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SULLIVAN: Love trees, hate traffic? Make your vote count

This column has been modified since posting to correct errors in voter numbers. City of North Vancouver Mayor Darrell Mussatto received in the last municipal election. Mussatto won a fourth term with 5,488 votes, 52.
Sullivan

This column has been modified since posting to correct errors in voter numbers. City of North Vancouver Mayor Darrell Mussatto received in the last municipal election. Mussatto won a fourth term with 5,488 votes, 52.5 per cent overall, beating challengers Kerry Morris, who finished with 4,598 votes (44 per cent), and George Pringle, who finished with 375 votes (3.6 per cent). The number of ballots cast was 10,567. Approximately 30 per cent of the city’s eligible voters cast ballots.

 

The North Shore’s next municipal election is a little more than a year away, on Oct. 20, 2018.

As if you care.

Before you get your back up, the numbers back me up: fewer than one in three people cast a ballot in the 2014 municipal election.

The City of North Vancouver led the pack: 30 per cent of estimated eligible voters voted on Nov. 18, 2014.

Where was everyone else? Anywhere else, apparently.

The most common excuse is that it doesn’t make any difference if I vote or not. It may feel like that sometimes. Somehow, America’s Orange-Tinted Error became President even though he lost the popular vote. So who in their right mind would participate in an election that yields Donald Trump as the technical winner? Except that he was able to secure Electoral College votes by winning states that formerly went to Barack Obama. Mostly because Obama’s voters stayed home. Who knows why? Hillary’s bad pantsuits turned them off?

The point is that if enough American voters came out and voted by stated preference, the New York Nightmare would be scolding apprentices instead of freaking out the world on a daily basis.

Back to the North Shore. A while back, I wrote a piece citing a Vital Signs survey that revealed the biggest issues in North Vancouver. They were, in order, a love of our natural environment, the cost of housing and traffic. One, two, three.

People want their politicians to be fierce Guardians of the Garden, solve the affordable housing crisis and get traffic moving again.

If past elections are any indication more than two out of three people have abandoned all hope that municipal politicians can do anything about anything. The thing is, they can.

Municipal politicians determine official community plans, they control zoning, they approve developments, are responsible for local infrastructure and advocate for local improvements with provincial and federal politicians. They also participate on the Metro Board. Both City of North Van Mayor Darrell Mussatto and District Mayor Richard Walton hold or have held important Metro posts.

Oh, and Walton was acclaimed last time; no one bothered to run against him.

I have nothing bad to say about the mayors or most of the councillors. Nearly every one of them would make a better U.S. President than Donald Trump. Even I’d make a better U.S. President than Donald Trump. But the point is they operate in an echo chamber, undisturbed, with the exception of a few devoted council watchers who are basically hobbyists. Instead of bird-watching, they keep an eye on the sleepy-eyed open-collar councillor.

These folks are essentially elected by proxy. For every vote cast, two votes are held back, mostly on account of indifference. We’re pretty lucky that somehow we haven’t elected a slavering monster with a large signing budget.

So far, however, we haven’t elected anyone who has been able to solve our top three priorities.

I’d like to think, for example, that if a few credible candidates decided to run hard on a platform addressing our big three preoccupations, it would stimulate enough interest to double the vote on Oct. 20, which would still only represent a slim majority of eligible voters.

It’s not magic; it’s good old-fashioned political power: the larger the mandate the greater the power. Darrell Mussatto is mayor of the city because he got over 5,400 votes. His voice would be that much stronger in all his dealings if he drew more than 20,000 votes.

Of course, if more people vote for you, more people care about what you do. At some point, environmental protection, affordable housing and sane transportation become real imperatives, not merely lofty, unattainable goals.

Instead, we get another SeaBus. Whoopee.

Today, a year from the next North Shore election, this little rant probably comes across as naïve at best and deluded at worst. But I guarantee that if eight out of 10 of the good citizens of the North Shore decided to take their democracy seriously and spend half an hour voting for their priorities on Oct. 20, 2018, it would make international headlines … and generate some jet-propelled councils that will have to get serious about one, two and three.

I know these are vexing, intractable issues.
In Hong Kong, the market is responding to the affordable housing challenge by building sub-200-square-foot condos.

Leave it to the market and that will happen here.

Vote for change, actually vote, and watch what happens.

Journalist and communications consultant Paul Sullivan has been a North Vancouver resident since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Madonna. p.sullivan@breakthroughpr.com

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