Departed park board candidate Trish Kelly — who earned the most votes at Vision Vancouver’s June 22 nomination meeting to choose four new candidates — must have big shoes to fill because Vision’s executive decided to nominate not one but two people to replace her on the ballot.
The party announced Wednesday that Catherine Evans and Brent Granby, who came in sixth and seventh place respectively, are joining Coree Tull, Sammie Jo Rumbaua, Naveen Girn and incumbent commissioner Trevor Loke as Vision candidates running for six of seven available park board seats.
Both earned fewer votes than fifth-place finisher Graham Anderson, but party executive director Stepan Vdovine said he no longer wanted the job.
“We spoke to Graham in the last month and since the nomination process he has moved on with other things in life and he stated to us that he is no longer interested in the candidacy.”
Anderson, the cofounder of a tricycle-based cargo delivery service, is on a leave of absence for an extended cycling trip in the U.S. He did not immediately respond to an email seeking a comment.
When asked if Anderson’s reluctance was related to Kelly’s controversial withdrawal from the race, which many online commenters believe was due to party pressure to resign after the emergence of an eight-year-old video where she expressed enthusiasm for masturbation, Vdovine said this wasn’t the case.
“I don’t believe so. I think it was just personal reasons. He was the first person we went to because he was the next one down and I’ve had multiple conversations while he was down in California and he expressed that he was simply no longer interested.”
Evans received 526 votes and Granby 505, which combined is still 131 fewer than Kelly's 1,162 at the June party meeting.
Evans, a lawyer and chair of the Vancouver Library Board, initially campaigned to be a Vision candidate for city council, with the sole available spot instead going to outgoing park board commissioner Niki Sharma.
Evans told the Courier she now believes the park board would be a better fit.
“Initially I wanted to run for city council but I came into the race I think a little too late and, looking at the landscape, I decided it would be a better option for me to run for park board because of the kind of things I’m interested in, which is mainly public space issues,” she said.
Evans declined to speculate as to why the party executive decided to run six park board candidates instead of five as originally planned.
The NPA has five park board candidates, the Green Party two and COPE four with a fifth expected to soon be decided by its indigenous equity caucus.
The election is Nov. 15.
