John Jensen

North Vancouver School District Land Disposition – Likely District Priorities – File: 1150-03-11 Report: Director, Community Development, October 8, 2008 PURSUANT to the report of the Director, Community Development, dated October 8, 2008, entitled “North Vancouver School District Land Disposition – Likely School District Priorities”: THAT staff be requested to work with North Vancouver School District staff with regards to surplus real estate and report back as necessary; AND THAT the report of the Director, Community Development, dated October 8, 2008, entitled “North Vancouver School District Land Disposition – Likely School District Priorities” remain in camera.

Until the campaign disclosure statements come up I don't know how much of an issue this is, although I will say that the on the whole the campaign material produced by the list of CUPE-supported candidates was far more numerous and glossy than those provided by other candidates.

However, when googling I came across this statement from CUPE's Saskatchewan branch, which reveals that some in the organization would prefer that it not donate at all to political campaigns.

“It’s been suggested in the legislature that neither corporations nor unions should be allowed to financially prop up the candidate of their choice,” said CUPE Saskatchewan president Tom Graham. “The members of our union whole-heartedly agree, and are calling on the Government of Saskatchewan to modernize the province’s donation policy, and ensure that no elected officials owe anybody any favours.”

That in itself would have a vicious circle effect -- more mortgage defaults --> more financial institution pain --> more media coverage --> more defaults, and so on.

One industry watcher opines that there will be a mini-gold rush to get in on some of these programs:

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Schiff says. "People are going to feel like complete morons if they don't participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn't afford."

The distribution of the results were fairly uniform across all the polling stations, so it's important to not take this too seriously, but it is fun to see revealed graphically something that would take more time to glean from manually reviewing all the numbers.

The better a candidate did in a polling station, the closer his or her bubble is placed to that of the polling station. You can see that Bookham and Keating, as the largest vote-getters, are firmly placed in the middle, with Bookham in a more central position. Councillors Keating and Trentadue got more of their support from voters voting at Carson Graham High School and at Holy Trinity Church, while Fearnley and Clark did more strongly at North Shore Neighbourhood House and at St. John's Church.

Again, without reading too much into this, it seems that Councillor Keating is a bit stronger at polling stations in the northern half of the City while the other councillors are either more distributed or draw a little more support in the south.

Like most citizens, I've only paid partial attention to local politics for most of my life, but now that I have a bit more time I'm focusing quite closely.  Thus far I have not been that impressed.  Local candidates mostly campaign on the basis of their individual attributes ("I'm a good person who likes the community, vote for me!"), with only very opaque or vague references to actual policies. Even then those policy statements are usually standard bromides like "ensure that growth is linked to social and economic development" or promising to "listen to what the whole community has to say and to find positive solutions that work for everybody".  I found it difficult, when reviewing the material of any of the candidates, to find anything that anyone could disagree with.

So, as I usually do, I turned to the web for more information.  I soon came to northvancouverpolitics.com, a blog run by North Vancouver's Barry Forward.  There I found a meeting place for the North Shore political subculture, where various authors make posts that largely are about drawing attention to local issues and provoking discussion in the comments.  From those that I have read, Barry and the other posters usally make posts that are informative, and rarely argumentative.

However, discussion and argument certainly does occur --  in the comments.  Most of the comments are anonymous, many are absolutely vicious, and even most of the ones that claim to be signed do not make use of the various possible authentication tools that are out there (Blogger/Google login, OpenID, etc).  Like many such discussion boards among many communities across the web, they are arenas where, I suspect, a relatively few number of people release their inner vindictive, angry ids.  This does not appear to be Barry's fault, as he clearly has tried to raise the standards of the debate and identification, but it is clear that a majority of the citizenry visiting the site do not yet, for whatever reason, feel confident enough to step up to it.

While the site was titillating and interesting to visit, it really didn't help that much in making a voting decision.  If I were to believe what was posted there among the thousands of one-liners, all the candidates were either crooks, frauds, failures, or puppets.

So I attended the last scheduled City of North Vancouver All-Candidates meeting, which was interesting.  Candidates' introductory remarks all followed the same pattern of an initital personal resume, followed by some high-level motherhood statements about their affection for and service for to the community and the need for solid representation on the council.

During the individual questions, however, positions on specific issues came to the fore, such as council's recent about-face on approval for a higher-than-standard residential tower in exchange for some developer-financed market housing.  From that discussion there seemed to be three rough factions among the audience and the council candidates.

1. Affordable housing is the highest priority.
   
2. Slowing densification and development is the highest priority.
3. Affordable housing is a high priority, but not at the cost of a hastily-assembled plan that in essence transfers a lot of money to 12 individual families.

We won't know until the election results come in, but it seems to me that the voters of North Vancouver want quiet, incremental changes in their community and do not feel a sense of urgency for either development or additional city-funded affordable housing.  To some degree both points are moot because it is clear that the residential construction boom is over, so there won't be any more development, and the current inventory is large enough that residential rents should decrease as well.