Seven Oaks Magazine.

In a result that apparently surprised both sides, a wards, or neighborhoods, system for electing Vancouver city councilors was rejected in a plebiscite this past Saturday, October 16. Community activist Mel Lehan of the Yes for Wards campaign spoke to Seven Oaks about the reasons for the defeat, and future prospects for implementing change to how we elect our representatives at City Hall.

1. Was this vote that defeated the Wards proposal, in a way, proof of the need for a system of regional representation?

Mel Lehan: I couldn’t have expressed it better myself. The very fact and the very way that the referendum was lost is proof that we need a ward system because a small percentage of wealthy people on the Westside, in the Southwest corner, that voted in high numbers in favour of the at-large system, defeated the rest of the city.

That’s the way it works in every single election. And that’s precisely why we’re going to a wards system, so that every community gets represented.

3. You had most of the councilors and the mayor backing the Yes for Wards campaign; why didn’t the Yes vote turnout?

Well, it did actually. We got 30 000 ‘yes’ votes and that’s a heck of a lot. It’s one of the highest turnouts in a referendum in history. It’s just that the Southwest corner already has the ward system, where one part of the city runs the whole city and they wanted to protect what they had so they came out. It’s always been that way. It’s always been that those that have power know how to hoard it.

4. This was the fifth time the issue of a wards system has been brought to Vancouver council. Can you give us a brief sketch of the history of this debate?

I think there was a referendum in the 70s that didn’t pass. I think there were three of them that passed in the 80s. And, in the 90s, there was one that was so garbled it didn’t make any sense – there were so many choices that nothing got a majority. And then there’s this one.

Every other major city in Canada has a wards system, except Vancouver. There is no other major city in Canada that doesn’t have it. And every major city in the United States, with the exception, I think, of Seattle and Portland, also have a wards system. It doesn’t make things worse, it simply improves things for neighborhoods. It makes things much closer to home.

6. Any chance this initiative will be brought back from the dead, like the RAV line?

Well, I’d like to think so, but I don’t know. It’s going to be very difficult. But time has a way of healing things, and changing things. And, who knows, maybe the opportunity will arise. I hope so.

7. I’ve also heard talk of a mixed system. Is there a proposal combining wards and at-large representation coming forward?

I hope not, because a mixed system is really a bad, bad compromise. It means you’d have about four or five wards, the city divided into four or five quadrants. They’re not wards, they’re mini-cities. The whole point of a ward is to create bite sized places where people are part of a community. If you have four or five quadrants, you simply just have five cities, and they don’t have any geographic or sociological base.