We All Have Our Reasons For Supporting TEAM: Here’s Mine

I’m Campaigning in Dunbar These Days To Elect Councillors Who Believe in Neighbourhoods

by Carol Volkart

Way back in 2020, as I watched a livestream Vancouver City Council meeting preparing to run roughshod over a neighbourhood, I was so incensed that I emailed the only councillor who seemed to be opposing the plans.

Councillor Colleen Hardwick answered right back, from her seat in the council chamber, and I’ve been working with her ever since. A group of us coalesced around the idea that residents deserve a say in how their neighbourhoods are to be developed, rather than the city imposing top-down changes without listening to the people who live there.

The result was TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, a new version of the 1970s-era The Electors Action Movement, which championed neighbourhoods. It led to a city famous for its tapestry of unique, livable neighbourhoods loved and treasured by their residents. Under Gregor Robertson’s Vision Vancouver and then Kennedy Stewart’s multi-party council, the vision frayed.

Now under Ken Sim’s majority ABC council, it has vanished. Residents of neighbourhoods are ignored, dismissed and viewed as obstacles to the city’s densification drive. The community plans and visions they spent thousands of volunteer hours developing under CityPlan were abruptly rescinded in 2023. Anyone who disagrees with city council now is called a NIMBY (Not in my Backyard.)

TEAM ‘s 2022 civic election campaign was a brave effort to shift the narrative. But hampered by its refusal to accept donations from developers, lack of name recognition, and voters’ desperation to elect someone, anyone, not named Kennedy Stewart, it fell short when the ballots were counted.

Now that resignations of Green and OneCity councillors have opened up two seats on Vancouver City Council, TEAM is trying again. Colleen Hardwick and Theodore Abbott are campaigning hard to form an effective opposition on city council, bringing the voices of neighbourhoods to a place that hasn’t welcomed them for many years.

True, two people can’t stop an ABC majority from doing what it will, but it’s a way of showing an alternative to the top-down, resident-dismissive direction that council has been perfecting for many years.

Those who haven’t been closely following civic politics for the last few years might ask, why choose TEAM candidates if they don’t like ABC? Why not Green, OneCity or even COPE?

One answer comes from an ex-journalist friend who once covered the BC legislature and certainly makes up her own mind on issues. Reacquainting herself with civic politics after a lengthy absence from the city, she attended the recent West End all-candidates’ meeting. Her conclusion was clear.   The TEAM candidates, she said, were “the only adults in the room.”

I’ve been to a couple of candidates’ meeting myself, and was struck by how vague, unprepared and ignorant of city policy, processes, and history TEAM’s competitors were. (I couldn’t assess the ABC candidates, of course, because they’re avoiding all-candidates’ meetings; it’s so much more comfortable to talk only to carefully chosen, pre-selected groups.)

Why not Green and OneCity then? Look at the decisions their party representatives have made on this and the previous council. Time after time, when they had to vote on issues that had terrible effects on neighbourhoods, Green and OneCity councillors sided with ABC for the benefit of developers instead of the residents of this city.

Gut view cones? Yes! Turbocharge the Broadway Plan so even more tenants can be demovicted while their affordable housing is replaced by expensive high rises with tiny suites? Hell, yes! And public hearings? Ban them; what a waste of time!

The CityHallWatch Media Foundation, an online site that does detailed coverage of City Hall, has provided a summary of the various parties’ positions on issues key to this election. To me, it encapsulates why TEAM is the only choice:

Like all neighbourhoods of the city, my own community of Dunbar faces growth and change. And to be honest, it could use a greater variety of housing, and a rescue of its struggling retail sector. The only question is, who makes the decisions that get us there? Will it be City Hall all on its own, or City Hall working with residents who know the area and care about what happens here?

Which is why I’ll be out, in my TEAM t-shirt, handing out flyers and chatting up passersby, on Dunbar Street from now until by-election day on April 5.

My message is clear: It’s time for neighbourhoods to win back a voice in their future!

Carol Volkart is a retired Vancouver Sun editor and reporter who has started a small online site covering news in Dunbar, https://dunbarnews.ca/