Honestly I'm a little too wired to know what to say about these unofficial results - except that Vision are the clear winners - but I'll try. Adriane Carr, the lone Green candidate, bounced in and out of the tenth council spot for most of the last hour, with the last poll (in friendly West End territory) making all the difference. That last poll also pushed COPE's Ellen Woodsworth over Bill Yuen of the NPA, but not by enough to catch Carr - COPE has been wiped off of council and parks completely, ...

[caption id="attachment_4300" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="A selected image from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool. Image courtesy of Steven Godfrey."][/caption] [If you're reading this before 8pm, polls are open. Still lost or caught by surprise? Check out Spacing Vancouver's recommendation post for more information on how to vote and who to take a closer look at.] The first post of this series went some way to explaining Vancouver's relatively unique electoral system, but before the ballots start going into the box it's useful to go into a little more depth as to how it works - and doesn't work. To begin with, each voter will be presented with a list of 94 candidates across races for the mayoralty, council, parks board, and school board. Without a ward system, every Vancouverite gets one vote for mayor, ten for council, seven for parks board, and nine for school board, for a grand total of 27 votes. Counting votes is rather straight-forward - simply add up the totals and take the top ten, seven, or nine. This is first-past-the-post on a grand scale, with the potential for candidates to squeak through on a plurality twenty-seven times over. To make things simpler yet, most candidates in contention come branded with a particular electoral organization's stamp of approval. In English, Vancouver has entrenched party politics. It also, again relatively unusually, allows non-resident property owners to vote in its elections.

[caption id="attachment_4158" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="A selected image from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool. Part of a photo by Philip Tong."][/caption] When I found out that CBC was opening their audience for Wednesday night's mayoral debate between Robertson and Anton, I immediately slotted it into the week's schedule after Sunday's "Last Candidate Standing" and Monday's "Connecting People and Places" without much thought. After being herded into the studio and sitting through the mic checks, however, it was clear that any new information was going to be thoroughly squeezed through the television tube. If you want the definition of manufactured story, check out CBC's own coverage entitled "Occupy Vancouver dominates CBC mayor's debate." No mention, naturally, that the format was specifically designed to give Occupy the entire first third, with housing and transportation fighting for the scraps.

[caption id="attachment_4110" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Separated Bike Lanes: Vision/COPE will expand them, NSV wants consultation, NPA wants moratorium and various "fixes." Photo by Kathleen Corey."][/caption] Transportation, always a major topic during a civic election, has spiked somewhat in the last few days with prompting from public forums and the release of the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition's comprehensive survey. While both forms of information are useful, they allow candidates to shape their message a little too much at times. Given the right audience, the NPA's George Affleck will stick his neck out further than any other candidate in supporting road pricing in the most congested areas of Metro Vancouver. He'll also muse about solutions to bring a second bicycle lane to the Burrard Bridge and suggest that he doesn't have any particular separated bike lane qualms beside business consultation - unfortunately, a rather different tone than his Georgia Straight op-ed. Similarly, after the Green Party's Adriane Carr played to Sunday's audience by claiming that there were no traffic studies or public support to removing the viaducts, she was conspicuously silent at the next night's transportation forum despite ribbing from Vision's Geoff Meggs. Conversely, her explanation of the "bike-free streets" debacle was embarrassingly thorough as she clarified it to bike-free bus lanes - simply suggesting that cyclists and transit vehicles be given their own space would probably be a better phrasing yet. To be fair, she gave what may have been the night's most convincing arguments in favour of bike lane expansion. Meanwhile, at Sunday evening's Last Candidate Standing, the NPA's Sean Bickerton explained his support for transit based density and touted his use of transit. He's favoured removing the viaducts in the past, against what is now party line. At a Tuesday presser, however, he threw cyclists under that proverbial bus by dedicating an entire platform point to their perceived misbehaviour. While drivers and pedestrians are only covered by a vague "share the road" education campaign, Bickerton wants to bring in cyclist licensing while cracking down on sidewalk riding and those without their styrofoam hats (as opposed to a more balanced approach).

[caption id="attachment_4029" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Photo from the original October 15 march by Spacing Vancouver contributor Christopher Porter"][/caption] The City has just posted notices asking Occupy Vancouver campers to pack up and leave, but if last night's Last Candidate Standing event was any indication, OV is not about to disappear quietly. Indeed the event, located on the same block as OV, was subtly occupied in its own way by people of all ages who do not at all resemble their media caricatures. The key topics of the night revolved around financial issues: housing affordability and campaign contributions from developers loomed large. The three finalists pooled their final question time (supposed to be about what big change their vision would lead to in 20 years) into a group speech and moment of silence for Ashlie Gough - then a standing ovation that even the remaining NPA candidates couldn't say no to. Occupy Vancouver is not, strictly speaking, under the umbrella of issues Spacing normally covers - at least not in its critiquing of large scale economic systems and power brokers. Should it somehow survive and develop toward a Freetown Christiania or Black Rock City, our skills will be more at home pretentiously assaying the vernacular tarpaulin architecture, arranged in the organic tradition and trapped in the aesthetic bifurcation between pastiche and bricolage - with a patina of both hope and despair. The encampment has, however, found itself drawn into the local election cycle. This not solely by choice: Occupy Wall Street just happened to spin off into countless other cities just as British Columbia kicked off the only major municipal elections in Canada this year. Unfortunately, using the movement as a political pawn is an infinitely more effective opposition strategy when you're - sorry Randy Helten, Gerry McGuire et al. - the current mayor-in-waiting with only weeks until the polls. Even Rob Ford in Toronto hasn't yet decided on a plan.

Twitter may be downright dirty (see Friday's piece), but it's not the only front in the online campaign. Online ads, primarily on YouTube, have become a staple of local campaigns. They're infinitely cheaper than television ads to broadcast, but it takes a particular type of video to gain widespread attention - people who aren't likely to follow the debates aren't necessarily going to be that much more inclined to watch the YouTube equivalent. It's no surprise, then, that the most popular (and successful, if views are a measure of that) video is a silly parody attack ad from Vision-affiliated WeBackTheJuiceMan.ca. Funny will only get you so far, of course. Vision and COPE have several polished party policy planks, while the NPA have a slew of shorter pieces. Meanwhile, NPA candidate Jason Lamarche seems to have outproduced his own party and Sandy Garossino has been able to keep up as an independent. Campaign videos are carefully scripted, to be sure, but how the message is delivered is just as important as what is said - and what isn't said. The top video for each campaign so far, in descending order of views, is after the jump.

[caption id="attachment_3839" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="A selected image from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool. Image courtesy of Rick Forgo."][/caption] Since you're the kind of person to read online election articles, you probably already know that the three major parties - Vision, COPE, and the NPA - are all strongly represented online, along with independent candidate Sandy Garossino, veteran of the casino fight, and others. This is the election where social media finally becomes the make-or-break campaign tool, say the pundits, just as they've said for every election in recent memory. I disagree, and I disagree as someone who recently managed a election's "social media candidate" (the exact race is not important, but I have never had any role with any Vancouver party or candidate). On Facebook, we had the most friends, and both a page to "like" and a discussion group to join. On Twitter, we were one of the most prolific campaigns, but also the most likely to engage in an actual dialogue. Our YouTube videos allowed comments, as did the in-depth blog posts we were constantly rolling out with detailed links to relevant articles. We answered pretty much every question directed our way on the local forum while most candidates ignored it, and we did an in-depth interview with a local blogger in addition to all the surveys we knew would end up online.

[caption id="attachment_3679" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Selected images from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool. Images courtesy of Philip Tong and Ben Johnson. "][/caption] Over the past week, the Coalition of Progressive Electors have rolled out plank after plank for their transportation platform, setting the bar higher than any other party is willing to jump at this stage in the campaign. The October 20th release is an all-too-rare case of politicians acknowledging the causes of poor cyclist behaviour (especially riding on sidewalks). The ...

[caption id="attachment_3632" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="A selected image from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool. Image courtesy of Matt Magnan."][/caption] You might have noticed some rather contradictory information swirling about lately on the homelessness front of the municipal election. However, the numbers consistently referred to (yes, on both sides) come from the same sources, like the Greater Vancouver Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness as presented in the 2011 Homelessness Count. The back-and-forth spin takes quite a bit of effort to untangle, but here's roughly how it breaks down: Last Friday, Incumbent Vision Mayor Gregor Robertson held a press conference to point toward "the first year-over-year decline" in street homelessness "since counts started being made." Indeed, there was an 82% drop in the unsheltered count from 815 in 2008 to 145 in 2011. The rest of the Metro region managed a drop of 23%, but now finds itself responsible for 80% of the unsheltered homeless instead of just under half. On Monday, NPA Challenger Suzanne Anton fired back that the numbers actually show homelessness is an "increasing problem" in Vancouver. The count's section on total homelessness (street and sheltered) found a slight uptick from 1580 to 1605 in Vancouver proper. Regionally, it was a slight drop from 2660 to 2623. Both changes are less than 2%. The numbers are key, representing the apparent success or failure of a rather significant promise regarding homelessness from the previous campaign. The promise Robertson made was, however, to end street homelessness - not homelessness as a whole - by 2015, a policy goal still in place and seemingly quite achievable at this juncture.

[caption id="attachment_3484" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Thank you to Pakalakamino on Flickr for the source photo. "][/caption] A plethora of perambulating peripatetics and other pedestrians descended on Vancouver at the beginning of October to madly rush through 200 presentations from twenty countries in just three short days. It overlapped both CanU, which I wrote about last week, and a Spacing Vancouver contributors meeting at the same time, and my head has only just stopped spinning from the experience. By the second night, as I struggled valiantly with an avalanche of bright pink balloons alongside Spacing's national editor and local podcaster (true story - photo from another group), I felt the pressure of wanting to attend every single session close in with a rosy, claustrophobic haze. The simultaneously happy and sad reality was that it was simply impossible for anyone to take in all the interdisciplinary opportunities on offer - if it were, I'd still be there, two weeks later, trying to get my fill. Presentations in the breakout sessions ranged from the vague-but-feel-good advocacy victory video to data heavy analysis, and the variety was very much appreciated, if it did make for some tough choices. Note to cycling advocates looking forward to Velo-City 2012: practice your power-walking and learn to be in multiple places at once!