A Vancouver progressive primary sounds like a good idea, but will uniting the left work?

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In last year’s municipal byelection, the parties on the left side of the political spectrum each agreed to run only one candidate. That meant that OneCity, the Vancouver Greens, and COPE threw just one name in the race, while the more right-leaning parties in ABC and TEAM ran two. 

That cooperation was noticeable in that the parties were eager to not split the vote and allow ABC in particular to add to its majority on city council. 

In said byelection, COPE, with councillor Sean Orr, and OneCity, with councillor Lucy Maloney, easily won, while TEAM’s Colleen Hardwick came in third place. 

In advance of the coming October municipal election, OneCity announced that it would be holding a contested nomination race. COPE expressed a level of interest in doing the same, while lone Green Party councillor Pete Fry announced his intention to run for mayor in January. 

But here’s the kicker. When Fry announced his campaign, he did so with one foot still out the door, claiming that the Green Party was committed to establishing a progressive coalition behind one mayoral candidate. The Green Party re-established that claim in a press release when Azaroff won OneCity’s nomination race. 

Orr and Fry have been vocal about uniting the progressive parties. But, of course, the timing of that seemed strange after OneCity’s nomination process. Was that party really going to peel back the results of that in order to let a different party’s mayoral candidate represent them? 

OneCity boasts having the largest membership of any progressive party. Dropping out after igniting the party membership to vote on a candidate would seem strange. There’s also the not-small differences in positions between the three parties. 

In that context, OneCity’s statement on February 17 that the party would be happy to have a progressive primary race under certain rules is a position that would no doubt benefit a party that just had a leadership race and effectively a member drive. (One of those conditions was that the parties can’t sign up any new members, effective the 17th.) 

For COPE or the Greens to take the bait on that would be an absolute fool’s errand, given that Azaroff would likely cruise to a win under those circumstances. So it was no surprise to see the Greens issued a release today as well, indicating that they would not be playing by those specific terms and that any unification would include council, park board, and school board candidates as well. 

The concept of Fry running for mayor under a left-leaning banner was always a little strange. It’s no secret that OneCity’s supporters don’t look kindly on Fry’s (or the Green Party’s) housing record. The idea of COPE and OneCity partnering is also a bit odd, given that COPE councillor Jean Swanson spent years voting against housing projects and that OneCity, especially under Azaroff, is eager to get more housing built. 

In 2019, Vancouver magazine put Swanson, former Green Party councillor Adriane Carr, and Hardwick (forever labelled an anti-housing NIMBY by her critics) on its Power 50 list, ranking them collectively as No. 7 because of the way they’d vote together, often against housing projects. The OneCity councillor at the time, Christine Boyle, almost always voted for those projects. 

So how do these three parties work together when the most important issue in the city that the municipal government controls is arguably housing? In the byelection campaign, Orr stated that he was against the Broadway Plan, which upzoned large swaths of the city. And he voted against the controversial Broadway and Commercial tower project in June. Fry abstained from the vote, while OneCity’s Maloney voted in favour. 

Azaroff is the CEO of affordable housing nonprofit Brightside Community Homes Foundation. He is going to move heaven and earth to get more housing built. Some of that will be the type that Fry and Orr approve of, you’d assume. But some of it won’t be, too. How these three parties work together remains to be seen, but so far the coalition isn’t off to a promising start.

That’s music to the ears of contenders like Sim, along with Kareem Allam’s Vancouver Liberals and former ABC councillor Rebecca Bligh’s Vote Vancouver. As those three and Hardwick split the centre and right-leaning vote, they’ll need the left to be fractured too.