November 25, 2009 - 9:32 am |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
The financial bridges to Toronto's City Hall will be dramatically changed if City Council accepts the recommendations handed to them yesterday.
If you read Charlie Smith of the Georgia Straight or SFU Professor Kennedy Stewart with kind of regularity, you would think that the only type of electoral reform to consider for civic politics comes in the form of wards.
But as pointed out in Smith’s above-linked article, Vision is looking at other means of changing the parameters of voting in the City of Vancouver:
“Jang said the Vision caucus’s priority in electoral reform is to come up with a “comprehensive package” that covers issues like campaign finance and disclosure rules.”
If that is the case, Jang et al. should look east to the City of Toronto, where corporate and union donations are on the verge of being banned from civic elections.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 30, 2009 - 9:25 am |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
A new approach that has middled Vancouver's political landscape is poised to dominate City Hall for years to come - if handled correctly, of course.
I am off to a string of meetings, so an abbreviated post this morning is what is being offered.
I want to reference some interesting reads to frame a future post:
First, check out the first link from this Google search – it is Kennedy Stewart’s interesting take on the COPE reign at City Hall entitled “The “COPE Interlude”: The (Predictable) Rise & Fall of Vancouver’s Radical Civic Left 2002-2005.” It provides a great analysis of why COPE and power don’t go so well together:
“The 2002 move to the centre brought electoral success, but centrist policy which infuriated COPE Classic sub-leaders to the point where they dismantled their party infrastructure and drove out their popular leader.”
On the other end of the spectrum is the NPA, which had become a political lazy and arrogant organization ruled by a sense of entitlement. Charlie Smith from the Georgia Straight provided a fantastic post-analysis of what the major points for the NPA’s overwhelming defeat were:
“The NPA has always operated on the premise that if it can just recruit enough good candidates and raise enough money, it can maintain control over the city.
Policies have never been an NPA strength. It preferred letting the bureaucrats run the show. That didn’t matter very much when the left was divided, had no traction in the first-generation Chinese immigrant community, and couldn’t raise any money.”
I will soon be delving into the appeal of the Vision Vancouver party (a commentary that might or might not show up later today), not from a partisan point of view, but rather from a pragmatic analysis of retail politics. Also check back over the coming days for a larger piece that I have written for a major daily newspaper on this exact topic.
