City council nomination hopeful Vaune Adams-Kolber believes that Vision Vancouver’s membership policies are more “inclusive of the people in the city” than those of the NPA.

Credit: Doug Shanks

Vision Vancouver becomes largest civic party

Vision Vancouver is now the largest civic party in Vancouver, having surpassed a membership count of 16,000 at the end of August. But critics have questioned the legitimacy of the numbers because the process for signing up members — and candidates — seems lax compared to NPA policies. Vision’s $10 membership fees can be paid on a pay-what-you-can basis, and Vision accepts landed immigrants and refugees as members, while the NPA does not. The NPA also prides itself on a stringent screening process that NPA council hopeful and retired banker David Lee describes as “tougher than joining HSBC 20 years ago.”

“On the [Vision] side, there’s no age limit, [and] you could be living anywhere,” Lee says. “It certainly looks good on paper, but are these people really going to help your party?”

Vaune Adams-Kolber contends the opposite is true. As a sales and marketing director and the former director of Simon Fraser University’s non-profit and voluntary programs, she is seeking a city council nomination with Vision Vancouver, which holds its nomination meeting September 20. “From working on Gregor [Robertson]’s mayoral bid and collecting memberships from different people in the city, in some cases what they were able to pay was, I can tell, quite difficult for them,” she says. “What that says is that the party is inclusive of the people in the city, rather than excluding people because they can’t pay the membership fee.”

Adams-Kolber says Vision’s big membership numbers — and, by extension, the huge number of people seeking nomination for municipal positions on the school board, park board, and city council — reflects the party’s strengths at capturing the interest of Vancouverites. “If there are this many people interested in running for the Vision party, it’s because they see something there that is very different than the typical process, which, I think, puts up all kinds of barriers for people to run,” she says.

Terri Evans, an SFU political science and urban geography instructor, says Vision Vancouver’s big-tent approach will win the party voters. “For people who are concerned about the business climate and people who are concerned about homelessness, crime, the increasing gap between the rich and poor in the city, I think Vision has created itself to speak to those causes in a much more dynamic way than the NPA,” she says. “I don’t think the NPA has shown itself to be a party that really cares about the poor, that really works for effective change for the homeless. The business and development and all those white-collar professions are their obvious targets.”

Even so, the high membership numbers — and high number of people vying for candidacy nominations — makes the Vision race complicated and highly competitive, where would-be candidates have scrambled to form alliances and voting blocks in the weeks leading up to the nomination meeting. Vision’s recently announced deal with COPE and the Green Party is still pending ratification at the COPE policy meeting September 14, but reaching the agreement has so far been an emotional and trying process for all sides, and many say it’ll only get worse.

Park board hopeful and West End Residents Association founder Rob Wynen is optimistic about Vision’s big numbers, as he sees them as a healthy sign of a new party, albeit a complicated one. “If I were on the NPA side of things, I’d be extremely worried about that, because I think it sends a lot of signals that people who want to participate in politics want to see [Vision] as the party that makes most sense for the city.”

Fellow park board hopeful Steve Tannock sent an open letter to Vision Vancouver members and candidates last week calling for gender parity in the nomination process, asking nomination-meeting voters to support female candidates. “This is not meant in a patronizing, women-need-men’s help-to-get-elected way,” Tannock wrote in the letter, which urged voters to nominate two non-incumbent women in the nomination process.

The letter met with positive response from a number of female candidates seeking Vision nomination. (The Vision website Vote4Women.org details the issue.) But Evans reads Tannock’s letter as a revealing message that speaks for more than gender. “The idea is that they’re trying to have diversity,” she says. “They want to have candidates that are representing a wider part of the political spectrum. As well, they’re trying to have some sensitivity around ethnicity, around gender. These things, to me, are sensitive matters when parties are in that early stage of formation, like Vision is. I think they’re going to sell themselves as being more representative of the city and its contemporary condition than the NPA will.”