A rookie city councillor elected in a byelection last October has now set his sights on becoming Vancouver’s next mayor.
Hector Bremner, a member of the Non Partisan Association, confirmed Monday what many city hall watchers predicted would happen when he convincingly won the Oct. 14 byelection. Bremner said his entry into the race is not based on ego, but to make Vancouver more affordable for the average resident.
“It’s certainly not about me,” Bremner told the Courier Monday. “I don’t think that my ego or anything requires me to do this. It’s really quite mission specific. While my name’s on the ballot, there’s a group of us who feel strongly that Vancouver’s broken, politics is broken and we need to do it better.”
The 36-year-old vice-president of public affairs for the Pace Group will first have to win his party’s mayoral nomination race — tentatively scheduled for April 29 — before he gets a chance to implement his agenda.
Though Bremner is a councillor, the NPA only holds four of 11 seats on a council ruled by Mayor Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver. Vision’s majority has made it difficult, if not impossible, for the NPA to implement policy or make radical changes.
So far, Bremner faces a field of potential candidates in his party that includes financial analyst Glen Chernen, urban geographer and film producer Colleen Hardwick, entrepreneur Chris Hasek-Watt and former Conservative MP Wai Young. Each person has either requested or picked up an application form from the party to seek the NPA’s mayoral position, said Gregory Baker, the NPA’s president.
Kirk LaPointe, who was a likely contender after he won 73,443 votes in the 2014 race, announced last week via Twitter that he wouldn’t compete in the contest. Baker said LaPointe’s withdrawal signaled to him “that it was not enough for the party to sit back and be complacent.”
He said the party continues to look for more potential mayoral candidates.
“Some people don’t know they want to run for mayor, and may make great candidates,” Baker said. “If you’re building a hockey team and you just go ask your hockey buddies to come and join the team, and you don’t realize that Sidney Crosby might be able to play, then you haven’t done your job.”
Whether Bremner is that Sidney Crosby is an open question. His advantage over the others, including potential mayoral candidates from other parties, is an obvious one: He is a sitting councillor who is able to build his profile, name recognition and — if he wins the nomination — effectively campaign at city hall until the October election.
Chernen, who unsuccessfully challenged Bremner in the party’s nomination race to select a council candidate for the Oct. 14 byelection race, acknowledged Bremner’s profile. But, Chernen said, he “comes with a lot of baggage,” referring to his ties to the provincial Liberals and operating as a registered lobbyist.
“Good luck to him,” Chernen said.
Bremner’s byelection campaign, like the majority of candidates who competed in the Oct. 14 race, was targeted at addressing the housing crisis in Vancouver. He reiterated Monday many of the same planks of the platform he ran on last October.
His planincludes stopping spot rezoning of neighbourhoods, freeing up the building permit process and having the city better utilize its land for affordable housing. More townhouses and other forms of housing are needed, he added.
“We warned everybody that we’re zealots and that we’re very focused on fixing the housing crisis and bringing forward real solutions that’s going to affect middle class people in particular, who have been left behind in the last 10 years,” said Bremner, who made the same point last week in criticizing the Northeast False Creek plan for its perceived lack of affordable housing for the middle class.
The Edmonton-born Bremner rents a three-bedroom condo downtown for $2,750 per month, where he, his wife and two children live. But, as Bremner told the Courier when he campaigned in the byelection, he knows what it’s like not to have a home, telling a story of how his family’s business of selling and servicing satellite dishes went bankrupt in the 1990s and “we lost everything.”
“At one point, in Calgary, we had kind of what you would call a [single-room-occupancy hotel] almost and we couldn’t afford to eat and pay rent,” he said last September. “So the guy took mercy on us — the landlord. He would move my father and I from unit to unit as one was available… we had two mattresses on the floor and a red toolbox to sit on. That was my life for a long time.”
Vision Vancouver and the Green Party have yet to indicate whether they will run a mayoral candidate. Robertson, who was first elected in 2008, announced in January that he would not seek a fourth term as mayor.
@Howellings
