A common refrain from the roughly 70 per cent of registered voters who don’t vote in civic elections is that their vote won’t make a difference in the end result.
Ask Mary-Ann Booth if she agrees with that.
Booth was elected mayor of West Vancouver by just 21 votes. In Coquitlam, the eighth and final council seat was won by just nine votes.
So your vote really does matter.
In Burnaby, sure, it wasn’t even close. Mike Hurley throttled Derek Corrigan by 6,000 votes to become the new mayor of Burnaby (we’re still getting used to that sentence). However, Hurley getting his supporters out to vote was crucial. People clearly wanted a change in the top job and they could have sat at home and whined that their vote didn’t matter. Instead, they went out to polling stations and got the result they wanted.
Voter turnout rose roughly four percentage points. It’s still an embarrassing overall number, but we’ll take an increase as a victory for democracy.
So now what?
Burnaby got a stunning change at the top, but what will really change?
That’s up to the Burnaby Citizens Association. They still maintain a stranglehold on council with seven councillors and have the power to set the agenda and reject anything else.
But there are two new voices on council. The Burnaby Greens finally broke the monopoly of councillors by electing rocker Joe Keithley. (We’re also still getting used to that sentence.)
It’s tricky to interpret what Saturday’s results really mean. Voters were clearly saying they wanted some change in direction, while still managing to support the BCA’s stewardship of the city.
BCA councillors must feel they have a mandate to continue in the direction they were heading, but they should also pay attention to the other message voters were sending them.
In the hours after Corrigan’s historic defeat, many BCA councillors were saying all of the right things about how they were willing to work with Hurley and Keithley. In the months leading up to the election, the BCA did signal they were reversing direction somewhat on the housing issue to find ways to prevent renters from being demovicted.
Now that they were mostly re-elected, we hope they will keep those promises. But again, it’s a tricky political situation. Voters were clearly saying they liked what Hurley was saying, but the BCA will look ahead to four years from now when they will want to elect a mayor from their own party. They’ll want to look collaborative but also not want to make Hurley look good.
It will be tempting to sabotage Hurley and Keithley every step of the way. It could get ugly. We urge the BCA majority to not fall into that trap.
Take the high road – for the good of the city.
