Surrey mayoral candidates, incumbent Doug McCallum, second right, Sukh Dhaliwal, back left, Brenda Locke, second left, and Jinny Sims, right, wait for the start of a candidates meeting in Surrey, B.C., on Sept. 26.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Jason Kurtz considers himself a reasonably well-informed, politically aware Vancouverite. And he wants to have a say in how the city is run by voting for good council candidates.
But the fortysomething property manager, who lives in the northeast Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood, is baffled. By Oct. 15, the final day for voting, he must decide on one candidate among 15 for mayor, and select 10 councillors from a list of 60 candidates running under 10 different party banners. If he has the dedication, he can also choose seven park-board candidates from a list of 32 and nine school trustees from a ballot of 31.
“I’ve never spent more time and energy on following municipal politics as during the lead-up to this election and it still confusing as heck to me. It is hard to have a strategy,” Mr. Kurtz said on Twitter.
Confused Vancouver voters have been trying to navigate an increasingly Byzantine election and figure out what kind of council they want. Their choices are complicated, experienced political campaigners say, because of how both the right and the left have fractured. The right is trying to cope with too many mayoral candidates. The left is struggling because the current mayor, Kennedy Stewart, created an additional party on top of the five existing ones on the centre and centre-left.
“Numerically, they’re absolutely splitting each other’s vote,” said Tristan Markle, a campaign organizer with the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) who is going into his fourth election with the 54-year-old left-wing party.
There are 23 candidates representing six parties clearly on the centre-left to far left: Mayor Stewart’s recently assembled Forward Together party, the Green Party, OneCity, Vision Vancouver, COPE and Democratic Socialists of Vancouver. As well, the six candidates from the Progress Vancouver slate headed by Mark Marissen might attract a few gung-ho pro-housing voters.
On the right are 19 candidates, represented by Ken Sim’s ABC Vancouver, current city councillor Colleen Hardwick’s TEAM for a Livable Vancouver and the once-dominant Non-Partisan Association.
Mr. Stewart won the mayor’s chair in the last election by beating Mr. Sim by only 957 votes in a three-way race at the top.
In previous elections, left-of-centre parties worked together to ensure only 10 candidates representing that end of the spectrum were on the ballot – one for each seat. Campaign observers say Mr. Stewart’s decision to form his Forward Together party at the last minute and put forward a six-person slate of council candidates has upended the traditional formula.
Kit Sauder, former campaign manager for ABC, said Mr. Stewart’s party has taken away some of the momentum that OneCity, with four council candidates, had been building.
OneCity, which includes current councillor Christine Boyle but is not running a candidate for mayor, had been working hard to pull in the traditional left base: the renter voters in the West End and north of Kingsway.
Mr. Sauder said he originally thought the election would distill down to ABC on the right and OneCity representing the new left in Vancouver civic politics. He still thinks that party is the strongest contender on the left. “OneCity has the best ground game and lots of volunteers. It has the vote coherence that none of the other parties on the left have.”
A mix of Vision and COPE candidates could have rounded out council, he said.
Now that strategy is in doubt, leaving left-of-centre voters floundering.
First, they must decide whether to vote for a defined slate so that Vancouver doesn’t have another four years of roulette-wheel-style decisions, Mr. Sauder said. In the last council, because no party had a majority, it was never clear which way council would go.
But voters on the left continue to prefer supporting a buffet-style mix from various parties, Mr. Markle said, in the hope that will force some useful compromises and negotiations. Wanting to avoid a repeat of the recent decade of Vision Vancouver reign, they are also not enthusiastic about supporting what they see as a developer-backed party with a majority.
For voters on the centre-right to right, the question is whether to support Mr. Sim or stick with mayoral choices that are less likely to win but offer the satisfaction of sending a message about what they really want.
The TEAM for a Livable Vancouver party, including Ms. Hardwick, is almost exclusively focused on protecting existing neighbourhoods from what it sees as rampant development. The once-dominant right-wing party, the Non-Partisan Association, with candidate Fred Harding, is running on an aggressive law-and-order message. (His party position lost some appeal Wednesday when the Vancouver Police Union endorsed Mr. Sim and his slate.)
One other option for those voters is to mix-and-match candidates with similar views, even if they appear on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Current left-wing COPE councillor Jean Swanson has voted against many of the same housing proposals as Ms. Hardwick.
On the left-green-progressive side, there is only one real mayoral option: Mr. Stewart. Some voters canvassed by The Globe said they would hold their nose and vote for him in an effort to block Mr. Sim and Ms. Hardwick from gaining a majority foothold on council.
Others say they won’t vote for a mayoral candidate at all, but will support a progressive slate.
In the crowded, confusing environment, campaign veterans say Mr. Stewart and Mr. Sim will be doing everything they can from now until Oct. 15 to concentrate their vote.
“I would take nothing for granted at this point,” Mr. Markle said.