The City of Vancouver is holding it’s civic election this upcoming weekend. There are two main civic parties that are gunning for control of City Council – left of center Vision Vancouver, and right of center, Non Partisan Association (NPA)

The two leaders for each of the two parties are preppy white (this is a politically incorrect blog) business men, born with silver spoons in their mouths. And both men aspire to take the Mayor’s seat

Peter Ladner, NPA

What is most interesting is the blunt fact reflecting the support base for each of the two men. Their respective political donor’s lists does not reflect the cosmopolitan and often hyped, multi-cultural quality of this city. Demographics show that over half of the citizens of Vancouver are of a visible minority, with the Chinese community hovering around 30 percent.

A quick glance down each Mayoral’s candidate’s list indicates an absence of Chinese surnames. All this means is that it would be more difficult to tap into this electorate base.

And it gets more interesting.

Last week, some confidential information relating to our 2010 Olympic Athletes’ village was leaked out. And Mr Gregor Robertson of the left leaning Vision Vancouver party made sure that citizens of this City was aware of this “secret business” transaction. And that’s where this story begins

Gregor Robertson, Vision Vancouver

Here is what Mr Charlie Smith of the Georgia Straight wrote today

Why Estelle Lo matters in the Vancouver civic election

By Charlie Smith
November 12, 2008

Tonight, I checked the City of Vancouver Web site and saw that Estelle Lo is still listed as the city’s general manager of corporate services, director of finance, and chief financial officer.

She is identified as having overall responsibility for a bunch of areas, including “real estate and property management”.

But she wasn’t at the October 14 in-camera meeting at which city council approved a $100-million loan guarantee to ensure that the Olympic Village will be completed in time for the International Olympic Committee to take control of the site by next November.

Vision Vancouver councillor Tim Stevenson has alleged she either quit or has been fired–a claim rejected by NPA mayor Sam Sullivan.

Why is this significant from a political perspective?

One reason is that Lo is the highest ranking Chinese-speaking bureaucrat at City Hall, which is dominated by a mostly Caucasian senior civil service. She is the only Cantonese-speaking bureaucrat among the managers who head the 11 departments.

The only other top management official of Chinese descent is police Chief Jim Chu, who was born in Shanghai and who has admitted publicly that Mayor Sam Sullivan speaks better Cantonese than he does.

In this election, the NPA already faces new challenges attracting votes in the city’s large Cantonese-speaking population.

The party won’t have Sullivan at the top of the ticket. And Sullivan is very popular within the first-generation Cantonese-speaking subset of the Chinese Canadian community, in part because he has learned to speak the language.

Sullivan has also enjoyed the support of heavyweights in the Cantonese-speaking local community, such as Tung Chan and Maggie Ip. They probably weren’t pleased by Peter Ladner’s victory in the NPA mayoral-nomination race last June.

If Lo is fired or if she has already quit, this will be a major story in Sing Tao, Ming Pao, and on the Fairchild broadcasting outlets–three media outlets that cater to the city’s large Cantonese-speaking population.

It will also be a big story on Channel M, particulary on a popular talk show hosted by Guo Ding.

In past elections, the NPA has relied upon the Chinese-speaking community to win elections.

SFU public-policy professor Kennedy Stewart predicted earlier this year that there will be at least 18,000 Chinese-speaking voters in the 2008 Vancouver civic election on Saturday (November 15).

According to exit polling that Stewart and SFU graduate students conducted in 2005, Sullivan took 70 percent of the votes of Chinese-speaking residents in the last mayoral contest. That was more than enough to give him a narrow victory over Vision Vancouver candidate Jim Green.

In the 2006 census, 29 percent of Vancouver residents identified themselves as being of Chinese descent. Of course, many are second-, third-, and four-generation.

The 2006 census also reported that there were 331,795 residents in metropolitan Vancouver whose mother tongue was Chinese. This could include Cantonese, Hakka, Taiwanese, Chaochow (Teochow), Fukien, Shanghainese, and other Chinese languages not specified on the forms.

But where will those voters go this year in Vancouver?

Vision Vancouver has nominated three council candidates of Chinese descent–Raymond Louie, Kerry Jang, and George Chow. All three are highly regarded among many voters who trace their roots back to Hong Kong and southern China.

The NPA’s sole councillor of Chinese descent over the past three years was the rather underwhelming B.C. Lee, whose roots are in Taiwan.

An NPA mainstay in the Cantonese-speaking community was former school trustee and councillor Don Lee, but he died earlier this year. Lee was a Sullivan supporter.

Lo also traces her roots back to the same part of the world.

The NPA could face unexpected trouble if its dealings with a couple of Iranian real-estate developers at the helm of Millennium and their financiers on Wall Street trigger Lo’s departure.

That’s because this will be big news in the local Chinese-language media, which cares about all things real estate.

Chinese-speaking developers could rightly ask why one particular development company gets loan guarantees from taxpayers whereas nobody else enjoys this benefit–just at a time when the market is imploding.

Now that’s a story with legs in the Chinese-language media–especially if Chinese-speaking developers start grumbling publicly that the NPA has forsaken the community.

This is the NPA’s worst nightmare in the week of the election. Another problem? NPA council candidate Kanman Wong does not have Don Lee’s stature in Chinatown.

And the NPA’s other council candidate of Chinese descent, former senior banker David Lee, doesn’t have nearly the same populist appeal in the community as Vision Vancouver’s Chow.

Chow won nearly 18,000 votes in 2002 as an independent candidate for council, even though he had never sought office before.

Ladner and the NPA can still win this election.

But they better hope that Estelle Lo doesn’t pull the plug on her job in a very public way this week, because that’s one headline Ladner doesn’t want to see in Ming Pao or Sing Tao before Chinese-speaking voters go to the polls on Saturday.

***

The bamboo network indicate that Mr Peter Ladner of the NPA, is currently enjoying the lead …due to the recent misjudgements by Mr Robertson – his apparent Skytrain fare oversight (nabbed not paying adequate transit fare) and his making a meal of undermining confidential City business dealings – meaning lack of integrity and playing unfair …two big slaps in the minds of this fickle CC community.

At a few community functions this past week, everyone was conversing about Robertson’s lack of integrity … speaking in Chinese. Then when the Vision Vancouver folks wandered over. Everyone clammed up and just smiled for the cameras.