Vancouver’s Green Party maintains it has not turned its back on the agreement with the Vancouver and District Labour Council.
“We haven’t walked away from it or anything like that, some people are trying to present it as that’s what we’re doing,” party spokesperson Jacquie Miller told the Courier.
Earlier this month, the VDLC announced agreements with the Green Party of Vancouver, Vision Vancouver, OneCity, COPE and Jean Swanson. At the time, the Greens said the party would run three council candidates, three for park board and three for school board.
However, at Wednesday night’s nomination meeting, party members elected four council candidates, three for park board and four for school board.
Miller said the decision to vary the number of candidates was made at a board meeting Monday night, however, she added, “The numbers we ultimately decided to run were the numbers we went to VDLC with.”
She said initially the party said it wanted to run three council candidates if Adriane Carr was going to run for mayor, and four council candidates if she decided against a mayoral bid, three park board candidates and four for school board.
Carr announced June 8 she would not run for mayor.
Miller added the board made the decision based on several factors — increasing membership, which has increased from around 200 to more than 750 in recent weeks, favourable polling results and the party’s successes in the last few elections.
“Ultimately the board felt that the party can elect those numbers and those were the numbers that we needed to run on behalf of our membership and our membership wouldn’t accept anything less than those numbers,” she said.
Miller said the party is hopeful it can update the VDLC agreement.
The party posted a statement on its website Thursday morning, saying: “The Green Party of Vancouver is in continuing discussions with the Vancouver District Labour Council (VDLC) about the number of candidates the Green Party of Vancouver will run, noting that Vision Vancouver, OneCity and COPE have all received VDLC support for running more candidates than the VDLC intends to endorse.”
So far the VDCL has not commented on the Green Party’s decision.
“We will be meeting to discuss the development with the Green Party early next week and will be able to comment further on it after that,” president Stephen von Sychowski said in an email.
