John Jensen

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.