Parties, Slates, "Independants"

Let's start off with the top organized political slate, well they're nameless so I use the term "Vision North Van" he and Gregor Robertson are old buddies from Carson Graham when Gregor lived in North Vancouver.  They could be called "Mussatto's team" or "Racing with the Mayor" or "The NDP's muncipal team" or something like that.   Perhaps they can't think of a good name that can fit on the ballot if they were legally registered as an Electoral Organization.

Before we hear the usual cries of "we are just a group of like minded candidates", this is a municipal NDP political party.  See bit.ly/svfAg4  for a North Shore News article.  Now it is easy to see the NDP orientation when you read of most Council decisions and Councillor Keating is obviously a card carrying NDPer but Mayor Mussatto?  It's not that he hides it but just doesn't portray himself that way except for his votes on Council.  Most know but I still run into people who think he is fully independent and not an arm of the NDP like former NDP MLA Gregor.  Here's the Mayor's Vision in a leaflet from the 2008 election.  Thousands of union dollars were spent on like ads in both North Shore newspapers.

Former Councillor Schechter moved to Burnaby to run for the NDP nomination after leaving Council. 2011 candidate Juliana Buitenhuis ran for the NDP in West Van prior to her Council run here.  It is clear that the "Mussatto slate" is a formal group of NDPers.  A former candidate naively asked me how do you get on the Mayor's slate?  I told him to join the NDP and work on Craig Keating's provincial NDP campaign.  As a member of the team that helped reelect Naomi, of course that was not an option for him.

Why the facade?  Well, the political class in North Vancouver believe that the voters will electorally punish those who ran in an electoral organization. Not even when the parties or slates are not arms of a federal or provincial party. Bill Bell, a former Councillor and NDPer wrote on my Facebook wall that the voters won't vote for a party or formal slate but never in the history of North Van has there been a legally registered party like Richmond First or Surrey First or the NPA or COPE or even Vision Vancouver. I think the voters want a honest straightforward, name on the ballot, type party rather than the smoke and mirrors tactics the other use to mask their intent from the voters.

In the Opposition role to Mussatto's minority government is Voices. There is a group of candidates (some Councillors) that Voices runs as their core slate who organize prior to the election and those they endorse out their list.  Voices claims to have formed in March of 2012 when some appeared in a delegation to Council by this name. Of course, mostly the same people registered as "third party advertising group" published an ad on November 2011, the day prior to the elections. http://bit.ly/IfFaHS  Does anyone think that Voices is not Independent Voices with a word dropped from the name? Of course, this disclosure was made more than two months after voting.

Here is the illegal ad they published in the North Shore News on 14 Nov 2008.

And here is the Voices AD from published in the North Shore News on 18 Nov 2011. This is the one they filed the spending declaration that the Election Law requires.

Does anyone believe Voices representatives who say they never existed before the spring of 2012?  Or that this group an organized group of people who try to secretly influence the elections?

In 2012, they got in a public tussle with supporters of the Onni 1308 Lonsdale project.  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=565851072 and some "foodies" in Surrey,  http://wflbc.com/2012/12/11/north-vancouver-nimbys-playing-politics-and-taking-control/. Their "modus operandi" was the same in 2008. They deny that Voices didn't exist before March 2012 but it is clear the same group of people, taking the same actions.

For the election of 2008, Voices did an ad, the day before the 2008 election with mostly the same names of endorsers/donors as 3 years later. It is quite clear that this ad originated from the same group of people of the "Independant Voices" ad of 2011. The ad was mostly the same but in 2008 they never filed a legal required declaration as the one above and they should have been charged for violating the election law.  Neither did any of the money donated for an election ad was included on the declarations of any of the candidates endorsed by in this ad.

 The roots of Voices are clearly in the Community Associations of the pre-2005 period when the "Coalition of Community Associations" was born.  It was publicly shown as an umbrella group of the various Community Associations, a good method of organizing and strengthening these associations which which often dominated by a small group of people with no  formal elections.

The Community Associations were meant to be non-partisan organizations since it has to represent all residents in an area. Strictly, non-partisan means separate from established and federal or provincial parties.  But although the Mayor's slate is really an arm of the NDP, the community associations have developed as anti Mussatto organizations but also with a strong NDP presence.  I like to think of them as NDPers who are anti-development as opposed to Mussatto's NDPers who are pro-development.

The non-partisan aspect became a tool for people within the community associations to "gatekeep".   They were intent on running and wanted the titles  provided by the community associations but needed to suppress the attraction or development of any competition to their personal electoral runs.  The Community Associations suffered from the actions of these gatekeepers.  New associations formed around the electoral needs of new candidates to use community concern such as the Low Level Road issue to get themselves media attention.

In the above Coalition leaflet from you can see many of the names of those who have run and some elected in 2005, 2008 and 2011 and those from the endorsement ads paid for by Voices and prior incarnations of Voices which was the electoral arm of the community associations.  With many of the serious actives focused on Voices as their electoral organization and the take over of Council, the actual community associations withered.

In 2011, the Council passed recommendation #17 from the Task Force on Civic Engagement which was designed to help residents become active in the community associations and make them more responsive to the community as a whole rather than just a few.

Reach Out To Community Associations

 #17: That the City adopt a policy to formally recognize community associations that 

meet established criteria that include open membership within a defined geographical area with non-overlapping boundaries with other similar 

associations, the holding of advertised general meetings and the election of officers. The policy should have provisions for these formally recognized associations to receive support from the City that could include: 

a) Provide a listing of Recognized Community Associations on the City web site, links to their web pages and information about their general 

meetings; 

b) Provide meeting space in City facilities; and 

c) Continue to provide community associations with notices of developments 

in their geographic area, as well as notices of meetings on City-wide issues.

Unfortunately, the community associations had entropied too much and the gatekeepers prevented renewal. If you do a google search as would a new resident would, do you even find them? Do any have a web page? The Grand Blvd being the strongest and having a core of residential areas which is the most active is the strongest.  The Lonsdale Citizens Association covers the largest part of the city's population is still going on.  The rest don't really have an association aside from a couple of people who use titles.

Next up, the long awaited 2014 election preview!