Mayor Gregor Robertson is the Courier’s choice for Newsmaker of the Year.
Why?
The simple answer: He won a third term as mayor this year and again secured his Vision Vancouver team’s majority on council, a remarkable feat for a leader and party that was only created in the past decade.
Robertson’s victory is significant because he thwarted another serious challenge by an NPA mayoral candidate — Kirk LaPointe this time — and foiled the party’s plans to regain the power it lost at city hall in 2008.
That was big news.
Bigger, the Courier decided, than the Oppenheimer Park tent city protest, the school board gender policy controversy, the fight over whales and dolphins in captivity at the Vancouver Aquarium, the rise in lawsuits against the city and the financial scandal involving the PHS Community Services Society.
Those five events are our runners-up for Newsmaker of the Year but it could be argued that Robertson is connected to most of them in one way or another.
Don’t forget, Robertson also made news election night because of what his party didn’t do: return majorities to school board and park board. The NPA now controls park board and has four seats on the nine-person school board, with Vision holding four seats and the Greens with one.
What led to that shift is unclear but the controversy around the previous Vision park board’s decision to ban cetaceans from breeding at the aquarium and a power struggle over community centres that ended up in court likely had something to do with it. Three Vision park board commissioners also decided not to seek re-election.
At the school board, the heated debate over the board’s gender policy was as equally controversial as the rejection of corporate funding from Chevron, raising questions for groups of parents about Vision’s ideology.
Now the NPA’s Christopher Richardson — who, coincidentally, is a traffic cop — is the board’s new chairperson, ousting longtime Robertson ally Vision trustee Patti Bacchus.
While his colleagues faced their own challenges this year, Robertson endured months of pushback from residents. That came in the form of protests in and outside city hall and in lawsuits, largely over development and planning issues.
At the root of much of the disdain has been the allegation that Vision is moving too quickly on development and not listening to residents’ concerns about changes to their neighbourhood.
In an unprecedented acknowledgement of that opinion, Robertson used his time at a microphone during a CBC mayoral debate in November to apologize to residents.
“While we have done a lot of good things very well in the past six years, there’s also some things we haven’t done particularly well,” he said. “And for those, in particular, when I haven’t met your expectations, I am sorry and I know that if I’m re-elected again ... that I can do better.”
Even so, critics continue to pile on Robertson for his ambitious promise to end street homelessness by 2015. A homeless count in March revealed the city had the largest homeless population in the city’s history. That fact was top of mind for protesters from the Oppenheimer Park tent city when they lashed out at Robertson in council chambers in July.
“You promised that you would end homelessness and you haven’t,” Brody Williams told the mayor at a raucous council meeting. “In fact, it’s gotten worse. Shame on you.”
Another battle for the mayor has been his attempts to create more affordable housing in a city where expensive condominium towers continue to shoot up in an already dense forest of highrises.
While Robertson has boasted about increases to rental stock under such programs as Rental 100, his critics have said the rents are unaffordable.
But not everybody was upset with the mayor this year.
The civic election results showed Robertson collected an impressive 83,529 votes — a “vote of confidence,” he said in his inauguration speech Monday at Creekside Community Centre.
Vision supporters got behind an administration that over the past few years has increased childcare spaces, saw a spike in so-called green jobs, opened a rent bank, launched a database to track problem landlords, reached out to First Nations leaders during a year of reconciliation, stood up for the LGBTQ community and went ahead with bicycle and pedestrian upgrades to Point Grey Road.
Still, Robertson knows he can be a better listener to more than 90,000 voters who cast a ballot for another mayoral candidate other than him.
“I intend to work my hardest over the next four years to demonstrate that we’ve heard that call,” he said at his inauguration speech. “It will take work, and it will take an openness to the ideas, the perspectives and the voices of every member of council.”
He has four years to prove it.
RUNNERS-UP
