Month: November 2022

Council – Nov 7, 2022

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

We had a Council meeting last week! It was the inaugural meeting, which is mostly ceremonial, but I’m going to use this as an excuse to start playing with the blogging format stuff, in light of the weird part I wrote about in an earlier post about how I am now the de facto spokesperson for the City Council and the Police Board, so my blogged writings, as often as I may say “These are not official communications from the City,” run the risk of being read as more official than they are meant to be.

I could write caveats all day, but here’s a summary of the business that got done on November 7th.

Oaths of Office:
We read oaths are required by law. Mayor, Councilors, Police Board Chair, and Parcel Tax Roll Review Panel. That makes us official.

2022 General Local Election – Report of Election Results
The Chief Election Officer reported on the official election results, and we received the report.

Acting Mayor Appointments
New Westminster doesn’t have a Deputy Mayor position, but we do appoint an Acting Mayor in the event the mayor is on vacation or otherwise not available for official duties. We have a practice in New West of rotating all 6 Councilors through for two-month stints as Acting Mayor. I suggested spots be filled based on where council finished in the polls, lacking any other way of differentiating when folks serve, and alphabetical order being so unexciting. Council voted unanimously to approve.

Council Member Appointments to Internal and External Committees, Task Forces, Boards and Councils
We have about two dozen Advisory Committees, Task Forces, and Commissions/Boards internal and external for Council to serve. It is pretty typical for a new Council (and we have a new Mayor and 4 new Councilors) to re-jig these. However, I have suggested to Council that we not make immediate changes to the committees that exist until the new members have had a chance to get caught up on what is happening in the City, and we have a chance to sit down as a Council of 7 and do some strategic planning around our priorities for the next year and four years. Every Task Force and Committee takes a lot of time on the part of staff, Council and the public (if it is a public committee). I suggest we need to be strategic about how we get the most value out of that time before we make big changes here.

So Council unanimously agreed to keep the same structure for the short term, and appoint the Mayor and Councilors to serve as either Chairs or Council Reps on the various committees until we get a chance to meet as a Council and do that longer-term planning. If you are curious, the long list of appointments is here.

Metro Vancouver Board Appointments
We also need to appoint a person and an alternate to represent this Council at the Metro Vancouver regional board. New Westminster gets one board seat, but more seats may open up on committees at Metro depending on how the Board Chair and new Board structure committees for the term. We probably won’t know more about that until early in the New Year. Council voted to appoint me as Metro Vancouver rep, and Councilor Nakagawa as alternate.

Then I read my inaugural speech, and we all smiled for photos. Now the work begins.

Inauguration

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Yep, I’m busy. So to keep something happening on this page, and in the spirit of recycling and placemarking, Here are the notes I used for the inauguration speech I delivered on Monday. Share and Enjoy.

Thank you.

I am honoured to be here, and humbled to receive the support from the community for this role.

I want to start my remarks by expressing deep gratitude to Mayor Jonathan Cote. I am so grateful for the work he did on Council and 8 years in this chair to move New Westminster forward. His work and vision have left a strong foundation for this Council to build upon – leadership on housing, on climate, on public engagement. Even through this last term with a global pandemic and so much economic uncertainty, we weathered the storm and are a stronger City now than we were 8 years ago.

And personally, having worked with Jonathan for 8 years, I also appreciate his mentorship and his friendship. His knowledge of the job, and his keen eye of my own strengths and weaknesses made our conversations over the last few weeks invaluable. I appreciate his sage and candid advice during the transition, and appreciate the time he took with the new Council Members to inspire their confidence in the work to come.

I also want to thank Chuck Puchmayr, Mary Trentadue, and Chinu Das for your service to this community. I have watched as all three of you put your hearts and souls into this work, each leaving indelible marks on the City. Especially through the challenging last 4 years, I am proud or our reputation as one of the most functional councils in the Lower Mainland, and the work you did to make that happen. We found consensus on most issues, and were respectful in our disagreements. It wasn’t easy, but most Mondays I walked home from the council meeting feeling we did good work for the community, and I thank you for that. I thank you for the sacrifice of your time and energy, the time away from your families, your other plans put on hold, in service to the community.

To the four new members of this Council, Ruby, Tasha, Paul, and Daniel, and to our returning champions Jaimie and Nadine, congratulations on earning the support of the voters, and thank you for stepping up to do this work. I look forward to each of you bringing your unique and diverse perspectives to this Council. My commitment to you is to do my best to empower each of you to do your best work here. This is a council of seven members, and I ask you to remember the community is best served when all of council engages in robust discussion of matters on our agenda, seeks consensus where it can be found, and does not let disagreement prevent us from taking firm and decisive action on the issues important to this community.

We have all spent the last 6 months (or more) knocking on doors and speaking with the community, we have heard the issues that are top of mind: housing, climate, transportation, safety for all in the face of overlapping crises in our region. We also heard that the community wants a proactive and forward-looking Council, not one that shrinks away from these challenges.

I also want us to be mindful of the voices we didn’t hear during the campaign, to recognize that political engagement is often the privilege of the few. It is incumbent upon us to continue to reach out and engage the entire community, especially those who face structural barriers to representation.

I also ask that all of council engage meaningfully in the journey towards reconciliation that we are undertaking as a local government. Be mindful that we are only the latest representatives of a system of erasure, built on the theft of land and of history. As we do the work commanded of us by legislation, we must also do the parallel work of exposing the truth and of building meaningful relationships with the people indigenous to these lands. That work is both collective and individual, and it is at times difficult, but it is your responsibility now, and as important as anything you will do in the next four years.

I also want to make special note of the work the City is doing to address climate change. You will be in these seats at least until 2026, taking us half way to 2030, a year for which bold targets for emission reduction have been set by this City, by the Province and the Nation. Everything else we do in the City – from housing and transportation to recreation and public safety – will be impacted by climate disruption, and will need to adapt to meet these targets. This is the term of council that will decide if our City meets our legislated goals, there can be no delay.

Perhaps an unintentional symbol of this responsibility, City parks staff have planted seven new trees on the front lawn of City Hall to mark the inauguration of the new Council. Let them remind us of our responsibility and the work ahead.

In the next few months, we will engage in a strategic planning process to set out our collective goals for the term, and in this job the consultation with the community never stops. I look around the council table, and I see our community represented by the many different life paths and experiences that brought you here. I know you are ready to do this work, and will make New Westminster proud.

But we cannot do this alone. We need to work as a team, we need to support and empower our staff to find creative and innovative solutions to the unprecedented challenges facing the community and the region. And we need to empower the broader community to be partners in these solutions. New Westminster is a city of incredible teams doing great work – non-profits and social profits supporting community, neighbourhood organizations, Arts and Sports organizations, Business organizations formal and informal. As a City we can harness that energy and talent to do amazing things.

So I close with an invitation to everyone in this room and everyone watching at home, to get involved. Connect with your Residents Association or your local Business Improvement organization, volunteer with the Arts Council or New West Little League. Come to a community engagement session, and bring a friend or two. This is your City, and your community, and you can shape it, but first you have to show up. By taking active part in your community, you in turn empower this Council to achieve the community’s goals.

Working together to support the community we love is a New Westminster tradition I hope we will all embrace.

Poll-by-Poll 2022

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The full election results are available on the City website, and as I have done in the last couple of goes-around, I like to look at the poll-by-poll results and infer a few things. Of course, others have taken this on and provided their own analysis, but I love to stick to a trend once I start, which in part explains the existence of this blog. Note: after boldly asserting I am NOT a political scientist, everything I write here has to be taken with a grain of salt.

This overlaps with the point that anyone in New West could vote in any polling station. One might assume that people vote in the station closest to their homes (as I did, voting early at City Hall), but there is nothing stopping someone from voting across town, so the geography of voting location is only a feeble proxy for the political leanings of that neighbourhood, which is the thesis of this entire post. Caveat Lector. But it is always fun to conject, so let’s have some fun. (Thanks Canspice for the image:

Starting with the Mayor’s Race, I marked the first place finisher in a poll with dark green, the second place finisher in lighter green. I also bunched the “Special Polls” and “Mail in” together as a single poll, for simplicity:

I finished first in most polls, and second in all the others, with my strongest polls being Downtown and the Brow, where I pulled greater than 50%. Armstrong won handily (~55%) in the two Queensborough polls, which represent about 10% of the overall votes. He also won the closer race in the Howay (Massey Victory Heights) poll. Puchmayr won Connaught Heights, which also happened to be the smallest poll, and the polls around his home in Moody Park generally had Puchmayr ahead of Armstrong in second place. As others have observed, there is a marked difference between multi-family and single-family neighbourhoods.

The Council race provides a bit more insight into how the vote was distributed. Here I shaded the first place finished in darker green, the second place finished in an apple green, and the other top 6 finishers in pale green. I used pale yellow for the three people just below the line, and no shading for the bottom three.

Much like Nadine Nakagawa last election, rookie candidate Ruby Campbell finished first overall by a good gap, and won the most polls. She finished first in 12 of the 19 polls, and second in one more. She “showed” (finished in the top 6) in all polls except (perhaps surprisingly) Herbert Spencer. Daniel Fontaine and Paul Minhas each led three polls, and Jaimie McEvoy was tied with Campbell for the favourite in the special polls, and was overall winner at QayQayt.

As most candidates were running with a party, there were clear trends related to those parties, and reflected somewhat the Mayor’s race. Community First had better results overall in most neighbourhoods, with the notable exceptions of Queensborough (the effect of Ken Armstrong being a Q’boro resident?) and Massey Victory Heights. The Progressives had a surprisingly strong showing at Herbert Spencer, which presumably draws most voters from Glenbrook North (where 3 of their down-ballot candidates reside) and Queens Park, but the same strength didn’t show at Queens Ave Church or Glenbrook Middle which would also presumably draw from Queens Park and Glenbrook. The two successful NWP candidates also had strong showings in Tweedsmuir (the West End) and Skwo:wech (Upper Sapperton), showing their appeal was broader overall this election than last, though again linked to single family neighbourhoods. The fact Queensborough didn’t show up for the one council candidate from Q’boro, when Downtown and the Brow did, will no doubt be the source of much deeper discussion.

And here are the School Board results with dark green for overall winner, apple green for second place, pale green for the rest of the top 7 finishers:

The results were close between the top three finishers, with third place finisher Connelly actually winning more polls (8) outright than Russell or Andres (4 each), who nonetheless had broader appeal across the City. Again, the NWP candidates followed Mayor and Council in having their strongest results in Queensborough and Massey Victory Heights, and Carlsen not able to leverage two first place and a second place finish into enough overall votes to get across the line. Aside from this single anomaly, it is perhaps surprising that party lines were not clearer. You could convince yourself that Connelly’s popularity pulled votes for Carlsen and Dobre in many polls, but it is far from consistent across the table.

Here is an interesting trend. Last election, about 21% of vote was cast at an advance poll. That went up to 27% this election. What’s interesting is in how the advance vote was distributed. Last election Team Cote got a bit more support at the advance than election day polls in comparison to the New West Progressives. This election, NWP candidates got an average of 28% of their vote in the advance polls, CFNW candidates only around 26% on average, with the Mayoral candidates having the biggest spread. See these tables with colour-coding for party affiliation and winners bolded:

Now, 2% isn’t a huge gap, but it is such a consistent trend between parties that it can’t be a coincidence. The prominence of an advance poll in Queensborough (and relative NWP popularity there) is not enough of a vote gap to account for this, so we need to presume something shifted in overall popularity between the first advance polls and the final election day. Community First got more popular as the election went on. The said, if we only counted advance pollsthe results in the end would be pretty much the same. The only difference would have been Carlsen being elected instead of Slinn for the final School Board spot.

Finally, there were 15,923 ballots counted, but 108 of them (0.68%) did not select a Mayor Candidate. If we project that same number of ballots to the Council race, there were 95,538 potential Council votes (6 per ballot), and 81,144 votes marked, or 85%. With School Board and 7 votes per ballot, there were 73,202 out of a possible 111,461 (66%) votes cast.