An NPA city councillor’s run to represent the B.C. Liberals in the riding of Vancouver-Fairview ended Sunday after she was defeated by a former executive assistant to Premier Christy Clark.
Elizabeth Ball lost the party’s nomination to Gabe Garfinkel, a 31-year-old owner of a health care communications consulting company who also worked as Clark’s director of stakeholder relations.
“Gabe had worked long and hard with the Liberal party and was well known -- and worked very hard in the neighbourhood for a long time making connections,” Ball told the Courier Monday. “He did a great job in bringing new people to the Liberal party. He’s a lovely young man. He’s very smart.”
More than 600 Liberal members were eligible to vote in Sunday’s nomination contest at the Holiday Inn on Broadway. About 60 per cent voted but the party did not release the vote spread.
Garfinkel said Monday he signed up the majority of new members in a campaign that he launched in November. Some of those members included his Hebrew teachers from Grade 1 and Grade 3 at Talmud Torah elementary school.
“I put together what I think is a great team, we had a game plan and we stuck to it,” he said. “The core of our strategy was just talking to people.”
Ball said she plans to finish her term as a councillor and has no current aspirations to seek another nomination before the May 9 provincial election. She is one of three NPA councillors on a council ruled by a Vision Vancouver majority, which often criticizes the Clark government for inaction on housing and health care. She didn’t anticipate she would be a target in council chambers because of her run with the Liberals.
“I think everybody is going to be very polite to me, and very nice to me in council,” said Ball, who first elected to council in 2005 and re-elected in 2011 and 2014. “I have always been extremely polite to everyone else, so I can’t imagine them doing something else. If they do, that’s their issue, not mine. And being linked to a party that actually is in government, I don’t think is actually something to hold against anyone.”
In 2012, Vision Coun. Geoff Meggs battled unsuccessfully to become the NDP’s candidate in Vancouver-Fairview but lost to George Heyman, who went on to win the riding in the 2013 election; he narrowly beat Liberal incumbent Margaret Macdiarmid by 1,300 votes. (Coincidentally, Meggs and Ball lost their nomination bids in the same Holiday Inn on Broadway.)
Heyman has a high profile in the riding, which has gone from NDP to Liberal and back to NDP in recent races. That history could work in Garfinkel’s favour but he realizes “I’m not the guy out there with the most name recognition.”
He said the main issue for him is to continue to boost and diversify the economy. Housing affordability is also a big issue in the riding, he said, noting he lives in an apartment near the Cambie Street Bridge.
“It’s a complex challenge that we’re facing – not one that has one solution, and it takes a lot of people working together to find those results,” he said.
Garfinkel has deep roots in Vancouver-Fairview, with his father growing up across the street from Douglas Park and his mother having worked as a social worker on Broadway for almost 40 years.
His grandmother, Ethel Karmel, founded and led the Cambie Heritage Boulevard Society, which convinced the city to make the boulevard a heritage landmark in 1991.
“There was a big announcement and a photo opp, so to speak, and I was the six-year-old planting the tree for the next generation,” he said.
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