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Dan Fumano: Vancouver and Surrey face long ballots, crowded fields

Analysis: "Now with parties popping up like mushrooms, it's much more difficult to figure out what they're all about," says University of the Fraser Valley prof Hamish Telford.

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Residents of B.C.’s two biggest cities will have no shortage of options when they enter the voting booth next month, but can too much choice actually create challenges for voters?

In most past Vancouver elections, there were typically no more than two or three parties with a shot at getting a councillor elected, and generally just two main mayoral contenders.

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But in 2018, Vancouver elected council members representing four parties, plus an independent mayor. Fast forward to today, all 11 members of that council are running in this year’s election, but the parties have splintered further, and those council members now represent seven different parties.

The parties that saw councillors elected in 2018 are running more candidates this year: the NPA, Greens, COPE and OneCity. In addition, four councillors elected with the NPA in 2018 have quit the party to run with upstart organizations: three councillors with ABC Vancouver, and Coun. Colleen Hardwick as TEAM’s mayoral candidate.

Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart in council chambers during the debate over the Broadway plan, at Vancouver city hall on May 18, 2022.
Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart in council chambers during the debate over the Broadway plan, at Vancouver city hall on May 18, 2022. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

Mayor Kennedy Stewart, elected in 2018 as Vancouver’s first mayor in a generation with no civic party affiliation, has now launched his own party, Forward Vancouver, with six council candidates.

Vision Vancouver emerged in 2005, as an offshoot of COPE, and is running candidates again, as are other new parties Progress Vancouver and VOTE Socialist.

It can be a bit overwhelming for voters. Trying to follow along in an all-candidates’ meeting with nine candidates from nine parties can be more difficult than absorbing a debate with three candidates.

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“When we had that stable two-party system for a long time with the NPA and COPE, like it or not, you know where they stood: COPE was on the left and the NPA was on the right, and it was relatively easy for people to make sense of,” said Hamish Telford, a political scientist at the University of the Fraser Valley.

“But now with parties popping up like mushrooms, it’s much more difficult to figure out what they’re all about.”

Vancouver’s 2018 election had a record ballot length, and a voter turnout of only 40 per cent, a significant drop from 2014. In the city’s postelection surveys and workshops, the number of candidates was given as one of respondents’ top reasons for not voting.

Vancouver’s 2022 ballot will have 137 candidates between mayor, council, park and school board, which is not quite as many as 2018, but still a longer ballot than previous years, and certainly an unusually high number of viable parties.

Mayor Doug McCallum at Surrey City Hall on April 25, 2022.
Mayor Doug McCallum at Surrey City Hall on April 25, 2022. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

Surrey’s 2018 mayoral contest was mainly a three-way race between two city councillors and former mayor Doug McCallum, who won and is seeking re-election with the Safe Surrey Coalition. This time, he faces significant challengers representing no fewer than four other parties, three of which only popped up since the last election. These are not just fringe parties, but are led by established, well-known politicians in the Surrey area.

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That vote-splitting should help the incumbent McCallum, said Gerry Baier, an associate professor of political science at the University of B.C. If any one of those four challengers were to take on McCallum alone, the mayor would have a much harder time getting re-elected, Baier said, but instead, “they’re just splitting the anti-McCallum vote.”

Most big cities in Canada have a ward system, which in some ways makes things easier, said Stewart Prest, a political scientist at Quest University. In such a system, individual voters don’t need to to learn a lot about every council candidate, but instead just focus on who’s running in their local ward, or district.

However, the ward system has its own drawbacks, Prest said, because politicians have “a much narrower set of interests you are specifically representing. … So in a ward system, you tend to have local elites competing to represent local interests without having any kind of larger sense of what the city as a whole needs.”

“We may want to spend a little time after this election talking about what a good electoral system for the city would be,” Prest said. “When the dust settles, it’s time to have a larger conversation.”

dfumano@postmedia.com

twitter.com/fumano

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