the 3.7 per cent?” Robertson quipped after the results were announced at a party at The Waldorf Hotel back in June 2011.
This time around, the party will hold another leadership vote May 4. A formality, I know, but members will also get a say on whether they want any of the incumbents on council, school board and park board to represent them in November’s vote.
Three weeks later, on May 22, Vision will hold a fundraiser at the Coast Plaza followed by a nomination meeting June 14 to fill out its roster of candidates.
The NPA, meanwhile, is scheduled to hold a fundraiser May 7 at the Vancouver Convention Centre and it still hasn’t said whether it will hold a nomination meeting, which would be unusual for the party.
But if you’re looking for certainty from either of the parties, you can count on them raising and spending more than a million bucks each to get elected. And both parties will tell you they hate having to spend that kind of money and they’re tired of telling the provincial government to bring in spending limits and to ban union and corporate donations.
They’ll also tell you that even though they accept a lot of money from the very people who go to council asking for rezonings and other approvals, that they are not influenced one bit by all that cash.
Shame on you for even thinking that.
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