Bill Bennett heads up Municipal Election Task Force

I'm stealing from Paying Attention again. At the Union of British Columbia Municipalities convention this summer Gordon Campbell announced the formation of a task force examining civic election rules/laws. We currently have no restrictions on election spending, transparency, and so on. In a speech that offered little to anyone* and was largely bereft of substance, GC announced this task force as if it was a major policy move or something. Okay.

The other day the government announced the formation of the task force. Liberal MLA Bill Bennett (he of questionable judgment at the best of times) will co-chair with Harry Nyce, president of the UBCM. They are joined by two more Liberal MLAs, Donna Barnett from Cariboo-Chilcotin and Douglas Horne, Coquitlam-Burke Mountain, and Surrey Councillor Barbara Steele and Quesnel Mayor Mary Sjostrom, both vice-presidents at the UBCM.

Here is Paul Willcocks' take on it:

"The task force will have six members - three from the UBCM and three MLAs. All Liberals. No public interest representatives. No NDP MLAs, or independent Vicki Huntington. The fix appears to be in. Campbell has rejected any limits on corporate and union donations to provincial parties. Any recommendations on limits for municipal donations would be embarassing. Stacking the committee reduces the risk."

I'll have to take his word that the three UBCM officials are Liberals (his word is pretty solid, kids). This is ridiculous. No experienced experts from Elections BC or Elections Canada? No policy wonk professors? Nope, instead we get Bill Bennett. Our choice. He's one of us. What?

Thinly veiled racism? "You want someone who pays taxes and is concerned about how that money is spent."

Co-chair Bill Bennett is a horrible choice, given his chequered past (see link above). His campaign this spring was rocked by controversy, including the publication of the above ad, which pretty clearly asks East Kootenay residents to vote for him because he's white (his NDP opponent, Troy Sebastian, is a member of the Ktunaxa nation): "He's one of us... You want someone who pays taxes..." Um, who doesn't pay taxes, Bill? Do you mean Indians? They don't care about how money is spent, right, because they suck up government funds like nothin' else. Freeloaders...

This is the guy we have directing a body tasked with making ethical and policy decisions about election reform? Brutal.


*Usually he gives millions and millions to municipalities.

History of voter turn-out in Vancouver

This handy-dandy chart* illustrates a simple issue in Vancouver: there is no "normal" voter turn-out. Voter turn-out is down this election, in both absolute and percentage terms, but it's up in some polls, and the overall drop was just under 8000 voters. The numbers aren't great, but they're still higher than by-elections (that bar is set pretty low, I know), and far higher than any election prior to 2005.

Why did the number of registered voters fluctuate so widely before 2005? There were no changes to who was eligible, as near as I can tell. The city adopted the Provincial Voters list, I think, which had far more people on it, but was that really why 30,000 more people voted in 2005? Was it simply a matter of extra voters' cards being mailed out to 120,000 more people?


* Excel doesn't allow for multiple x- or y-axes so I had to cobble this together using the paint function on Appleworks. What a ridiculous restriction.

Civic election - downtown changes

Map 1:
Number of registered voters:
RED - 0-10% loss
GREY - even
PERI - 0-10% gain
ROYAL - 10-20% gain
NAVY - 20-30% gain

Map 2 (with dots) is the mayoral race from 2005; Map 3 is from 2008.

Three things changed downtown from last civic election:

1) A general influx of people (which won't surprise anyone). Registered voters is up from 57,871 to 61,727, for a net gain of 3895.

2) Parts of the West End lost registered voters. While there was only a slight overall loss (around 300) overall, the furthermost western polls (1, 2, 4, 5 and 6) either stayed the same or lost voters. Who's been moving out? Doesn't seem to matter: Vision won these polls by significant margins in 2008 (see vote ratio) and 2005.

3) The NPA lost polls 3, 9, 13 and 15 to Vision; voter turn-out dropped substantially in all of these polls. They held onto poll 17, where voter turn-out dropped enormously. Jim Green did better than Gregor in poll 17, and Peter Ladner managed to pull in as many votes as Sam did in 2005 while voting rates dropped significantly. So did some Vision/Jim Green supporters just not vote in Yaletown? I can't even begin to guess what happened there.

It's interesting to note that voter turn-out dropped in every single poll on the downtown peninsula, and it wasn't high to begin with, resulting in some shockingly low numbers (13.6 - 27%). Poll 15 actually increased by 94 votes but the number of registered voters increased by 1112*, so we see a drop in voter turn-out as a percentage.


* Only two other polls increased so much: poll 17 by 932 and poll 68 (Joyce and Kingsway) by 1008. No other polls were even close.

Civic election vote ratio

This map was really fun to make. It shows the ratio of votes for Gregor to votes for Peter. It's basically a percentage of popular vote, but some of the percentages were so high I thought it would make more sense to present it as a ratio.

I think this map shows why Gregor and Vision won. Peter Ladner dominated a few polls, but even in the strongest NPA areas the ratio was only about 3.5 : 1. Contrast that with some polls in East Van where the ratio of Gregor votes to Peter votes was approaching 7 : 1.

Civic election voter turn-out by poll

So I whipped this up tonight. Not great quality, but it looks okay. A few thoughts on voter turn-out:

1) As could be predicted, southwest and west Vancouver generally had a high turn-out, but so did eastern parts of the city.

2) It will take a bit of doing to figure out how turn-out affected specific polls, but right now there isn't a clear conclusion to be drawn from the numbers. Each candidate won ridings with low and high voter turn-out, including in adjacent polls.

I'm going to put together another few maps tomorrow, one based on voter turn-out by party allegiance.

Election thoughts

I have a monster post planned, basically a day in the life of a poll. It's dull, but I took so many notes I have to do something with them. I analogue-blogged yesterday (note to self: get BlackBerry), and I'll have to go through my notes to find the interesting bits.

But for now, a few simple thoughts about the results from yesterday's big win.

1) Peter Ladner had his ass handed to him, and I mean this in the least partisan way possible.* 48,794 votes. Suzanne Anton got more votes (52,941) than he did. Geoff Meggs, who received the fewest votes of any successful Vision candidate (49,538), got more votes. Ladner would have barely squeaked onto Council with those numbers. Edit: I just checked, and Anton beat Ladner in the 2005 council race as well. Future mayoral candidate?

2) It looks like a fairly clean geographic split (for the mayoral race, anyway; see the Gazeteer for his opinion on density), but I think we'll have to hold off until someone does a full numbers analysis. My sense is that those big red NPA blocks in the southwest aren't that red. For example, in poll 104 (solid NPA territory near UBC south of 16th), Gregor got 395 votes to Peter's 885. Contrast that to poll 40 (Commercial to Clark, 1st to 8th), where Gregor got 674 to Peter's 107.

3) Is anyone else excited about the tie in the mayoral vote in poll 88 (each got 464 votes)? Has that happened before? Edit: In 2002, 88a (now part of 104 in the SW) was a tie.

4) Voter turn-out was low, but not disastrously so. The city's website has it at 30.79%, down from 32.45% in 2005. What will make for interesting reading is where the turn-out was low (and trying to guess how that affected the election). A quick glance shows the highest turn-out (39.1%) in the heart of NPA-land, poll 129: Blanca to Discovery, 8th to 16th. Poll 9 (downtown: Broughton to Bute, Haro NE to the water) had the lowest turn-out (13.6%), one of two downtown polls with less than 15%. Absentee condo owners, anyone?

Thanks for reading, everyone.


* I was hoping to keep this blog relatively non-partisan (tm), but last night and the events leading up to the victory were just too much. I've worked and volunteered for the Vision/Gregor team, and I've enjoyed it all. Great people to work for/with. I volunteered all day yesterday (nothing like a 12-hour volunteer shift), and really felt like a part of the victory was mine. So, apologies to those that might be reading this thinking I'm a party hack. I'll try (when I can) to keep my personal feelings on the side.