Mayor Gregor Robertson is showing signs of campaign fever.
Fresh from the first defeat of his political career, the Vision Vancouver-led Yes campaign for TransLink expansion, Robertson is among the “Stop Harper” forces two years after Liberal leader Justin Trudeau unsuccessfully courted Robertson to run federally.
He emerged from summer vacation to host a Sept. 8 forum at city hall on a federal issue, the Syrian refugee crisis. Vancouver Quadra Liberal MP Joyce Murray, wearing bright Liberal red, was introduced from her front row seat.
Robertson aide Braeden Caley just so happens to be president of the Liberal Party of Canada in B.C., but it was then-city manager Penny Ballem who took one for the team. She claimed to be the one that OK’d Trudeau’s Sept. 10 news conference on the roof of civic engineering offices, not normally a partisan political venue.
Trudeau channeled Robertson in a speech promising to spend $20 billion from taxpayers on public transit as on-leave city hall bureaucrat Jessie Adcock stood behind him. The $170,280-a-year chief digital officer is running for the $167,400 job of Member of Parliament in Port Moody-Coquitlam. Adcock told her @VancouverCDO Twitter followers on Aug. 5 to follow @JessieAdcock until Oct. 20, but she retweeted Aug. 26 from her city hall account a photo of her behind ex-Prime Minister Paul Martin at a Liberal photo op. When it was noticed, she quietly pulled the plug on @VancouverCDO.
Robertson’s name was on the list of 300 supporters in a Sept. 8 letter demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper lobby the Egyptian government to free Al-Jazeera’s Mohamed Fahmy. A rare show of support for a journalist by a mayor who vowed, at his 2008 swearing-in, “I will not let you down on making city hall more open and accountable.” Vancouver city hall is one of Canada’s most-secretive, according to a 2014 Newspapers Canada report.
He was front-and-centre at an Oct. 1 Simon Fraser University Downtown election forum on transit and housing. Robertson often blames the feds for not helping him fulfill Vision’s 2008 promise to end street homelessness by 2015. He missed TransLink’s Sept. 25 board meeting in New Westminster to be in New York to launch Vancouver Economic Commission’s climate change campaign. VEC’s 2013-hired president is ex-Liberal Party of Canada CEO Ian McKay, who also attended Trudeau’s news conference in Vancouver.
Vision Coun. Geoff Meggs has appeared at NDP campaign events with leader Tom Mulcair and Vancouver-Granville candidate Mira Oreck, an East Vancouverite getting help from another Robertson aide, Kevin Quinlan. Oreck was Robertson’s aide during his abbreviated term as an NDP MLA, produced salty viral videos promoting Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election and is the public engagement director for the left-wing Broadbent Institute think tank. Her nominators include Vision-allied public relations agent Lesli Boldt, whose company moved in with Vision’s polling and robocalling partner Strategic Communications in 2013. When the Province newspaper caught the company paying the NDP’s Punjabi-speaking phone canvassers $13-an-hour, Stratcom blamed a subcontractor and vowed to give them the same $17-an-hour rate as English speakers.
In Vancouver-Centre, the fourth name on the list of nominators for longtime Liberal incumbent Hedy Fry is Trevor Loke. The ex-Vision parks board chair snubbed the NDP’s Constance Barnes, his ex-caucus mate, with this carefully worded endorsement: “I worked closely with the NDP’s candidate. I also worked with Hedy Fry. This election is about judgment and experience — and that’s why I’m supporting Hedy Fry.”
Veteran Fry campaigner Paul Nixey is Vision’s co-chair. Fry’s nomination signatories also include Steve Kukucha and Diamond Isinger. They have addresses on separate floors of the same West End condo tower where Robertson was believed to be living during last year’s civic election.
Kukucha was working behind the scenes at Trudeau’s Sept. 10 West Vancouver campaign stop with Vision board member Brittney Kerr. The “ku” in Wazuku Advisory Group (which donated $3,100 to Vision in 2014) is a registered B.C. lobbyist for Enbridge and was the so-called “wagon master” for Premier Christy Clark in the 2013 B.C. election. Isinger is the veteran Vision and Liberal social media strategist.
Even Leadnow, the group encouraging anti-Harper strategic voting, has a Robertson link. Executive director Lyndsay Poaps was on the Mayor’s Engaged City Task Force that recommended a citizen polling website in its May 2013 report. But plans for Angus Reid’s $152,080 no-bid Talk Vancouver website were already well-advanced.
@bobmackin
