Nothing brings about a sense of vindication more than a good win. Nothing ignites bouts of recrimination like a loss. And as the results of last week's civic election begin to unwind, we are being served large dollops of both.
Bob Penner, Vision Vancouver's pollster, posted a piece proclaiming that his guys had it nailed from the outset. While the media was preoccupied with Occupy Vancouver, the issue may have motivated the NPA base for Suzanne Anton but it hardly registered with most voters.
People opposed to bike lanes and other green initiatives of the governing party weren't going to vote for Mayor Gregor Robertson anyway.
And just look at the election results. Every candidate they put up for council, school board and park board was a winner. Everything from their handling of the Olympic Village to HEAT shelters for the homeless and even the gag on city bureaucrats past muster-more or less- with the majority of voters. "Robertson's Riot" will be nothing but an unfortunate footnote in an otherwise successful term in office.
Meanwhile, the chorus of kvetching from the parties that went down to defeat has been cacophonous. But it all filters out to this: "Don't blame me."
NPA bag man and wealthy developer Rob Macdonald complained that, in spite of his own deep pockets and a campaign budget apparently north of $2 million, his guys were beat because Vision has a full-time machine at work.
The NPA just gets together for a brief moment every three years and does what it can. (After generations of the NPA blocking a ward system in this city, what would they expect an opposition to do in order to take power?)
The fact that Macdonald's party put forward a mostly motley crew of candidates and their mayoral candidate sang from a song sheet composed by those nattering nitwits of negativism over at CityCaucus.com was nowhere in his reason for the results.
Defeated NPA council candidate Sean Bickerton had a slightly different view: "Voters have spoken, decisively rejecting a mayoral campaign based on puerile sophomoric, gotcha attacks and trivial wedge issues."
One other NPA supporter could say, "I told you so." Former councillor and mayoral candidate Peter Ladner warned that the NPA would attack Vision's green policies at their peril.
In the end, NPA voters succeeded in electing two candidates for council who exhibited no characteristics more notable than the fact that- by luck of lineage-their names were "Affleck" and "Ball" putting them at the top of the ballot.
A wounded contingent at COPE, which was shut out of all but one seat on school board, offered a buffet of excuses starting with campaign manager Nathan Allen. He blamed his paltry budget, which was just shy of $400,000 and the big TV ad buy taken out by the other guys that totally buried COPE's campaign.
In Wednesday's Courier, three-term COPE councillor David Cadman blamed Tim Louis for the loss. While Louis was virtually invisible for the past three years, he surfaced at a COPE meeting last summer but failed to marshal enough forces to block the deal COPE signed with Vision.
That wasn't the end of it. While Cadman figured he could snooze through the subsequent nomination meeting, Louis was at the barricades signing up enough members that, along with a bit of slippery strategy, led to Cadman's defeat.
Aside from dumping their most electable incumbent, COPE now had a candidate in Louis who was actually hated by their allies in Vision. While Louis played footsies with the Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver, a splinter group that peeled away from COPE, many Visionistas threw a vote to the Green Party's Adriane Carr, rather than go near Louis. Ironically, Carr squeezed out the only other COPE council incumbent, Ellen Woodsworth, for the last spot at the council table.
And that provoked another round of kvetching.
