Tag: Politics

Council Meeting? What Council Meeting?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

You may have noticed I didn’t update on last week’s council meeting, nor on the week before. That is because we did not have a council meeting last week, and the previous week’s meeting was limited to a short “Closed” session to deal with some necessary business, and a Committee of the Whole meeting that was more of a workshop.

You can watch that workshop on the live feed, if you are interested in the two topics we dug deeper into. I will cover them a bit here, and share a bit of where my (early, and therefore very open to adjustment as information arrives) thoughts are on these programs.

Family Friendly Housing Policy

I seem to be at the certain age where a great many people around me are surrounded by children, increasingly their own. And the numbers keep growing (Congratulations Mike & Melissa! Rick & Lana!). Recently, there has been quite a bit of conversation having to do with housing affordability – not only of the low-income or supportive housing, but of affordable housing for middle-income families.

Many of my generation (and the next) who have chosen the urban lifestyle of a place like New Westminster as opposed to increasingly soul-crushing suburbia and commutes, are not necessarily expecting a big house with a big yard, but are ok with townhouses and condos. However, most lament the lack of 3+ bedroom places available for their growing families. Very few feel they can afford a detached single family home (even if they want one and the attached costs, maintenance issues, and hassles). Outside of the detached house model, 3+ bedroom options that do become available in the new building stock end up being tower penthouses or the token pedestal townhouses attached to a tower, both of which are unaffordable to buy (challenging the single family detached in price), and come with disproportionate Strata fee loads.

Some go so far as to suggest that this one issue is going to limit the City of New Westminster’s ability to attract and keep a stable population of young professionals with families – the very population we need to provide us a solid tax base, a vibrant school population, and that community feel we love so much.

Problem is, for a long time, no-one really knew what to do about it. Vancouver has already taken steps to encourage the development of family-friendly housing (although notably two-bedroom is only as far as they would go), and some other Cities (North Van, Burnaby) are looking at policies. New West has been working on this for a while, and has already reached more than 800 citizens through the initial outreach/consultation process, and collected a considerable amount of data on the national, regional, and local markets. The City even contracted a financial feasibility study of building more family-friendly units. It seems the City has taken a pretty comprehensive approach (something I can take no credit for, as this was all done prior to my joining Council).

The issue is (in my opinion) more complicated than just forcing new towers to have a higher percentage of 2-3 bedroom units, and I am thinking that may be the completely wrong approach. The cost of concrete high-rise construction would put those units on price competition with single family detached homes in New West, even if they were not the “penthouse” buildings. If we look at the neighbourhoods in New Westminster that have higher density family-sized units, we look at the low-rise areas of the Quayside, the Fraserview area, and Queensborough.

I suspect the solutions to family friendly housing are found in low-rise infill density, and will rely on more than just restrictions on bedroom counts, but on providing more prescriptive design guidelines to assure ground-based homes have adequate space for a family, including storage space adequate for a growing family (where to store the bikes, the hockey gear, the Lego!), adequate kitchen/pantry space (I have a former co-worker who always lamented the massive volume of “boy-chow” he had to supply his active growing kids), and that there are enough safe opens spaces and other community amenities so that growing kids have room to run.

There is quite a bit of data in the report (worth reading if you are interested) and this will be an ongoing conversation, I would love to hear your ideas about what the challenges are.

Canada Games Pool / Centennial Community Centre

There have been rumblings for several years about the Canada Games Pool. State-of-the-art in 1973 when the Canada Summer Games were hosted in New Westminster and showing its age, the pool is increasingly expensive to operate and some significant capital costs are upcoming as major components of the physical plant are reaching the end of their service life. If we keep the pool as it is, we will need to spend several million dollars in the next few years keeping it working. If we replace it or do a major refurbish, then those millions can be rolled into the larger project instead of being invested in a fading asset.

The time to decide what to do is now, as whatever decision is made, there is going to need to be construction happening in this council term. So the public consultation is beginning, and staff came to council to start putting a framework around that consultation, and assure their consultation vision aligns with ours.

Disclosure: I am not a swimmer. I like to swim in warm oceans and lakes, not pools. I see swimming as something one does to cool down in tropical heat, to observe colourful sea life through a mask from a respectful distance, or to prevent oneself from drowning, but I don’t do it for exercise. I don’t even use gyms. I like to exercise outdoors, and see no point in picking weights up and putting them back down again when I could instead be out on my bike or climbing a mountain. So I personally have no skin in the Canada Games Pool game.

I do, however, hear from a lot of people about the pool. The ever-suffering MsNWimby uses the CGP several times a week, as she does like picking weights up and putting them down and such activity. My car pool partner grew up swimming laps with the Hyack Swim Club, and now lives a block away and trundles her kids off to Poirier where the water is warmer. I have heard many people talk about how great Edmonds pool is for their kids (despite the terrible change rooms and sometimes terrifying dumping bucket), but how CGP is still the place to go if you want to do serious laps.

I also know the current pool is not only the largest source of corporate Greenhouse Gasses of any City operation, it is also expensive to operate. For every person who walks into CGP, the taxpayer subsidizes that entry to the tune of more than $1 each. To me, there is no problem with that, we subsidize library users, people at Century House, the Youth Centre, the Anvil, and for that matter everyone who drives and park on our streets or walks on our sidewalks – society is a socialist enterprise. However, I want to know if people feel they are getting good value from the CGOP, and how we can make that value better.

To get there, I want to hear from people in New West about what they want from a Canada Games Pool. This is not the official public engagement, but I want to hear peoples’ opinions on a few questions:

What kind of pool do you want? Do we want a “competition pool” (50+ m, cooler water, proper dive tank with high platforms), a family swimming centre (25m, warmer, more play-time amenities), or both (recognizing the increased cost that comes with having it all).

Besides the pool, what other uses? As the Centennial Community Centre is also reaching the end of its life, the question of how we manage the combined amenities is also a good one. As this is the only community centre in the Glenbrook North / Massey Heights/ Upper Sapperton area – what kind of services should we include? Remember, again, that every new service costs money to build, money to program, and money to operate, and there is no chance that an accessible community centre will ever operate at 100% cost-recovery. What are the priorities for the facility?

Where would you put the pool? Right now, the only discussion is where on the current footprint of the block between McBride, Cumberland, on East 6th Ave. I have been wondering –f we were to build a new pool starting from fresh, would we put it there? Or would we put it nearer more population density, where the future population growth is expected instead of in what is essentially a single-family-detached neighbourhood. Should it be closer to a SkyTrain station? I have to admit, I don’t have a location in mind, and it could be hard to find another 100m x 50m footprint in the City to build a centre like we have (or 100m x 80m to build something like Edmonds), but I think it is important for us to have this discussion before we build an asset that will set in stone for 50+ years. This opens up the floodgates towards innovative approaches:

What other delivery approach could we use? I could see a model where the pool was moved and replaced with a smaller community centre (think a new Centennial type facility, a gym or two with meeting rooms, maybe a pocket library), and excess land on that lot sold off to finance part of the cost of the replacement pool and centre. I could also imagine locating the pool in a denser neighbourhood and selling off density, or even co-developing a larger lot with a residential component to share some costs.

I have to emphasize: I am spitballing here. It is very likely that the pool will be built adjacent to the existing site, and the institutional and neighbourhood momentum that exists overpowers any other option (or, more likely, any other option is deemed too risky or too cumbersome in the relatively tight timeline of the project). But I am open to hearing creative ideas.

So there you go, a couple of weeks without regular Council activity, but lots for council to chew on, even outside of the ongoing “Vote for a livable Transportation future” campaign work. Oh, and I took a 2 hour walking tour with people who want to “Save our Parkade”, attended a celebration of the 58th anniversary of Ghanaian Independence, attended a couple of Residents’ Association meetings, chaired meetings with the Environmental Advisory Committee and the Advisory Committee for Transit, Bicycles, and Transit, had a meeting with the Downtown BIA around their exciting new strategic plan, and attended the 100th Anniversary Concert for the New Westminster Symphony. Back to regular council life next week.

Disclosures – my own this time

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

It has been a while since campaign financial disclosures from the 2014 municipal elections were released. I apologize it took so long for me to write this up, but I haven’t had a lot of time to crunch the data. After giving the CTF the gears for their ham-fisted disclosure, the least I can do is point an equally critical eye at my own disclosure forms, and those of the other candidates in the election. Do they support the common narrative of the campaign that we all held last fall?

I should note right off the top that the numbers below are off the unaudited forms as submitted to Elections BC. They have not yet been reviewed by Elections BC, and may contain honest (or otherwise) errors that may impact my analysis. I have not gone through every form (except my own) in any detail, and take the declarations people made at face value. Note, the first error I noticed was on my own form (!), where an extra digit was slipped into line 10 of form 4222, such that it doesn’t match box A of form 4234. The entry on Form 4234 is correct, and the error on 4222 is an obvious transcription error. My Financial Agent contacted Elections BC to let them know as soon as we noticed this. So in the interests of pots and kettles, I’m not going to point out the math errors I note on the forms of others.

Because I am so involved in this, I am going to first concentrate on the details of my own form in this blog post, and will discuss the entire council campaign a little further down. Mayors and School Trustees can take care of themselves!

The first headline is that I spent more than anyone else running for council this time around. If you had told me that a year ago, I would have been surprised, but that surprise would have steadily decreased as the election rolled on. (Of course, I had I known, I might have spent $200 less, and got in under Councillor McEvoy’s total, but hindsight is 20:20). The reason things changed during the campaign was the emergent generosity of people from across the City (and a few from outside of it) who personally contributed to my campaign. This generosity was humbling. I talked in this earlier post about what I think went well and didn’t go so well in my campaign, and fundraising was clearly a success.

When I went into this project, I knew I would need to spend a lot of money to “break the bubble” and get my name out into the community to people who didn’t know me. I had a base level of name recognition, but that needed to be boosted by an order of magnitude if I was going to be successful. Between my core team and I, we set out a preliminary budget of $15,000. Being a member of CUPE, I figured I could count on $3,000 from them, and if I received endorsement from the NWDLC, that estimate would rise to $5000. So I set a non-labour fundraising goal of $10,000 (not including in-kind donations). By the end of the campaign, those goals were met, and exceeded.

I received almost $3000 in donations from companies (representing 12% of my total). About $1,200 of that was “in kind” donations, such as discounted web services from a friend who runs a server, and donations from local businesses that were used as door prizes for my fundraiser. An interesting issue with the door prizes are that they do (by the rules) constitute an in-kind donation, and were declared as such, but according to the instructions we received from Elections BC, they are not counted as a fundraiser expense when they are given away. That donation-without-an-offsetting-expense accounts for a large part of the gap between the money I raised and the money I spent.

The amount of money I received from various labour organizations amounted to $6,300, (26% of the total) of which $5,800 was cash and the rest was in-kind donations (essentially, use of some of their services).

That means the rest of the money (62%) was from private donors- about $3,000 in the form of Fundraiser tickets, and the remaining $10,000 in declared personal donations (plus the $2,000 I put in personally, some of which was refunded at the end to close the bank account). I received no anonymous donations (which are illegal over the amount of $50). Here is a pie:

patjpie

As I said earlier, I had the highest declared expenditure of any Council candidate, beating last election’s champ by $200 (but spending much less than he did last election). Here is a chart that shows how much every candidate raised, broken up by the category of fundraising, and listed left to right in order of number of votes received. You might want to click to get the details.

donationscandidate

Of the 6 elected people, 5 were amongst the highest spenders/fundraisers in the election. Both Kainth and Brett spent more in losing causes than first-finisher Puchmayr did (demonstrating the power of incumbency and name recognition?). A fairer division might be to split up into “big spenders” (myself, McEvoy, Harper and Kainth), “semi-big spenders” (Williams, Trentadue), and “serious spenders”     (Puchmayr, Cartwright, Donnelly, Brett, and Palmer). People who spent less than $5,000 getting their names out there did not fare that well. Money doesn’t buy elections, but it sure buys attention, and you need attention to separate you name from the other 20 on the ballot. On this chart, people are in the order of spending, not the order of votes (red columns are those who got elected):

order1

“Labour Money” was clearly a factor in fundraising, representing about 22% of all the money raised in this election (recognizing, again, that much of that is not actual money but “in kind” donations), divided between the 6 NWDLC-endorsed candidates and CUPE member Scott McIntosh. This chart changes the one above by shading out the “labour” contributions, to see the subtle changes in how the campaign would be funded with out it:

order2

Back to the multi-colour chart, Corporate/business donations (in green) did not quite meet the level of labour, totalling 17% of all money raised (again some of this will be “in-kind”) with Harper and Kainth as stand-out recipients. I was the third-highest candidate when it came to corporate donations.

Where I clearly led the pack was in individual donations from private citizens (in blue), with Kainth just behind me. I attribute this to my early start (I was the first candidate out of the gate) and a really stellar effort by my fundraising team to put together a fundraising event that got people excited about the campaign at the right time. I understand Kainth also has a great launch party, and with her deep connections in the business and social community on New West, I’m not surprised she also did this very well. Note that I separated personal donations (the money candidates contributed to their own campaign) from other individual donations, by shade of blue.

Also interesting is that more that 61% of the money raised this campaign, and approximately 50% of that raised by the winning 6 candidates, was private individual donations. I for one would not oppose limits on labour and business donations in local elections, but only if private donations also come with strict upper limits. Unless taxpayers are expected to foot the bill for all election financing (and I don’t suggest they should), if we remove the right of organizations to contribute (through cash or in-kind help), it is inevitable that campaigns will be funded by the wealthier demographic with disposable income, which will no doubt shift how policy is developed on the ground. Tax credits as they exist in senior government elections (and tax credits for volunteer work for lower-income people) would help flatten that disparity.

Finally, I’m not afraid to say that more than $20,000 is a slightly absurd amount of money to spend running for City Council in New Westminster. I would welcome discussions on placing limits to spending, but will not lead that conversation for a good reason. As this election proved, incumbency is a huge advantage, and advertising is more important to challengers than it is to incumbents. For me, who used a lot of money to establish name recognition, to now limit that right for those who would challenge my incumbency in the next election may be politically smart, but not terribly ethical. If a person is able to raise a lot of money from individual donors across the City, if they can raise that groundswell of support for the democratic process, then I suppose we should not discourage that.

Every indication is that things are going to change in the next election. ElectionsBC made some changes going into this election, and the provincial government has hinted at campaign financing limits next election. Expect there to be public engagement during the development of the new rules, so you should keep an eye on the ElectionsBC website if you really care about this issue.

On disclosure

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I was about to publish my long-delayed blog post on the campaign financial disclosures from the November election, but then saw another declaration was released, and found it so humorously ham-fisted, that I have to write about that first. (I’m massaging some graphs for the other one… will be ready soon)

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation have always been reluctant to talk about where their money comes from, but as the front organization for Federal Conservative datamining the NO side in the ongoing Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite, they attempted to get some press this week by releasing a declaration of their campaign contributions.

Except, of course, they did no such thing.

Their declaration document, which you can read in its entirety here, is amazingly bereft of details, and suffers from some basic math problems (reinforcing the notion that math is not a CTF strong point).

The document states that the NO campaign has a budget of $27,259.30. That came from anonymous donations amounting to $7,003.30, declared donations from 10 individuals that total $5,186, and $14,750 from the CTF coffers. Those numbers leave an unexplained $320 gap, but that is not the real problem with this “declaration”.

Of the $27,259.30, exactly $5,186 is actually disclosed – less than 20% of the total money they are spending is from a declared source. The largest contribution, the $14K from the CTF itself, will never be declared, nor is it clear if this declaration actually covers the true cost of this campaign – not the least including what portion of Jordan Bateman’s $75,000 annual sticking-up-for-the-little-guy salary is included, or how much Hamish Marshall is getting paid, because he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who works for free.

"Declared" donations to the NoTranslinkTax campaign by category.
“Declared” donations to the NoTranslinkTax campaign by category.

More concerning, the 160 (or 153, as the CTF doesn’t even get the number of donators correct) people donating to the campaign, they list 10 people, or 6%. How is that “Releasing a Donor’s List?” And , of course, that 160 (153?) people does not include the mysterious people who pump up the CTF tires every day.

The CTF, with this half-hearted and untruthful declaration is in no position to criticize the Better Transit and Transportation Coalition, which is comprised of (at last count) more than 130 member organizations, all listed on the website. It is clear that the Mayor’s Council is spending money on this campaign, and each City that contributes is going to need to account for how that money is being spent (for example, New Westminster set a budget of $20,000, and is within that budget). It is also clear that TransLink took some of the money they regularly spend on advertising every year (a little under 1% of their budget) in order to get the word out about the Plan. That is public money and will be declared publicly, as is the law for these types of organizations.

However most of the partners in the coalition, from the David Suzuki Foundation to the Vancouver Board of Trade and Unifor all have their own accounting requirements, and will need to declare to their members how their money is being spent. The CTF will need to do this as well, but no-one expects that to be a public declaration, and besides a few board members and spokespeople, no-one is really sure who their members actually are. So I’m not criticizing the CTF for not being open about their spending, I’m criticizing them for pretending to be open and daring anyone else to pretend to be as open as them. Yet another silly distraction.

In the spirit of providing some positive after all that criticism above, and talking about data that isn’t a distraction. Here is a much better source of info on the numbers that matter in this plebiscite. It is an ongoing project that is using some data visualization and data crunching to tall the more nuanced story about how we fund transportation in the region. They are just starting up, but the early results look good. And their pie charts are way cooler than mine:

chart

The Future of the Region – Yes or No.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

A few interesting developments on the Referendum front, and it has been a while since I wrote about it. Unless you have been living under a rock, or work in a phone bank for the BC Liberal party*, you are aware there is a referendum going on to decide how we will invest in transportation in the region.

We are less than two weeks from when ballots go in the mail, so it is a good idea for you to look into how you will vote, so you don’t lose your franchise. Elections BC recently released the full details of how the Plebiscite** is going to work. A few details:

If you were born before May 30, 1997, have been a resident of BC since November 29, 2014, are a Canadian resident and live in Metro Vancouver, you can register to vote online at the Elections BC website or call their 1-800 number (you need a Driver’s Licence or a Social Insurance Number). You will get a ballot in the mail. If you don’t get a ballot in the mail in March, you should contact Elections BC and request one. You have until March 29 to return your ballot. The Mayor’s Council set up this helpful graphic to show you the timelines of the vote.

timeline

Like my council Colleagues across the region, I have been busy with this campaign. As unique as the voting mechanism is, this is just an election campaign, and identifying your vote and getting it out requires a lot of organization. I have been talking to community groups, helping with phone volunteers to identify support bases, and helping develop the get-out-the-vote plan, etc. etc.

I’ve said before that democracy is not what happens on election day, but how we, as citizens, get involved between elections to get the most out of our elected representatives. If you think this referendum needs to be won, if you think we need to put the brakes on the cuts to transit service and enter a new era of transit expansion in our region, then I ask you – what are you doing about it? Get in touch with me, with the City of New Westminster, or the Mayor’s Council to see how you can help.

When I have time to be involved in the “air war”, I have concentrated on two things (an links below are to others doing exactly that):

1: Outline in as much detail as the audience needs about the myriad of benefits, tangible and otherwise, that this plan delivers to New Westminster and the region; and

2: Hit back aggressively at specific mistruths being propagated by a few very prominent members of the NO side.

One thing that always gives me a chuckle is the plethora of advice for how the YES side should be campaigning, mostly delivered by people loosely connected to the no side (for example, the wife of the guy who is coordinating the NO campaign for the CTF) and wrapped in sanctimony. We have been told, at times, to stop using scare mongering and stick to the facts; that we can’t rely on facts but should instead go for emotion; that we need to describe the plan in detail so people understand; that we need to simplify the message; that we need to appeal to “Joe Sixpack”, or “Students”, or that we should stop relying on “special interest groups”.

I thank them for the advice, but to me, the most effective message I have heard was delivered by Gordon Price at the PechaKucha New West event two weeks ago. It was an inspiring 6 minutes on the past, present and future of the region. After it ended, I thought “we need to get this on YouTube”. Turns out people (as usual) were way ahead of me, and a (slightly shortened, better produced) version has just been made available by the good folks at Modacity. If you do nothing else before you vote, take 4 minutes to watch this video***, if you want to understand what this referendum is really about:

Vote Yes. For nothing less than the future of the region as we know it.

*I received a phone call from a BC Liberal**** fundraiser on Wednesday evening. I allowed him to go through his script about balanced budgets and good times ahead before I asked him what the party was doing to encourage support for the Referendum that the Leader had called, and was (tacitly) supporting. The poor guy had not even heard that there was a referendum going on. He claimed to be in Burnaby (and I have no reason to doubt him, as he seemed to understand what TransLink was and claimed to watch Global News, so he wasn’t in Topeka or Bangalore). I made what I think was a compelling case for the reasons to support the Yes side, and he asked if the result of the referendum would be a deciding factor in the next election for me. I said no, but the leadership shown during the referendum definitely was. He thanked me for my time, and actually forgot to ask for money.

**Yes, this is a Plebiscite, not a Referendum. The differences are rather arcane. In most jurisdictions, the words are synonymous. In BC, they both mean “a vote on matter of public concern”. Where a Referendum is governed by the Referendum Act and “is usually binding on the government”, a Plebiscite is governed by the Elections Act and “may be binding on the government”. Remarkably, this vote is not being regulated by either, but by something called the “South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Funding Referenda Act”. Regardless, the Provincial Government changed the language from referendum to a plebiscite when the ballot was released, you can make up your own reasons why. Safe to say, whatever it is called, the results of this vote will be politically binding on the government, if not legally binding.

***Note the book at 1:03 in the video. None other than Charles Montgomery’s The Happy City. Nice touch.

**** Since I wrote that footnote*****, I have noticed that some of the strongest messages coming out on the YES side are coming from BC Liberal MLAs, so I am glad to give kudos to the members of the party who are seeing the importance of this vote, and are putting their political capital into it. We need more of this in the next month.

***** This footnote thing is getting out of hand.  

Spending wisely

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I saw this story in the paper, and could see by the tone (and some social media flitter) that some people are wondering why Council decided to spend up to $20,000 on getting out the YES vote on the upcoming Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite. I shouldn’t presume to speak for all of Mayor and Council, but I can give you my reasons

Transportation is the #1 issue in this City, and was so during the last election. At that time, this Mayor and the successfully-elected members of Council talked about their vision for addressing this issue, and it centered around implementing the newly-developed Master Transportation Plan. That is the mandate the voters gave us. The MTP contains a variety of goals and strategies, and they are all supported by the plan for transit and transportation infrastructure outlined in the Mayor’s Plan. None of those goals are supported by a NO vote.

Further, during the election I was told by citizens at the doorstep, by people in the media (social and no-so-social), and even by other candidates during all-candidates meetings that the City needs to work collaboratively with our neighbours to solve the regional transportation issues that are impacting New Westminster. The Mayor’s Plan that we are being asked to vote on was developed in collaboration with all of the municipalities in Metro Vancouver, and was approved by the vast majority of them. This is what working collaboratively looks like.

It might also help is we put that $20,000 into perspective.

$20,000 is the cost of a single parking spot. If a YES on this referendum means one more person has access to reliable transit for their daily commute, and the City has to build one less parking spot, we have already broken even.

$20,000 is about 0.7% of our annual paving budget. If traffic is reduced by the infrastructure that comes with this plan enough to reduce the wear on our streets by 0.7% for just one year, then the City breaks even.

$20,000 is less than it costs to respond and investigate a single road fatality in the City. If one less person in a car, on a bike, or walking, is injured or killed in an MVA in our City because traffic is reduced, or because they now have access to a night bus, or because the Pattullo Bridge is made safer, then the City is financially ahead.

A YES vote will bring hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements to the transit and transportation system every person in New Westminster uses every day. $20,000 is a good investment, and we (as elected officials responsible for making good economic decisions for the citizens of New Westminster) would be fools to not support the YES side of this referendum.

My 1500-word case.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I started writing a note to a group I was hoping would support the YES side of the upcoming Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite, and it turned into a bit of an extended rant. Actually, after re-reading, it appeared to be very un-ranty for me, which first disappointed me, then made me a little proud. So I thought I would share it here (edited slightly for audience). So here is my 1,500ish-word case for the Yes vote.

I’ll list some facts for clarity, then give you my opinions. See if you can tell where it shifts.

The Plebiscite

The Plebiscite asks for a 0.5% increase on the PST to fund a package of transportation and transit capital projects across the Lower Mainland. This money is specifically earmarked for the projects listed in the Mayor’s Plan released last year, and there will be annual independent audits to assure the money is spent as promised.

The Plebiscite will be my mail-in ballot. Elections BC has not released all of the election details yet, however indications are that ballots will be mailed to every person on the Elections BC voters list. To vote you need to be 18, a resident of the area served by TransLink, a Canadian Citizen, a resident of BC for the last 6 months, and you must be registered to vote at your current address. The ballot will be mailed in March, and you will have until the middle of May to return it.

The “Congestion Improvement Tax”

The regional CIT is a 0.5% sales tax that will raise something in the order of $250 Million per year for the next 10 years. The province has committed to matching funds, and suggest the Feds would as well; when these three sources are combined it equals $7.5 Billion over 10 years.

The CIT will cost the “average household” something in the order of $100 per year. The number is hard to parse exactly, because it depends on how much you spend. The average household income for the lower mainland is about $60,000, and if you spend all of this on PST-taxable items (i.e. didn’t buy food, pay rent or purchase haircuts) then your burden would be $300.

To put the tax rate in transit-oriented perspective, if you buy a $1000 television, you will pay $5 in CIT, which is less than the cost of a single 3-zone ride. If you purchase a $34,000 car, the CIT will cost you $170, which is equivalent to a single month 3-zone bus pass.

The Mayors Plan:

After almost two years of discussion, negotiation, and finagling, the Mayors of Metro Vancouver agreed almost unanimously on a planned package of improvements (the Mayor of Burnaby was the only dissenting voice):

3 light rail lines in Surrey, which will connect the King George SkyTrain station to a line along 104th to Guildford Town Centre, a second along King George Highway to Newton, and a third to Langley Town Centre along the Fraser Highway;

1 Broadway Corridor extension of the Millennium Line all the way to Arbutus;

1 replacement Pattullo Bridge. The Plan will provide an important portion of the capital funding to build a new 4-lane bridge, with the balance of the capital coming from tolls;

11 new B-line routes, adding up to 200km of much more frequent service. 3 of these lines are in Surrey, 2 are in the North-east section, the rest are in Burnaby-Vancouver, or connect Burnaby-Vancouver to target destinations (Richmond, UBC, SFU, North Vancouver);

400 new buses, which means more frequent service, extended hours, and higher reliability for everyone who uses busses;

50% increase in Seabus service – more frequency, longer operation al hours;

80% more night bus service;

30% more HandyDart services;

129 additional Skytrain/Canada Line fleet vehicles on existing lines, providing more frequent,
reliable, and comfortable service;

2,700 km of bikeway improvements.

Impact on New Westminster:

The City is in support of this plan because it provides valuable tools for us to achieve the goals of our Master Transportation Plan, and helps meet many of the City’s objectives towards building a more sustainable, inclusive, affordable and livable community.

The Pattullo Bridge plan is a good one for New Westminster. The bridge will be 4 lanes, and will be tolled. Both of these are issues the City has pressed hard and negotiated towards. The bridge will be built to accommodate future expansion to 6 Lanes (and this is the exact language of the agreement) “if need arises, to meet demand increases beyond current forecasts”. The plan does not include funding for this expansion to 6 lanes, and tolling the bridge and providing the alternatives (light rail and B-line expansion South of the Fraser) is our best assurance that the demand increase that would drive future expansion to 6 lanes will not occur.

More frequent SkyTrain and bus service will of course have a huge impact on New Westminster, which has one of the highest per capita transit use rates in the lower mainland. These new buses will turn the tide on “service rationalization” that has seen two bus routes reduced in New Westminster in the last two years. Larger, more frequent SkyTrain cars mean you are more likely to fit in the first train that arrives at 8:00 in the morning at New West Station, instead of trying to decide if the next train might be a little less packed. Increased Night Bus service will have a huge impact on shift workers (think RCH – our largest employer) and night owls. Increased HandyDart service will help keep our community connected and accessible for more people.

However, providing improved transit service to South of the Fraser and the Northeast Sector is also a major “win” for New Westminster, as it provides viable alternatives to people so they do not have to drive through New West on their daily commute. This is not the solution to New Westminster’s traffic problems, but it is a huge step in the right direction.

Plan B:

We cannot talk about the YES side without acknowledging the NO side. What will be the result of a NO vote? Frankly, no-one knows for sure, but we can make some educated guesses.

We can be fairly sure that the scale and pace of expansion offered by the Mayors Plan will not occur. No provincial government interested in staying in government is going to reply to a NO vote from the public by introducing a new taxation scheme to replace what was just voted down. The Mayors could, in theory, decide to fund this plan with property taxes, however if you read the history of how we got to where we are now, the chances of a plurality of Mayors agreeing to that in short order are very slim, especially as they will be under the same pressure as the provincial government to not approve a tax that the people just voted down. (I will ignore for now the public policy argument that property taxes are a terrible way to pay for transit infrastructure).

Note that almost every other alternative to funding proposed by the Mayors (carbon tax recovery, vehicle levy, gas tax increase, comprehensive road pricing program, funding from general revenue) has been nixed by consecutive Ministers of Transportation. It is not as if there wasn’t a Plan B considered, it is that no proposed Plans B have received consensus support.

In New Westminster, a NO vote almost certainly means continued “rationalization” of bus services. The delay at getting rapid transit built in Surrey will put more pressure on the Pattullo and provide incentive for a 6-lane option. The delay in other transit expansion projects mean more people will be forced (note – I didn’t say “choose”) to include driving through New Westminster’s neighbourhoods on their daily commute to Surrey or the Northeast sector. Congestion will increase the cost of moving goods, will erode the livability of our community, and will empower the government to build yet more lanes of unsustainable transportation infrastructure – with your tax money, and without a referendum.

TransLink:

It is important to remember that TransLink is the agency created by the provincial government to operate Greater Vancouver’s regional transportation system. It exists at the pleasure of the provincial government, and is governed by them. The province could disband, re-regulate, or replace TransLink tomorrow, but the region would still require a public transit operator who would operate the expanded capital assets the Mayors Plan will provide.

There may be significant governance issues with TransLink, however those governance issues are not part of this Plebiscite, nor has the province suggested that governance changes at TransLink will result from a YES or NO result. To suggest so is pure speculation with no basis in the public record. TransLink is not running the Plebiscite, nor are they particularly in favour of it. Every indication is that TransLink has the same position as the Mayors (if I may paraphrase: “we wish we didn’t have to go through this exercise to get adequate funding, but if this is the only path provided to us to build our service level, let’s get going).

This Plebiscite will raise funds to build capital projects, and the funds raised are specifically earmarked for the projects proposed. The province and Mayors have agreed to annual external audits and reporting on how the funds are spent, providing a level of transparency and accountability unparalleled in the history of transportation capital budgeting in the province. This money is not going into a TransLink black hole, but into tangible assets we can see operating. If you want to see more accountability in how TransLink spends, this provides it.

In summary

I am very much on the record in my support for limiting the lanes on the Pattullo to 4 lanes, and tolling the bridge; I have advocated for better public transit in New Westminster; I have supported the mode shift goals of the Master Transportation Plan; and I have supported working with our regional partners to build a more sustainable transportation network;

All of these goals are supported by a YES vote on the Plebiscite,
None of them are supported by a NO vote.
So I’m voting YES.

Fare Evasion and Jordan Bateman

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 4 Comments.

There was furious action on the War on Public Transit this week, as our local Libertarian hypocrite from the misnamed Canadian Taxpayers Federation again got unexplained media saturation by suggesting that fare evasion on lower mainland transit is some sort of a scandal, or worse – proof of incompetence at TransLink. It sounds compelling, but it is just predictable CTF misinformation.

Allow me to explain.

The latest CTF anti-transit rhetorical volley is based on data released on the “no fare paid” button on TransLink buses. This is the process through with bus drivers account for improperly paid fares (fare evaders, those paying too much, those crossing a zone boundary without paying the premium, etc). Drivers counted 2.76 Million incorrect fares in 2013, which is an increase of 250,000 over 2011. This, in the rhetorical world of the CTF, proves that TransLink is irresponsible, inefficient, and cannot be trusted with the public’s purse. It is further implied that if they could only solve this simple problem, TransLink may not need those new funds being requested through the upcoming referendum.

There are several problems with this narrative, and I might be accused of senseless idealism when I expect our “liberal media” to point them out instead of just parroting Bateman talking points.

For example, the media could put the numbers in perspective. 10 seconds on Google, and one can find TransLink’s financial disclosures, and find that there were 355 Million boardings in the TransLink system in 2013. That means 2.76 Million “non-fares” represent 0.8% of the boardings. In a rational world, an organization as worried about the public purse as the CTF would be touting TransLink’s phenomenal record of collecting fares from 99.2% of passengers on a crowded, chaotic, distributed system with literally thousands of moving fare collection stations comprising what is, essentially, an honour system*.

The CTF makes further hay out of the trend. A 10% increase in “fare evasion” since 2011 sure sounds like a trend should be worried about. Except again, no. TransLink collected $433Million in fare revenue in 2011 and $481 Million in 2013. Over those two years, ridership basically flatlined (356M boardings to 355M boardings, thanks to “rationalization” of routes) but fare revenue went up by 11%. Again, the CTF fails to tout that TransLink is doing an 11% better job squeezing users for revenue, reducing the burden on the poor taxpayer the only way they can without senior government approval.

What about the lost money though? Surely this means TransLink is hemorrhaging money due to scofflaws and lazy drivers? Again, the data says something different. Assuming those fare evaders would have paid if forced to (instead of just walking or hitchhiking or dying where they stood, whatever) that would have resulted in about $7 Million more revenue. Compare that to the $481 Million in fare revenue collected in 2013, and it represents a 1.4% revenue bleed, which is not unsubstantial, but hardly breaks the bank. In comparison, the Congestion Improvement Tax (ugh, still hate that stupid moniker) will raise about $250 Million per year, all of which will go to Capital Projects, not operations.

When Bateman says “TransLink can’t properly manage the system they already have – they certainly can’t be trusted with another $7.5 billion of our money,” he is suggesting not just that this fare evasion is a huge problem, but that TransLink is incompetent at stopping it. What he doesn’t suggest is a way to close that gap, and there is a good reason for that: diminishing returns.

Yes, we could put an armed guard on every bus enforcing payment and issuing receipts, and fare evasion would approach zero, but it would be prohibitively expensive, and the return on revenue would not cover the cost. This has been the central story all along on the Falcon Gate fiasco – TransLink was forced by the Former Minister of Transportation to install an expensive faregate system that TransLink knew would never cover the cost of the fares evasion it was meant to prevent. (Oh, and it is just a coincidence that that the guy who tried to get that same Minister of Transportation made into the Premier is now going to lead the NO campaign for the CTF, but I digress).

Any rational person has to understand that fare-evasion-zero is not possible (just like Zero Tolerance on parking meter violations or speeding or drugs is impossible). A rational person with any business sense at all says that reasonable effort should be made to push that evasion towards zero, up until the point where the cost of those efforts exceeds the money saved through enforcement. Pushing past that point makes no monetary sense if the goal of fares is to earn revenue. I frankly don’t know what that magic point is – at what point further enforcement costs more than it is worth – but if I was a betting man, I would put my money on something around 1%, because that is a common number the tolerance TransLink and other transit systems gravitate towards. Bateman thinks it is a different number (closer to zero), but I’d like to see him (a person with no experience running a multi-modal transit system) demonstrate what that number is, and explain his rationale.**

But he won’t, because he is not interested in public policy or rational discussion. He is interested in getting headlines by making irrational arguments that clip well in order to get donations for his organization. And our media provide him that free advertising every day.

If you think I am being mean to Jordan Bateman, you are right, because he used to be someone I respected. As a City Councillor in Langley, he was a voice of reason and an excellent communicator. I didn’t often agree with his politics, but always liked the way he tried to explain his thought process through contentious issues. I know people who worked for him, and he had a reputation as a Councillor who did his homework, collected the data he needed to understand issues, and defended his decisions based on that knowledge. He knew that there was an objective truth and that good governance required it. He was the kind of City Councillor I want to be. This makes him a disappointment whenever I see him acting like a clown for the TV cameras.

Back then, Bateman not only had a much more rational approach to taxation, he was a supporter of increased capital funding to TransLink to provide improved light rail and transit service, specifically so his children would not be cursed with another generation of entrenched motordom. Unfortunately, he is now the one person in the province most interested in leading the campaign against exactly what he called for 7 years ago. And he has yet to provide any meaningful reason why he changed his mind.

And that is a shame. For him, for his kids, and for all of us who want to improve our region.

And I know just by responding to him, I am falling for some sort of Streisand Effect trap he is setting. The result? Just watch, 4 months from now, when the referendum campaigns are in full swing, scofflaw fare evaders and TransLink’s refusal to address this issue are going to be major points repeated uncritically in the media, as Bateman and his ilk keep hitting that drum while providing no actual context to the discussion, until it becomes just another part of the “common sense” that no-one can deny. The lie will become truth, thanks to a guy who used to know the difference.

*Actually, the ever succinct Canspice points out bus boardings in 2013 were actually 228 Million, my number includes SkyTrain boardings. I’m not sure which number is better to use, but I guess whether you are trying to make the point that Bus Drivers are useless or that TransLink is incompetent. As noted by Canspice, if your argument is simply the CTF’s standard “ALL TAXES BAD!”, then I guess it doesn’t matter.

** In looking for this number, I found two fascinating research papers, one using Game Theory to determine if Fare Gates make sense for a public transit system (Optimal choices of fare collection systems for public transportation: barrier versus barrier free: Yasuo Sasaki, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological Volume 60, February 2014, Pages 107–114) and another using multi-variable calculus and economic modelling to determine what the optimum fare inspection rate is for a proof-of-fare transit system like SkyTrain (Fare evasion in proof-of-payment transit systems; Deriving the optimum inspection level: Benedetto Barabino, Sara Salis, and Bruno Useli, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Volume 70, December 2014, Pages 1–17).

    

Communications breakdown

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Thing have gotten a little crazy around here, and by around here, I mean here in the internet.

It all seemed to make sense at some point, but now after having set up a Campaign, then getting elected, things have gotten out of hand. I suddenly find myself with two Twitter handles, two Facebook pages, three webpages/blogs, 5 e-mail accounts, 5 phone numbers, two smart phones, and not time to generate any content on any of them.

So things are going to change.

The plan so far looks like this:

Twitter: I’m bringing @NWimby to an end. It was a fun 14,000+ tweets, but it is time. I needed to set up a different account for the campaign (for a variety of reasons related to Elections Act authorizations, linking the account to my NationBuilder account, etc.) and had I not been successful, I probably would have just nuked that one and gone back to @NWimby. However, the way things turned out, it makes sense to keep the @PJNewWest handle, and start re-building the follower base. I suspect @NWimby will sit there as a largely-ignored legacy for a while, because there are some epic Twitter exchanges in there.

So if you want to follow @NWimby, follow @PJNewWest.

Facebook: I have no idea what the plan is here. I really don’t like Facebook. It has a utility in keeping up with some geographically-distant friends and family, but I am increasingly finding it more of a hassle than it is worth. A local friend one told me “Twitter makes you want to buy as drink for someone you have never met, Facebook makes you want to toss your drink at someone you thought you knew.”

During the election, I used Facebook to transmit info, to identify supporters, and for a little self-promotion. However, I also found that it was a popular media for critics to say less flattering things about me. I have no problem with that, I bring that on myself every time I open my fat mouth. The problem on Facebook is that criticism rarely appeared in pages that I frequented, but instead on pages I have no connection with, so I was rarely able to respond or correct the record. And this got me thinking about how Facebook essentially fails as a social media. Now that my NewsFeed is dominated by auto-running videos of people doing stupid things with trucks, I cannot even fathom why I am still there.

So my Facebook pages are still active, but I may not be there much. I have no strategy yet.

Webpages: I have been blogging pretty consistently for 5 years now, first as GreenNewWest then as NWimby, and in parallel with TignPat. I also did a bit of blogging during the campaign on my campaign website. Again, at the time it made sense to keep these separate, and if the Campaign thing didn’t work out, I could quickly cast the new site to the ether. Now I need to re-jig.

I am going to keep blogging. In the short term, that will be at NWimby. Sometime early in the New Year, there will be a new PatrickJohnstone.ca website, and NWimby will go away. I will port all of the 5 years of NWimby goodness to that new site, so the legacy will still be there. The new website will be the main portal for my non-Official-City-of-New-Westminster communications, and should be significantly spiffier than the current mess that is NWimby. The same lame content, though. And TignPat will pretty much stay where it is, being updated whenever adventure takes place.

E-mail: I’m working on getting away from the Telus webmail thing, as I have had that e-mail address for so long and used it to register for so many different things that it is essentially a place where spam goes to die. I set up a Gmail account for the campaign, and it seems to be the most adaptable format for most things. I will be making some adjustments related to the webpage, so I will probably create a new e-mail address that will forward automatically to Gmail for my personal stuff, like info@patrickjohnstone.ca does now. Stay tuned, but in the meantime (and foreseeable future) you can use that address.

For Official New Westminster Council business, I have been given the e-mail pjohnstone@newwestcity.ca which I will use for just that –official City business. If you want to complain to me about something, send kudos, have a question related to the City, you can use that one.

However, remember that e-mail belongs to the City, and because of FOI rules and such, you might not want to send me anything there you wouldn’t want to see published on the front page of the Newspaper. For much the same reason, I will NOT be using my Gmail account for any official City business.

Phone: The Original Social Media(tm). I have an unofficial phone number which I will hand out to people on a need-to-know basis. I suspect MsNWimby and I have reached the point where our land line is no longer a useful utility, so that number might go away. If you have my 778- cell number, you can use that. Much like withthe e-mail, the City gave me an official number as well, and if you want to chat about City business or have a question that just can’t wait, you can try 604-679-6784. I might answer, if I can figure out this Blackberry thing.

And that’s the breakdown on my communications future. Let’s see how it works out.

As a post-script, my new role requires that I say one thing: my social media comments, writings, posts, and opinions are mine. People will not be posting for me, and I don’t have an editor. Also, nothing I say should be construed to represent the official opinion of the City, or of any other member of Council. Every member of Council is capable of providing their own opinions, and the City has communications staff to transmit information the City needs transmitted, this is not the media for those communications. I may sometimes quote other people, and I may point to official communications, but I will make it clear when I am doing that

I say this fully cognizant that there are a few outspoken people in New Westminster who will purposely try to blur that distinction to create a controversy, if it suits their agenda. That is to be expected, and part of what a politician has to deal with if (s)he wants to continue to be as outspoken and opinionated after the election as (s)he was before the election. So just to be clear: I have opinions; I am not the City.

I hope everyone has a great Holiday, doing the things you love with the people you love. See you in what is promising to be an exciting 2015!

Getting to Yes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

Now that everything is looking official, we can start preparing for the TransLink Transit Transportation Transportation & Transit Referendum Plebiscite. The Premier Minister of Transportation will let the people Registered Voters of BC the Lower Mainland vote on increasing the PST installing a new Provincial MetroVancouver-only PST-like Congestion Improvement Tax to feed the piggies at the TransLink trough finally reduce congestion build a SkyTrain to UBC long-needed improvements to local transportation infrastructure.

Ugh, I should not listen to AM radio.

It should be no surprise to my few readers (Hi Mom!) that I am supporting the “yes” side of this referendum, and will be actively campaigning in the spring to help it pass. So I will be writing about the referendum on this blog until most of you are sick of it.

To start things off, I want to talk about what I see as the biggest narrative being drawn up by the NO side forces: the argument that TransLink does not “deserve” more tax money. This sounds like what we hear on CKNW daily: “We should vote NO to send them a message”. The “them” to whom the message is being sent, and the content of the actual message, are shifting details to the overall narrative: Send them a message.

I have even received e-mails and had Twitter exchanges with people whose opinions I respect on a variety of issues that repeat a version of this refrain. So let’s address it (and much below was pulled from e-mails I sent these people in response – I’m plagiarizing myself now!)

Anyone who thinks this referendum is the appropriate place to launch some sort of “taxpayers revolt” is missing their mark in a pretty significant way. A NO vote will not tell the Province or the Mayors that “we pay too much tax already”. Trust me, they already got that message ad nauseum. This is the actual reason the Premier has taken the cowardly route and created this silly referendum exercise that allows her to dodge the blame for any costs related to regional transportation infrastructure, why the Minister of Transportation has nixed all of the earlier alternative payment schemes, and why the Mayors have been diligently pushing back saying “this is your responsibility, not ours”. None of them want to own any tax once it is implemented.

Instead, a NO vote will deliver the Province exactly what they want – an excuse not to invest in public transportation, a download of their responsibility to provide transportation infrastructure funding to the Lower Mainland, and a way to reduce their operational costs by reducing public service. They will proudly talk of being prudent protectors of the public purse (despite their actual record: see BC Place, Site C, Golden Ears Bridge, BC Hydro, etc.), and if the Mayors step up to fund this basic public service through Property Taxes, the Premier play to the CKNW crowd by calling them reckless spendthrifts that throw public money around needlessly with no regard for the poor suffering taxpayer (see downloading of ambulance services, mental health, housing, etc.).

Further, a NO vote will send this Provincial Government the message that when they want to fund a public service (the Massey replacement, an $8 billion dam of dubious need, a new roof for a stadium, etc.) they will just do it without consultation, but when they don’t want to fund a public service (Transit, public health, housing, schools, etc.) they will send the plan to a Referendum and get the public to say no when they don’t have the balls to say so themselves, because they can count on another misplaced “taxpayer revolt”.

That will be a very, very bad precedent for governance in our Province, as with a continued reduction in public service, those taxpayer revolts will become more reliable. That is how the neo-liberal downward spiral is mapped.

If you agree we need to stop cutting transit service (two bus lines reduced in New Westminster in the last year alone!), and need to start re-investing in transit infrastructure, then this YES vote is the only way we will see that happen in the next decade. Because the only “Plan B” anyone can see on the horizon right now is funding this entire thing through property taxes, and I cannot imagine the Mayors will agree on a formula for that in any kind of short order. And there is no way in hell the Provincial government who just witnessed a NO vote on public transit funding is going to then turn around and introduce any kind of new funding scheme for public transit.

Worse, after a NO vote, the Province is still going to move ahead spending ~$3 Billion on a replacement for the Massey Tunnel, and will then spend billions more on suddenly-required Oak Street Bridge replacement, and widening Highway 99 and or 91, then a new Second Narrows Crossing, a 6- or 8-lane Pattullo Bridge, and on and on with bigger highways and bridges as we try to figure out how to move a million more people through this region when the public transit system fails. And they sure as hell are not going to have a referendum on any of those projects. You won’t get to say NO, because by saying NO this time, you already said YES.

This referendum is a dumb idea, and represents terrible governance. However, this is the situation we are in, and we need to make it work, for the future of the region. The Mayors have climbed Mount Impossible and come up with a unified vision and a reasonable (if sub-optimal) way to fund it. We need to get behind it, or a generation of transit infrastructure growth may be lost, and the impact on our region will be worse even than the damage that was done by the Worlds Widest Bridge.

So I am going to be going door-to-door in the spring, and I am going to be reaching out to as many people as possible – we need to vote YES for more sustainable transportation infrastructure and for the future of our region’s sustainability.

Election Results – finally

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

No sign that I have been too busy to blog is more clear than the fact I have not had a chance to write about the election results yet. Things are settling a bit, and now that I can chew on the poll-by-poll results, I can start to throw some conjecture on top of my pre-conceived notions.

I have my own ideas about what went well during my campaign and what didn’t. I also put a lot of effort in during the campaign to get out of my own bubble and talk to people who didn’t know who I was and didn’t already support me. Yes, the NWDLC endorsement helped, as did the Citizen of the Year legacy. However, even I was surprised at the doorstep how large a percentage of voters cared about environmental concerns – the coal terminal, Kinder Morgan pipeline, and tree protection in the City came up more often than I might have expected. This last one really buoyed my confidence as the campaign went on. I also had an extremely successful fundraising program, which allowed me to buy a lot of ad space on paper and on-line. This definitely showed during the last week of the campaign, as people at the doorstep really started to know my name before I could introduce myself. “Campaigning” is from the Latin for “shameless self-promotion”.

However, identifying “my constituency” was a tough job. I think my support in the social media audience in the City (the “Twitterati”) was as strong as anyone’s, but by its very nature, this is small, distributed, and nearly impossible group to identify in poll data. I felt much more confident in identifying my opponents’ constituencies (e.g.: She’s do well in Sapperton, He’ll do well in Queensborough, etc) than I was able to self-evaluate. So let’s look at the data and see what we can imagine we see:

This table shows (unofficial!)poll-by-poll results. The winner of the poll is marked in dark green; the 2nd to 6th place finishers (i.e. the rest of the imagined caucus for that poll) are shaded light green; the 7th to 12th place fishers (let’s call them the shadow cabinet) are marked in light yellow, and the 13th to 18th place finishers (the also-rans) are shaded pink. The last three place finishers in each poll are not shaded. The next table is better for looking at overall trends, but this is better for looking at anomalies.

you are going to want to click to make visible

It is clear the Puchmayr and Williams dominated this election. They led the total vote count by a handy margin, and won 9 polls between them. Of the 38 polls they were in (19 each), they were in the Top 6 in 37 of them. The anomaly being Williams finishing 7th at Herbert Spencer, apparently the victim of a surge in Kainth and Folka votes from that Queens Park/Glenbrook North catchment.
The other two Incumbents shared 4 poll wins, three for McEvoy and one for Harper. The former won three polls surrounding Queens Park, the latter we may start calling the “Mayor of Queensborough” with his solid win at Queen Elizabeth.

The Queensborough vote is also interesting in that only 3 of the people eventually elected finished in the Top 6 here, with Cartwright, Kainth, and (Queensborough resident) Palmer filling the top part of the poll. The other similar anomaly is F.W.Howay in Massey Heights, where again Cartwright, Kainth, and Donnelly finished toward the top. I can’t help but notice I was not in the top 6 in either of these polls. I read this as saying I got a push from being supported by the Incumbents, as the “protest vote” generally didn’t fall towards me. No surprise there, as I did not run a campaign of protest.
Speaking of protest, it appears the Great Sapperton Revolt promised by some during the lead-up to the campaign simply did not occur. Yes, Cartwright dominated the Pensioners Hall poll, and won the Richard McBride poll as well, but for the most part Incumbents did well in both of these polls, with almost all of them (4 for 4 in one, 3 for 4 in the other) finishing in the Top 6.

I have my own theory about the Cartwright result. She was a well-spoken and easy to like candidate who, in my opinion, sold well to the traditional Betty McIntosh voter. I suspect she drew much of the vote that Scott McIntosh was hoping to receive from the name recognition. This shows in Cartwright’s strong result in the polls where incumbents did less well, and in the two Sapperton polls where Betty usually did well. This may also be reflected in that McIntosh the Younger did not get a similar boost in those polls (his 10th and 11th place in those polls is where he finished in almost every poll).

Finally, I won a single poll – the one at the Shops at New West Station. I have no idea what that means – Who voted there? The residents of Plaza 88? SkyTrain users? People I met at SpudShack? If it was the Twitter/NEXTNewWest crowd, I would have expected Kainth to get a similar boost, but she finished pretty much at her average position in this poll. It’s a mystery to me what that poll means. Probably just another anomaly.

Another way to look at the numbers is to see what rank everyone finished in each poll; in this table, think of golf, as a low score is better:

yeah, click, in a second window, so you can refer back to it. 

At the right side, I added up every poll that the candidate won, and counted the number of polls in which they finished in the top 6. Then I calculated their average finish (which is only interesting in pointing out which polls the candidate finished higher or lower than their average), and the standard deviation (which showed some interesting results. The highlighted yellow squares are just numbers I wanted to draw attention to.

Again, the Puchmayr/Williams dominance is obvious. For us newbies, I won a poll, but Mary finished in the top 6 in one more poll than I did. It seems intuitive, but only those who got elected finished in the top 6 of more than ½ of the polls.

The Queen Elizabeth (Queensborough) poll isn’t as anomalous as one might expect, except that Palmer punched above his weight in his own neighbourhood, and Raj Gupta’s one-shot strategy of covering all of Queensborough with randomly-located signs definitely paid off, as he almost cracked the top 10, and wasn’t even close anywhere else.

Showing how important it is to get out of your “bubble” during the campaign, both Cartwright and Kainth won more polls than Harper, me, or Trentadue, but finished behind us because they had too many polls where they just didn’t show. The Standard Deviation column shows the consistency across polls. No surprise Kadioglu was the most consistent, finishing dead last in every single poll, but the consistency of Puchmayr is an example of what you need to do to win the election overall. I’m actually a little disappointed with my SD of 2.5, as I spent a lot of time every neighbourhood in the City. I spread my doorknocking around, especially early when I was purposefully trying to gauge and engage the populace in different parts of the City.

I think an interesting contrast is Kainth’s SD of 3.8 when compared to Brett’s notable 0.8, especially as I saw them as running very similar campaigns. They both had great sign strategies, spend a lot on newspaper and on-line ads, and had great social media presence. They also both have deep community roots and could conceivably draw from established constituencies. Despite these similarities, Kainth saw either very high or very low support where Brett was remarkably consistent, finishing pretty much 10th across the board.

Which proves, as I always expected, I know nothing at all about politics.