What went wrong and what comes next for One Burnaby?

On Nov. 2, Burnaby’s new city council will be sworn in, and the makeup of that council will only have representation from one member of the city’s newest political party, One Burnaby.

It certainly wasn’t the outcome the party was hoping for on election night.

Rewinding back to June, when the formation of One Burnaby was announced, there was a possibility that the party would change the makeup council, which has been dominated by the Burnaby Citizens Association (BCA) since 1987.

Mike Hillman, who was initially elected as an independent councillor in the 2021 byelection, formed the party and noted that one of his reasons behind doing so was to provide voters with a different option at the polls.

“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,’” Hillman said, in a previous interview with the Beacon.

Aside from Hillman, the party consisted of five council additional council candidates: Mona Grewal, Richard T. Lee, Richard N. Liu, Mario Miceli, and Brea Huang Sami.

Lee and Sami ran as 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 party wanted to take on more of a centrist approach and presented a large platform filled with large promises such as freezing property taxes in 2023 while keeping the rate from 2024-26 at 2.95% or less.

One Burnaby also pledged to speed up the permitting process and review the consultation process for new housing, allow for densification of single-family neighbourhoods, as well as promote “complete communities” or a 15-minute city by building amenities like corner stores, cafes, childcare centers, and grocers in all neighbourhoods.

Leading up to the election, it appeared that One Burnaby was the BCA’s main competition. The party had a big platform, it was running some candidates with previous political experience, and had an active and vocal campaign presence on social media and on the ground.

But when election night rolled around, the results were disappointing for the party, as only Lee managed to pull away with a win, with 11,231 votes (5.23%).

Hillman trailed behind with 9,710 votes (4.52%).

The remainder of the One Burnaby team received less than 4% each of the total 32,251 ballots cast in the election.

So why and how did Burnaby’s newest political party not see better results at the polls?

Ian Bushfield, co-host of the local politics-based podcast The Cambie Report, pointed to the low voter turnout as a factor as well as Mayor Mike Hurley winning the election by acclamation.

The city recorded a 19.71% voter turnout, according to City of Burnaby data. There were 163,076 registered voters.

That’s the lowest turnout Burnaby has seen in a municipal election in more than 10 years. A highly contentious mayoral campaign in the 2018 election drew 32% of voters to the polls. In 2014, turnout was 27.3%; in 2011, it was 24.6%; and in 2008, it was 23.49%.

“The big story of the night when I look at Burnaby’s election results is just this abysmal turnout. … It’s under one-in-five people exercising their right to vote. Probably because there wasn’t an exciting mayoral campaign to really drive anything,” noted Bushfield.

“And when you have an acclamation for mayor, people don’t have strong feelings, I guess, about council. And it’s really hard with our system to parse these different candidates. To Burnaby politics’ credit there was a clear choice of the ballot between going back to a BCA-dominated situation or taking a risk and trying something new with One Burnaby or maybe [getting] slightly more Greens in there. And it seems like overall, people wanted to stick with the comfort they knew.”

One Burnaby campaign manager Kit Sauder agreed that the turnout was “abysmal” and it was a “strategic problem” for the party.

Sauder also cited the ongoing impacts of the pandemic as having a “massively suppressive effect on democratic activity across all democratic countries.”

“There are some questions about democratic legitimacy for a city that has an acclaimed mayor with no contest and a voter turnout of under 20%,” he said.

As for Hillman not being reelected, Sauder chalked that up to poor turnout as well higher name recognition for Lee, as a former BC Liberal MLA.

There are other factors to examine in One Burnaby’s performance as well, like its campaign strategy to narrow in on the BCA as the election neared, particularly on social media.

On Oct.6, the party released a statement saying it filed a report with the Burnaby RCMP to investigate a possible breach of the Criminal Code or the Election Act by running a community engagement survey that gave participants a chance to win a prize.

However, Burnaby’s chief electoral officer told the Beacon that the BCA did not break any financing rules and the RCMP said that no other laws appeared to be broken regarding the matter.

The next day on Oct. 7, the party sent out another tweet, questioning whether BCA candidates upheld their promise to not campaign on Sept. 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

The tweet included a photo of the BCA’s Mikelle Sasakamoose, who was running for school board at the time and has since been elected. She is Burnaby’s first Indigenous politician elected in 130 years.

In the photo, Sasakamoose was standing with federal NDP Leader and MP for Burnaby South Jagmeet Singh.

Another picture attached to the tweet showed BCA candidates standing with BC’s incoming premier, David Eby.

One Burnaby claimed the photos appeared to be a campaign rally on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Sasakamoose later released a statement saying she was “disgusted by the outright racism” displayed by One Burnaby and noted she was witnessing a traditional pipe ceremony at Westminster Pier Park on Sept. 30.

The photos used in One Burnaby’s tweet were from different events earlier in September.

The BCA called on One Burnaby to issue a public apology to Sasakamoose but that did not happen.

When asked about campaign tactics with this incident in particular, and if it was effective for the One Burnaby campaign, Sauder said that raising questions of whether or not a party is keeping its commitments is part of the democratic process. He also maintained that there were some members of the party campaigning on Sept. 30.

“No one accused anyone … of doing anything. We asked a question and we were responded to with vitriolic language and accusations of racism,” he said.

“Politics is sometimes frustrating in that those tough questions need asking. I think that we saw a higher rate of engagement, we saw—after the coverage of those issues—and increase of engagement across all platforms.”

As for where the party goes from here, Sauder said that councillor-elect Lee has a big four years coming up, and he will likely start his term “listening and learning.”

“The BCA has a substantive majority but there are likely areas that Coun. [Joe] Keithley, Mayor Hurley, and Mr. Lee agree and probably areas where they can find three of the six BCA votes to move issues forward as well. So it’ll be a matter of working from the minority consensus, seeing where there’s strength and overlap between us, the independent mayor, and the Green Party and try to advance a couple of those issues.”

Sauder added that the next four years will be ones of building and growing for the party, and he hopes to see a “rebound in democratic engagement” that One Burnaby will be able to build its success on.

Correction: This article previously stated that Mikelle Sasakamoose was the first Indigenous person to run in Burnaby. That is incorrect and the article has been updated to reflect that.