bCbusinEss.Ca OCtObER 2018 BCBusiness 23
another uncharacteristically sweltering
day in Vancouver, one of many in a scorch-
ing summer around the globe. The sky is a grey haze
of smoke from Richmond's bog re. People are lined
up at Earnest Ice Cream on Fraser Street for some-
thing to cool their stinging throats.
But across the street, about 100 non–ice-cream
eaters have chosen to spend the afternoon at
the Polish Community Centre, supporting yet
another new Vancouver political party and its crop
of newbie candidates for the October 20 munici-
pal elections. Among them: Glynnis Chan, a
Chinatown travel agency operator who wants to
improve tourism to Vancouver; and Jaspreet Virdi,
a pharmacy proprietor in the city's South Asian
epicentre who calls for a support program for small
businesses. Virdi makes another point, one that's
central to his party: "We have a huge housing cri-
sis, and if we continue to do things the same way,
nothing will change."
They're all part of the new team for Yes Vancou-
ver, whose mayoral candidate is Hector Bremner.
That would be the former BC Liberal Party sta"er
and current vice-president of a public relations/
lobbying rm who left the Non-Partisan Associa-
tion
(NPA) after being told he couldn't be its mayoral
candidate, presumably because of connections to
real estate developers, despite having been elected
as the party's councillor only a few months earlier.
This is a guy no one had heard of a year ago but who
is hoping to do what Gregor Robertson did a decade
back—break the city's alternation between right and
left and come up the middle.
"Our city is broken, our city is broken," Bremner
intones, his face sombre as he closes o" the after
-
noon's speeches by stressing the need to build more
housing and stop deferring to residents who block
it by talking about "character and soul and design."
Bremner's odds of winning appear low: he was
showing up with a dismal 5 percent of voter support
in polls during the summer, and council candidates
he'd recruited to run wi
th him as an NPAer had bailed.
But thanks to voters' fatigue with the usual politics and
parties, the chances of him and a party like Yes Vancou-
ver having some success are still higher than at any time
in the past half-century.
In this month's civic elections, Vancouver voters must
choose from a bewildering number of parties and mayoral
candidates. Will public anger over the housing crisis tip the
balance of power away from the city's traditional rulers?
b y F R A N C E S B U L A
It's
decision
