The question is always the same as mayoral candidate Stephen Hammond and members of his NewCouncil.ca team knock on door after door in Victoria’s Oaklands neighbourhood: “Are you looking for a change?”
A surprising number of people say yes. “[Change] is not always that easy, but a lot of people are just really pissed off at the fact that this mayor and council just goes ahead and does what it wants,” Hammond says.
Bike lanes have been the No. 1 issue on the doorstep, but Hammond says people are not as upset about what Mayor Lisa Helps has done as they are about how she’s gone about it.
It’s a view shared by Tom Braybrook, who retired to Victoria five years ago. “I find the council pays a lot of lip service to consultation, but too many moves have been taken without consultation,” says Braybrook, a former alderman and deputy mayor in Niagara-on-the Lake, Ont. “For a council that prides itself on transparency and consultation, there have been just too many.”
Helps’s critics point to a what they say is a familiar pattern — whether it be adding bike lanes, removing the Sir John A. Macdonald statue from the steps of city hall or updating the Gonzales neighbourhood plan: Mayor and council push ahead with what they want to do, only to later retreat and/or apologize if and when the residents complain enough.
Helps squeaked into power in 2014 by nudging out incumbent mayor Dean Fortin by 89 votes and capturing 37.63 per cent of the vote — meaning most people voted for one of the other seven candidates. (There will be 10 names on the ballot this election.)
Fortin received 37.27 per cent of the vote, and the remaining 25.09 per cent was split between former Liberal cabinet member Ida Chong (13.40 per cent), broadcaster Stephen Andrew (9.74 per cent) and the other four candidates (just under two per cent). Voter turnout was just over 39 per cent.
“I’ve kind of thought that Ida defeated Dean,” says former Saanich mayor Frank Leonard. “She spent a lot of money attacking him and she brought him down, but didn’t bring herself up.”
With at least three credible challengers this time around, Helps doesn’t need to grow her base to win — she just needs to hold it and hope the opposition splits.
“I can’t see her growing her numbers all that much, so it’s really a question of that whole bloc of [other] votes — whether they coalesce around one of these leading guys,” says Michael Prince, the University of Victoria Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy.
Victoria has long been an NDP/Green stronghold. About 60 per cent of the city’s households rent in one of the country’s tightest and most expensive rental markets. A 2011 Statistics Canada survey pegged the median household income at $45,827 compared with $60,796 for the region; 32 per cent of residents gross less than $30,000 a year.
Of the city’s 85,700 residents, the largest age groups are between 25 and 29 and 30 to 34 — those most likely to oppose pipelines, ride bicycles and support bans on plastic bags.
For all her detractors, Helps does have a good base to draw from, Prince says.
She’s the only woman running against nine men, she’s a youthful incumbent and she’s got name recognition, he says, noting Helps will appeal to millenials. “These are people who love the phrase ‘doing it to save the planet.’ ”
Helps’s three main competitors are Hammond, a lawyer and management consultant, Michael (Big Mike) Geoghegan, a political lobbyist and consultant, and Vancouver Island University sociology professor Bruce McGuigan.
Key campaign themes for all of those wanting to be mayor? Affordability and a civic public consultation process that’s not working.
Geoghegan — a Saanich resident who trumpets endorsements from a range of supporters, including Saanich-raised and Los Angeles-based music producer David Foster and Langford Mayor Stew Young — was a ministerial assistant during the 1991-1996 government of NDP premier Mike Harcourt.
“I see a city that is sleep-walking toward a near future of being a city of only the very wealthy and the very poor,” says Geoghegan, who promises to lobby the province to build 2,000 to 5,000 units of student housing at UVic and Camosun College. That, he says, would have an immediate impact on rental vacancy rates, making more units available and stabilizing rents.
“Rents are still skyrocketing. That is the market screaming at us that we don’t have enough inventory,” he says.
Geoghegan says he is the main challenger to Helps — not Hammond, who he accuses of running a “modern-day, Republican-style” campaign based on “anger and fear and not hope and ideas.”
He, too, says Helps and council have not been listening to residents. “For someone who is very good at giving touchy-feely speeches, it’s been rather surprising at just how autocratic Victoria City Hall has been under the current mayor. I think that has turned off a lot of people,” Geoghegan says.
McGuigan, meanwhile, says the city hasn’t demanded enough of developers in the way of amenity contributions. The city should be building communities, not real estate empires, he says, and should “take a break” from some of the rush to develop.
“We’ve had an increase in density, an increase in supply — and an increase in costs. In simple economics, the reverse would be true,” he told a recent candidate forum sponsored by the Downtown Residents Association.
“We haven’t gotten from developers the community benefits that other municipalities have. The District of North Vancouver got $148 million, of which they dedicated $48 million to social housing. So if we had been doing what the District of North Vancouver has been doing, we would have been able to pay for a bridge and housing.”
He also thinks the new protected bike lanes on Pandora Avenue and Fort Street should be reconfigured so that cyclists travel in only one direction, moving in the same direction as motor vehicle traffic.
Hammond gained public profile as founder of the Mad As Hell citizen group, formed out of frustration over what members considered inaction by local officials over the tent city that dug in for eight months on provincially owned land behind the Victoria courthouse in 2016.
But as a mayoral candidate, Hammond is quick to disavow any notion that he is angry. Nor, he says, is he the right-wing demagogue some of his opponents would have you think he is.
Hammond concedes some prominent Conservative political operatives are volunteering on his campaign, but says some prominent New Democrats are, too. And records show that in recent elections he has contributed financially to the provincial NDP and the federal Liberals.
He says he doesn’t know or care what the political affiliation of his volunteers are. “But they’re not joining my campaign because of my politics, because most people don’t even know my politics.”
Helps’s failure to adequately consult is proven by her backtracking “on all the stuff that really irritated so many communities,” he says. “On the Cook Street bike lanes, for example, people had to scream bloody murder for two years and then it’s: ‘Oh gosh, I guess it can go down Vancouver after all.’ People are having to fight for common sense.”
But what others call backtracking, Helps calls listening.
“The job of somebody in a leadership position is to listen to feedback and to balance that feedback with advice received along the way from staff,” she says.
The city has undertaken hundreds of consultation processes over the past four years, Helps says, and while not all of them go well, the vast majority do.
“What I haven’t heard from any of my competitors is what their plans are for citizen engagement,” she says.
Helps says council has been taking steps toward affordability, citing a new inclusionary housing policy mandating a percentage of affordable rental units in all new condo buildings.
She also expects up to 130 units of affordable rental housing will be built over the city’s new fire hall on Johnson Street, along with 88 affordable units and child-care space at Burnside school. Victoria was the driver behind securing $90 million for affordable housing from the CRD, the province and the federal government, she says.
She’s proposing other measures, such as expanding the garden-suite program on oversized lots, exploring the concept of allowing moveable tiny homes, and gentle densification of some neighbourhoods through allowing four-plexes and five-plexes.
Overall, Helps has been pro-development. A website tracking council votes, launched by former Monday Magazine editor Sid Tafler, notes that Helps and Coun. Marianne Alto voted to approve 95 per cent of major development applications that came before council.
If advance polling is any indication, interest in the race is high: Fifty per cent more votes were cast in the first day of advance voting compared with 2014.
Still, as the Oct. 20 voting day nears, the only certainty surrounding Victoria’s mayoralty contest is that no one is sure what’s going to happen.
“I wouldn’t bet a nickel on this election,” says former Victoria councillor Shellie Gudgeon, who says she is undecided as to how she will vote.
Some on the campaign trail say they’ve never seen an electorate so polarized.
“But it’s not a left-right thing,” says council candidate Marg Gardiner, who has been actively campaigning since August. “It’s a great unrest.”
Helps finds it laughable that she’s seen as a polarizing figure, but concedes she’s terrible at politics. She thinks that’s because, rather than focusing on things that will get her elected in four years, she’s tackled issues whose real impact won’t be felt for 10 or 20 or 40 years — like bike lanes.
“Yoko Ono says: ‘When you do something, something happens.’ We’ve been doing a lot of doing over the last four years out of necessity. We’re woefully behind in terms of climate change,” Helps says. “Maybe they’re polarizing [issues]. Maybe people aren’t going to understand them. But that’s what’s needed to set the city up well for the future.”
Other mayoral candidates on the ballot are: Saul Andersen, David Arthur Johnston, RyMo (Ryan Moen), Alexander Schmid and Krzysztof Zmuda. Rob Duncan has unofficially withdrawn but will still appear on the ballot. He’s urging his supporters to vote for Geoghegan.
