Will Burnaby wake up to a council shake up?

Will Burnaby wake up to a council shake up?

With Mike Hurley winning Burnaby’s mayoral race by acclamation, the city’s council race is now the one to watch—but whether it will drive residents to the polls is yet to be determined.

A few weeks ago, the Beacon asked if there could be lower voter turnout due to Hurley’s automatic win.

At the time, Quest University political scientist Stewart Prest said there is a chance voters may pay less attention when it comes to voting for council and school trustees.

“While the mayor is just one vote on council, it’s an important one. It sort of takes away, in some sense, the focal point of the election, so I would not be surprised if it does have a negative impact on turnout,” he told the Beacon in September.

Fast-forward to today: we’re now one day away from the election and advance voting in Burnaby has come and gone.

So what do the numbers tell us so far?

According to results provided to the Beacon from Elections Burnaby, there are 163,076 eligible voters in the city in 2022. In 2018, there were 156,015.

A total of 9,225 Burnaby residents voted in this year’s advance polls, compared to 9,683 in 2018.

Turnout on Oct. 1 was 1.61% compared to 1.72% on the same day in 2018. On Oct. 5, there was a 1.82% turnout in comparison to 1.83% in 2018. The turnout on Oct. 8 was 2.23% and in 2018 it was 2.66%.

Debbie Comis of Election Burnaby told the Beacon that the slightly lower advance voter turnout in 2022 is likely due to the lack of a mayoral race.

Looking back to 2018, the Burnaby mayor’s race was a heated one. Hurley, an independent, was up against incumbent mayor Derrick Corrigan.

Hurley won 52.55% of the vote, beating Corrigan’s 20,333 votes with a total of 26,260. His win was recognized as “remarkable,” and “shocking” after defeating the BCA’s Corrigan, who had served as mayor for five previous terms.

Although the race for mayor is non-existent this year, advance voting results didn’t see a dramatic decrease—there were 458 fewer votes cast in 2022 compared to 2018.

Prest, however, stressed that these numbers are hard to read, and are not an “indication that turnout will likely go up over time.”

“Effectively, what we have seen, is that over time, there is a move to make greater use of advance voting, particularly among those who would vote anyway… But where it often gets used is when there’s a competitive race, and parties and candidates are really focused on [getting] out the vote efforts,” he told the Beacon in follow-up interview this week.

Racing to the finish

With less than 24 hours before polls open, Burnaby’s council race is panning out to be a competitive one.

There are three parties—the Burnaby Citizens’ Association (BCA), Burnaby Greens, and the newly-established One Burnaby—that are running candidates for council.

Six out of eight Burnaby councillors are up for reelection: Alison Gu (BCA), Pietro Calendino (BCA), Sav Dhaliwal (BCA), Mike Hillman (formerly independent, currently One Burnaby), Joe Keithley (Burnaby Greens), and James Wang (BCA).

Two independent councillors who were formerly BCA members—Colleen Jordan and Dan Johnston—are not running for re-election.

The big question is whether council will see a shift when it comes to who is elected, and if the BCA will continue its long-time council majority.

The BCA (Burnaby Citizens Association) has been the dominant party on council since 1987, according to historical data. This year, the party is running a full slate of council and school board candidates.

The longest-serving current BCA councillors are Sav Dhaliwal, Pietro Calendino (first elected in 2002), and James Wang (elected in 2014). Alison Gu is an incumbent elected in a 2021 byelection. Reah Arora, Antara Deb, Daniel Tetrault, and Maita Santiago are new candidates on the BCA slate.

As for party affiliation, BCA candidates must be members in “good standing” with the BC NDP.

The city’s newest party, One Burnaby, is running six council candidates: Mona Grewal, Mike Hillman, Richard T. Lee, Richard N. Liu, Mario Miceli, and Brea Huang Sami.

Hillman announced the creation of the party in June in hopes of bringing “new voices” to council.

“BCA has had a long history of being on council and controlling council, and this provides an opportunity for people to say, ‘Let’s have some new voices, and let’s bring in some additional thought to the table as we move forward,’” stated Hillman at the time.

Kit Sauder, One Burnaby’s campaign manager, said the party does not require members to be connected to any provincial or federal party to join, but pointed out that some candidates do have affiliation with either the federal or provincial Liberals.

This includes two former Liberal candidates for Burnaby South in the last two federal elections. Lee, who is also a 16-year BC Liberal MLA in Burnaby North, ran in 2019, while Sami ran in the 2021 election. Both lost to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.

The Burnaby Greens have four council and two school board candidates running. Joe Keithley (council incumbent) is running alongside Carrie McLaren, Jasmine Nicholsfigueiredo, and Tara Shushtarian. The Burnaby Green Party told the Beacon it is not affiliated with any provincial or federal party and does not require any of its members to hold membership with any other parties.

There are also nine independent candidates running in this election: Ken Arnold, Gulam Firdos, Martin Kendell, MichaelAngelo Robinhood, Konstantine Roccas, Deborah Skerry, Tom Tao, Scott Van Denham, and Heymann Yip.

Two new faces on council

Outgoing Coun. Colleen Jordan noted that there will definitely be at least a slight change on council due to her and Johnston’s retirements.

“Even if all the incumbents were to get in, there will be two new people. So the question will be…which one of those candidates will fill [our] seats,” she said.

She went on to make an observation about the 2021 Burnaby byelection when Gu and Hillman (independent at the time) were elected.

Gu received the most votes (4,994), followed by Hillman (3,227). Gu’s BCA running mate and former school board trustee Baljinder Narang trailed slightly behind with 3,103 votes, followed by former BCA councillor-turned-independent candidate Lee Rankin with 3,016.

“Both Narang and Rankin were well-known in the community because they both served before. They were on council and our school board before but Hillman managed to beat them and now Hillman has a whole team. And I think also in the past, sometimes the opposition teams that ran against the BCA… they weren’t known to the community. Now this time with One Burnaby, they’ve got some candidates that are known to the community and they could add their more extensive resumes… and they put out a huge platform, which I’ve never seen from an opposition party before,” she said.

Jordan added it can be “really hard” for independent candidates to get elected in a general election, but that doesn’t mean they should be discredited for what they could bring to council.

“When Hillman ran for the [byelection] he was just an independent, right,” she noted.

Prest said that an election with many candidate options, like Burnaby’s, “can really give a chance for voters to tune in and to think about the choice they are making.”

“…When you have a more competitive race, then you are going to have more voter interest. And even if it doesn’t trickle up to the mayor’s race, the fact that the council as a whole is being contested for the first time in this more three-way race in quite some time is certainly indicative—that even if we don’t see things transform fundamentally in this race—people may start to pay more attention.

What’s the key issue?

A key issue that could also fuel a more competitive race in Burnaby is housing.

That was reflected in a recent survey of voters in Metro Vancouver carried out by polling company Research Co., as 55% of respondents in Burnaby, New West, and Richmond said housing was the biggest issue in their respective cities.

A recent report in The Province noted that despite council’s steps to try to improve housing options and affordability in the city over the past four years—with policies like the Tenant Assistance Policy and the Rental Use Rezoning Policy (RUZP), and efforts to lightly increase density and plans to address the “missing middle”—the housing crisis continues to rage on.

At every city council debate over the past month, parties and candidates have been asked about how they would take to tackle the affordable housing crisis and create more housing.

At the debate at Gilmore Elementary on Oct. 11, independent candidates Kendell and Firdos, and One Burnaby’s Hillman argued that the city’s housing woes are due to years of inaction from BCA candidates before Hurley created the Housing Task Force in 2018.

The BCA’s =Calendino argued that the BCA has worked with Mayor Hurley “to build the [housing] task force” and has supported policies like the RUZP, which requires new multi-family residential developments to reserve at least 20% of units for below-market rentals. Rental units in old buildings torn down for new developments must also be replaced at a 1:1 ratio, and tenants returned to their units will pay the same amount in rent that they paid prior to the new development.

Tetrault said the BCA is also committed to building more purpose-based rentals, which was the basis of a motion brought forward by Coun. Gu and her BCA colleagues in September.

Evidently, housing is Burnaby’s hot-button topic and one that carries a lot of weight as residents head to the polls on Saturday.

And the issues that residents care about will determine how much, or how little, change we see on council.

Jordan highlighted that there was a slight shuffle on council in 2018 when the Greens’ Keithley was voted in, and this could be a sign of possibly more change to come. But at the end of the day, it lies in the hands of the voters to decide.

“So now some people are looking at this as like, ‘OK, we got some things changed in 2018, but do we want more change now?’ And that’s the question in front of people,” Jordan said.

With files from Dustin Godfrey and Srushti Gangdev