It’s election day, again
Today is the day that municipal governments hold their elections in BC.
Across BC general elections are held every three years for mayors, councillors, regional district electoral area directors, school board trustees and Islands Trust trustees (municipalelections.com)
In Vancouver, we have to vote for a mayor, 10 city councillors, 7 park commissioners and 9 school board trustees. That’s 27 people I need to vote for! Plus there are other questions about “whether to allow the City to borrow money for major construction projects (for example, re-build certain community centres, or extensive re-construction of water or sewer lines)” (City of Vancouver).
To be honest, it’s election day and I’ve only just now read1 through the candidate profiles. The sheer number of candidates to consider has seemed overwhelming to even think about up until now – and I know that just reading the 150 words or less candidate bios isn’t really sufficient to make a truly informed vote but, given that the election is today, I think it’s the best I’m going to be able to do. It helps that I’m a bit familiar with the major parties, but of course this means that the independent candidates are getting the short end of the stick.
For my non-Vancouver readers, the major parties in Vancouver politics are:
- Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE)
- Vision Vancouver
- the inexplicably named Non-Partisan Association
I mean, given that “partisan” means “of, pertaining to, or characteristic of partisans; partial to a specific party, person, etc.” (dictionary.com), doesn’t this mean that the Non-Partisan Association are the “Party that is not partial to itself”?
For school trustees, Airdrie just twittered a recommendation that people check out who their local teachers associations are endorsing and, as it turns out, both the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers’ Association and the Vancouver Secondary Teachers’ Association support the Vision and COPE candidates, which was in keeping what I was planning to do after pursuing those short candidate bios, so that makes me feel a bit better about my lackadaisical approach to this.
Darren also posted about his “near-complete apathy” towards local politics and now, in the spirit of the theme of phoning-it-in-edness of this posting, I’m going to totally steal his question: “Who are you voting for, wherever you live (assuming, you know, that you live in BC)?”
1OK, skimmed.
Image credit: Photo by Theresa Thompson on Flickr with a Creative Commons license.
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As I mentioned on Twitter, VSTA did not endorse all COPE/Vision school board trustee candidates… they didn’t list Gregson, a VV candidate. I believe she’s the pro-gun one.
I voted all COPE/Vision/Green as the good progressives were supposed to. I really hate voting Vision, though (aside from Gregor, who seems cool) because they are responsible for the NPA’s win 3 years ago (and are essentially the COPE-Lite people who are more pro-business). Because the left-wing parties in BC aren’t pro-business enough, we need a more centrist (read: right-leaning) municipal party! *rolls eyes*
And I hate voting for Tim Stevenson because the man’s unpleasant… but I didn’t want to be responsible for the NPA getting any council seats that Stevenson could otherwise get, so I held my nose and voted for him because (as Brett put it), at the end of the day, his politics are still more closely aligned to mine than any of the freaky neoliberal, BC “Liberal”-in-training NPA nutjobs.
It would be so cool if COPE/Vision ends up controlling all three arenas and the mayoralty.
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