During a break in the weather Monday afternoon, Vision Vancouver Coun. Raymond Louie pulled an election campaign sign from the trunk of his car in the city halls parking lot and handed it to a supporter. It has begunat least this phase of it.
But now all three partiesVision, the NPA and COPEhave their campaign headquarters set up and lawn signs started appearing at the beginning of the week.
Three blocks from city hall, upstairs from a Dollar Store, Mayor Gregor Robertsons chief of staff, Mike Magee, nursed a coffee next to a chest-high stack of four-by-eight election signs. Visions campaign headquarters is made up of a series of small offices, mostly populated with folks working on computers, talking on phones, or both.
Magee and Robertsons communications guy Kevin Quinlan are officially on leave without pay. Visions brain trust will also include pollster Bob Penner, lefty communications heavy Marcella Munro and Vision senior staffer Ian Baillie. Joel Solomon, green philanthropist and significant Robertson backer, will be expected to keep the money coming; he hosts a fundraiser Oct. 19. Vision has been canvassing for support since August using paid team leaders and volunteer door knockers. They are already running radio ads in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Magee says they would like to have a budget of $2 million, which is not exactly chicken feed. Theyre not there yet. Aside from the Solomon fundraiser, there was another planned for the Chinese community on Oct. 5. Their major fundraiser will be Nov. 2.
Ten blocks to the east and in much more modest digs youll find Visions poor cousin COPE. They are still getting over the fact that their nomination meeting knocked out Coun. David Cadman and a near sure thing for a council seat and landed them with a pile of trouble in the person of Tim Louis.
They have a budget that is paltry by todays standards$300,000.
Yet they soldier on with a cast of mostly young volunteers. But they hope to ride to victory on Visions coat tails. And Vision hopes to ride on a carefully packaged Robertson wave.
If you ask Magee what he wants the ballot question to be, what he wants people to be thinking about as they head in to vote, hell tell you it is all about leadership and whether the city is on the right track with its current priorities.
That is not the question NPA campaign manager Norman Stowe wants people to be thinking about. Just look at the digital clock next to the front door of their campaign headquarters in the underground mall near the Granville SkyTrain Station. It is ticking off dollars spent by the city at $32.66 every second and asking you to ponder this: Are you getting your moneys worth?
And speaking of money, the campaign offices are free thanks to NPA mayoral candidate Suzanne Antons buddy and wealthy developer Rob MacDonald. Hes also the finance chair of the NPA campaign. Stowe denies the NPA moved their fundraiser from Sept. 27 to Nov. 3 because they couldnt sell tickets. Regardless, money will be no object. They may not be able to get bums in seats but they will definitely get bucks in bank: more than two million bucks.
And they are already spending even though their major roll out is not until Oct. 17. They were first up with radio ads. And then there are the incessant computer-generated calls my Facebook friends have been kvetching about.
Stowe makes no apologies. This is not rocket science, he says. If all the calls, the dinners, the speeches, the banners, the events, the coffee parties arent working on identifying your supporters they really dont have any value. Thats the key.
And while all the parties girding their loins for what is now unfolding may disagree on any number of things, theyll agree on that.
