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_4385" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Top 5: RJ Aquino (COPE), Geoff Meggs (Vision), Sandy Garossino (I), Andrea Reimer (Vision), Ellen Woodsworth (COPE)"][/caption] Spacing Vancouver brings together contributors from all facets of the urban experience - transportation policy wonks and affordable housing activists alike. Our contributors are volunteers, flaneurs, and professionals, with interests as diverse as our city's urban landscape. While we would not presume to tell you how to cast your ballot, you might be feeling lost with only one day left before election day - so we've compiled a list of council candidates that we think deserve a closer look. Check out the City of Vancouver's website for details on how and where you can cast a vote to support our shared urban environment on Saturday, November 19. More than a dozen contributors have pooled their preferences to produce the following list, ordered in rough decending order. All four major slates are represented, as are the lone Green and key independent - and while the vast majority of those who contributed plan to vote for Gregor Robertson to continue as mayor, Randy Helten and Suzanne Anton did register in our poll.

With the Vancouver Mayoral Election heating up, one of the city's major campaign issues has become affordable housing. Vision Vancouver is indeed declaring it this election's central issue.  With Vancouver having the nation's highest real estate prices housing affordability has taken centre stage.  "Affordable housing" is a phrase we will hear uttered regularly for what remains of the election, and I recommend asking your political party how they define it, and therefore a measure of success in achieving it.  Specifically interesting is Vision Vancouver's inclusion of market rental housing under its umbrella of 'affordable housing'.  With no form of rent control in place, landlords are free to charge a price as high as renters will pay.  With no limits I set out to answer what is the potential for affordability?

[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.

Are you a candidate running in the upcoming civic elections in the Lower Mainland? The CBC Early Edition would like to hear your one-minute pitch for why voters should support you on election day. Call in to the Candidates' Corner hotline at 604.662.6463. Introduce yourself with your full name, the municipality in which you're running, your party affiliation, and the position you're campaigning to win. Are you a voter in the Lower Mainland? Check here to see if candidates in your municipality have left us a message. ***

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.

DATE: Sunday, November 6, 2011 TIME: 7:00 to 9:30pm LOCATION: UBC Robson Square ADMISSION: free, but your must register at the EventBrite registration page. The 2011 edition of Last Candidate Standing is being co-produced by the Vancouver Public Space Network and UBC's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.  It's an election mixer and rotating debate that's open to all mayoral and council candidates.  If you're a mayoral or council candidate, this is your chance for fame and ever-lasting coolness... not to mention a chance to participate in the best idea-sharing forum in the election.