With Vancouver’s civic election behind us, it’s a good time to sift through the rubble, dust off our leather pants and evaluate the lay of the land. Here are a few things we’ve learned:
• $4.3 million (the combined amount of money spent by Vision and the NPA) is what it costs to elect the same mayor and nine out of 10 of the same city councillors. Vision loses strong silent type Tony Tang and the NPA gains former park board commissioner and Sarah Blyth frenemy Melissa De Genova. It’s kind of like Ground Hog Day but with an absence of humour.
• The percentage of eligible voters who managed to stop shopping or tweeting pictures of their meals for a few minutes and vote improved considerably from 2011’s embarrassing turnout of 34 per cent. But before we go patting ourselves on the back for having the highest voter turnout in 10 years, let’s acknowledge that 44 per cent voter turnout is still pretty shameful. To put it in perspective, even with more than 187,000 ballots cast for Saturday’s election, more people attended the B.C. Lions’ nine home games this season than voted for the people running this city. And the B.C. Lions are terrible.
• NPA’s failed mayoral candidate Kirk LaPointe had some interesting words for his former co-workers at the Vancouver Sun. In his concession speech, the Sun’s former managing editor praised his campaign team with this little bon mot: “First of all let’s start by congratulating the magnificent NPA team… if I had a newsroom like that I would have stayed in journalism a long time.” Ouch. It’s not like LaPointe worked at the Province. We kid, we kid. Sort of.
• With the NPA winning four of the seven seats on park board it’s likely they’ll keep their campaign promise of repealing a July decision by the Vision dominated board to ban the breeding of whales and dolphins at the Vancouver Aquarium. So expect to see a lot of whale on whale action over the next year. Think Caligula but with horny belugas.
• Vision councillor Kerry Jang is basically the Joe Biden of city hall. The dude drives a Miata, builds model boats in his basement and likes wearing cream coloured suits. And there’s a great photo of him above on election night, grinning and pointing to someone in the audience. We’re placing bets on how long it takes Jang to say that being a councillor is a bitch.
