The real election season has finally arrived. Contradictory polls are multiplying and candidates are jousting over various issues that make not one whit of difference to the lives of most people in this city.

It’s also when voters are starting to think seriously about whether they’ll cast a ballot at all and, if so, who for. The reality is that about 70 per cent of eligible voters in this city won’t, because the choices will seem too daunting or they won’t feel strongly enough about any of the candidates. It may be even more than 70 per cent this election, as some political strategists I’ve talked to say that turnout will likely be lower than 2008’s 30 per cent.

That leaves it in the hands of the rest of us to decide. (It’s not actually the worst way to go. That 30 per cent is a relatively well educated lot. I don’t mean in terms of post-secondary schooling, but in terms of people who follow the news and learn something about the candidates.)

What many are waiting to see is whether Vision, a party cobbled together out of some people who migrated from the more-left COPE, some Greens, and some Liberals who migrated over from the more-right Non-Partisan Association, can hold together. There isn’t a strong history of that kind of centrist party being able to hold out in this city or this province, where people tend to polarize into right and left.

My story about the NPA in this month’s Vancouver magazine looks at the way this 74-year-old party has been able to survive many political revolutions over the years. Things are looking very mixed for the NPA in this election. Both public polls and polls inside the parties indicate Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson has a strong lead.

 (Today’s Postmedia poll has to be taken with a grain of salt. Although it has a good sample size, it was a robo-call — i.e. an automated calling system that simply dials anywhere in the city, not even checking whether the person responding is a voter — that only measured who would vote for the mayor and who would vote for anyone but him. That’s closer to an approval rating and isn’t that far off the 52 per cent the mayor has been holding at for a few months. That’s different from asking people who they would vote for against a known candidate, as the recent Justason poll did, and eliminating the undecideds to get 68 for Robertson vs 32 for Anton.)

The bigger question is whether the NPA can establish a strong beachhead on council with some effective councils, to rebuild the party for 2014. And the even bigger question is whether Vision can hold its coalition together over a long term or whether this is a brief revolutionary moment that will become part of history, after everyone reverts back to the old pattern of an unmistakably left-wing party versus a sort of middle, sort of right party.

Strategists keep telling me this is going to be a “technical” election — one that’s one by mobilizing the ground troops to get out the vote — and, after today, I believe it.

The second Mayor Gregor Robertson platform announcement took place in an east-side park to the sounds of kids playing soccer and autumn leaves falling to the ground. He promised more childcare spaces, more help from the city for seniors by training city workers to recognize signs of dementia, and more cops.

Plus he delivered a more or less “Keep calm and carry on” message about Occupy Vancouver.

I’m glad I went to the news conference, mainly because I got to ride my bike up on a gorgeous fall day through east-side neighbourhoods that startled me with their charm. (I went up St. Catherine’s and Prince Edward, just east of Fraser, then back down Prince Andrew.)

Anyone who thinks this is only an executive city should walk down these streets on a day like today, where there were people out taking care of their gardens, walking their dogs, and, in one case, holding a pre-Halloween party in a front yard with extravagant costumes for the kids on their street.

It was also a surprise to end up cycling with the mayor a few blocks on my way back from the news conference, where we chatted about his events for the day (Van Dusen opening, something at the Roundhouse, something else I can’t remember) and what’s ahead for the next three years (no more big change, but consolidating what’s been set in place now that some ‘proof of concept’ tests have been tried out).

But mostly the new conference was a snore, leading me to think that there aren’t going to be any issues that will motivate more than the dedicated 30 per cent to vote Nov. 19.

Yeah, nice to get childcare spaces. Nice about the attention paid to seniors. (Apparently this was inspired by an event in Toronto where a woman with dementia got ticketed for having some tree cut down in her yard and, after several appeals, the city’s ombudsperson ruled city staff needed training in dealing with older people with possible cognitive problems.) But nothing that will get people stampeding to the polls.

And the announcement about 30 new polices officers? When you deconstructed that (as we liked to say back in my communications grad-student days), it was the mayor saying they are going to hire 30 officers whose positions had gone unfilled for the last several years in the city budget-squeezing efforts. It’s not 30 new authorized positions.

So that left the only news of the day as What Will The Mayor DO About Those Vagrants Down Occupying The Vancouver Art Gallery?

I’m not dismissive of this issue.

I think it will be a test for Mr. Robertson, along with mayors in the other 1,200 cities where this is happening, of how they manage to steer that line between those who think the little varmints should just be run off the property (preferably with shotguns) and those who think they are noble freedom fighters who should be allowed to turn the art gallery wood-chip field into a provincial campground until world capitalism collapses.

Dealing with these protests is going to take a unique combination of tact, discussion, and enforcement, tolerance for free expression and intolerance for intrusion on other people’s right to use the city, from mayors and police forces everywhere. This council has, if anything, had more criticism about its tendency to go overboard on enforcement (Olympic protest signs in condo windows; Falun Gong demos in front of the Chinese consulate) than the other way.

And it’s not enough to say, “Just make them go.” (When people say that, it reminds of all the advice that childless people like to give us breeders when we’ve had our troubles with teens, i.e. “Just throw him/her out of the house.” Yes, very helpful.)

So Mr. Robertson’s efforts to steer the right line was the most interesting part of the media scrum. What he had to say?

“The protest will end, it definitely is going to come to a close … but the cities that have gone in swinging have created havoc. I want this to end when the protesters have had their say.”

“I’m following the advice of police and city staff, who manage 300 protests a year. [They] say that intervening physically is not a good step. It will really depend on the behaviour of the protesters, how peaceful and compliant they are with city bylaws.”

He also called the statements from his challenger, the NPA’s Suzanne Anton, “inflammatory.” (Not sure which ones he means, as she’s made several.)

In answer to the question, why were they allowed to set up tents in the first place?

The tents were set up while there are a crowd of four or five thousand there on the weekend and, “staff and the VPD decided it was not a safe situation to wade in and prevent the tents from being set up. And because it is not on city land, the bylaws we have for sidewalks and parks don’t apply.”

“The encampent has certainly grown and there are increasing concerns about safety and health. It’s treading on a thin line.”

Personally, I’ve decided the only fair way to evaluate Mr. Robertson and Ms. Anton on this is something that we’ve become all too familiar with: the reality show. Each should get 20 protesters, chosen at random, to try to talk into leaving the camp. Whoever is first at convincing all 20 to leave gets to be mayor.

Another poll from Barb Justason, who’s provided us the voters with information for this campaign that usually the political parties keep to themselves. My Globe story is here.

The basic numbers: 68 per cent of decided voters opting for Mayor Gregor Robertson; 32 per cent for NPA challenger Suzanne Anton. Twenty per cent are undecided, btw. For council, 37 per cent support Vision; 29 per cent NPA; 19 per cent Green; 11 per cent COPE.

Approval ratings (which are different from “how would you vote tomorrow” show that approval levels have stayed the same for the mayor and Anton, but his disapproval ratings have dropped in the last two months and hers have gone up.

Those numbers have to be looked at with caution, as every pollster will tell you. No more than 35 per cent of people vote in any Vancouver campaign, so you have to factor in who actually votes among those people on the phone with the pollster. Younger, poorer, more transient, renter voters less likely to come to polls, as any number of studies have shown.

That means NPA voters are likely to be more dominant on voting day than these poll numbers indicate.

Another factor: Vision and COPE voters likely to support each other’s candidates, but we don’t know exactly how many. 100 per cent? 90 per cent? 75 per cent? Not sure. If it were 100 per cent, the combined Vision/COPE slate would have 48 per cent support, easily trumping other parties. But I’m guessing that’s not the case.

A city report and several media stories this week, including mine, offered the public a confusing glimpse of what’s going on with efforts to house the homeless.

The city report left many with the impression that the real homeless are somehow being bypassed as non-profit housing operators choose who is going to live in the new supportive-housing buildings going up all over Vancouver.

Then all the politics started flying. NPA Suzanne Anton accused the Vision Vancouver council of having mismanaged everything, with the result that the homeless weren’t being housed. Non-profit groups felt like they were being accused of being slackers. The city’s former housing director weighed in, saying the buildings were being used exactly as intended.

What’s hard for the general public to get is the fierce battle that’s going on over the fundamental strategy needed to house the homeless.

City manager Penny Ballem called me yesterday to talk about this at length and laid out the philosophy of this administration compared to the last one.

What Ballem said repeatedly is: “You can’t boil the ocean.” In other words, there isn’t enough heat around to raise the temperature overall on a huge problem. So you can’t just throw out some new housing and start putting in just everyone who you think might be someday at risk of homelessness and think that you can solve the problem that way. Not when supportive housing units are at such a premium.

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City manager Penny Ballem gave an update on the Olympic village numbers today, which was sort of helpful but still didn’t answer some of my questions. However, here’s her slide show, to get us started.

As many of you know, development consultant Michael Geller and I have been having a back and forth about this whole issue, as he says the city is going to lose a lot of money that it didn’t need to because it has insisted on hanging on to the 252 city-rental units, to the 119 other rental units that were always planned to be market rentals, and by pushing the developer into receivership, taking over the whole loan and sales program in the process. (I think I have that right.)

I’ve asked him to set out the numbers for the two scenarios, so that we, the taxpayers, can see the difference in losses between the two.

Michael’s tweets today say that he believes going his route (sell everything off right away) would have saved the city $100 million. Since he calculates the losses under the current direction to be $270-$320 million (including the foregone profit on the land? I can’t tell), that means his way would mean the city would only lose $170 to $220 million. I think. He also said at another point that his method would generate enough income to pay off all $446 million of the loan plus get back some of the $170 million that the city was supposed to get for the land but never did. Anyway, we’re still working on this.

The critical numbers needed, however, are this. Numbers people should feel free to weigh in. Let’s have a real math nerd-out here.

1. What could the 119 market units and 252 city units have been sold for?

2. What is the city getting in rent from those units over the life of the building?

3. What is the net revenue from that, less maintenance, management and holding costs?

4. What are the 304 remaining condo units likely to be sold for?

5. What are the rents on the commercial spaces likely to be for the life of the building, less the maintenance, management and holding costs?

6. What are the costs of repairing deficiencies etc that aren’t covered by the Maleks’ or their contractors’ insurance programs, which need to be factored in.

7. What kind of impact would it have on the sales prices of all the units in the village — the 500 original for-sale condos; the 119 market units; and the 252 city units — if all of those had been put on the market at once? Could you really have sold them for the same kind of price as units that are pre-sold before the developer has had to start carrying costs? Would there have had to be a discount? Would you have had to carry them over a period of one or two years before you could sell them all? If so, what would be the holding costs on that?

The Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction opened three years ago with the promise that it would be the place that would take on the hardest cases of people who were mentally ill, drug-addicted, sick and homeless, give them treatment and help them transition to a stable place to live.

It’s struggling, as I outline in a story I wrote based on an evaluation of the centre, partly because of the way it was hurried into existence. As a result, it ended up not admitting the most severe cases all the time, not monitoring how they were doing very well, and not having much success with transitions to other kinds of housing. Some of that can be fixed. But some is an ongoing struggle, because the centre’s staff are having a hard time figuring out where the people it treats can live after their time at the centre.

Not surprisingly, I see that Vancouver city staff are in the middle of a struggle to allocate their precious social-housing units that are starting to come on board, as the province’s new buildings are opened one after the other. The city wants to see the 1,500 units in those buildings go to people who are homeless, as detailed in a report released late Friday. But they’re facing enormous pressure from other agencies looking for places for their people — including, I can well imagine, the Burnaby Centre.

The reality is that, in spite of the enormous acquisition and building effort from the province in the last four years, there isn’t enough to go around in a system that keeps manufacturing homelessness.

For those who are interested in the full report on the Burnaby Centre, I’ve attached a link below:

Severed release version BCMHA Final Report

Civic politics junkies have been waiting to see whether the NPA would get into the ugly topic of the Olympic village, a tricky one for them as the party risks getting mud on its own face. As you’ll recall, the uproar over the village’s financial mess three years ago dominated the election campaign.

Today, Suzanne Anton decided to call for an accounting on the village’s finances, which I guess she and her party are hoping will get voters thinking about the more recent Vision Vancouver decisions on the village (keep the social housing, put the whole project into receivership, etc.) rather than the earlier NPA ones (commit to building a village with a private developer, accepting a bid based on the highest price rather than most experienced builder, lending money to the private developer when other financing started to fall apart).

But, oddly, apparently the city manager just issued a memo to all councillors, including Suzanne, that provides an update on many of the numbers Suzanne was asking for.

Here it is, for those wondering what’s happening. (Personally, I’d like to know how much of the mortgage is left and what we’re paying per month on it. We got those numbers a few months ago, but it would be nice to see them updated. Here is a link to the info that was presented in the spring.)

Suzanne’s news release is below.

Some of you have full, rich lives that aren’t routinely punctuated by tweets from the three main parties competing for seats on Vancouver city council. In others words, you’re not me.

I am getting these tweets. Vision, in particular, started running them in the last week like crawlers at the bottom of the news, occasionally sending out the same or a similar tweet on a topic two or three times.

Some seemed reasonable but others made my fudge-o-meter start twitching. As a public service, I’m listing everything here that I received in the last week (though not the duplicates), in order of how they came out and with my assessment. I reluctantly anticipate seeing CityCaucus/NPA tweeting out the negatives and Vision/Kevin Quinlan tweeting out the positives. I’m sure that those tweets will swing the voters, my friends.

HERE WE GO:

Vision created the 1st new co-op housing in 9 years to provide affordable options in our city’s newest neighbourhood

Amended with new info. It is the first new co-op housing in nine years. But the co-op building in the Olympic village has only 23 units of the 84 that are rented at rent-geared-to-income rate. It’s being rented at market rates for the most part, i.e. $1500 or so for a one-bedroom.  And the city didn’t set out to create a co-op building. But, after a mess over the bidding by other social-housing non-profits, the co-op was the only group left standing at the end.

FUDGE FACTOR: Moderate

Vision helped land new offices in Vancouver for major companies like Pixar, Sony Imageworks, Canon Canada, & Telus –

The city’s economic development commission did work hard to convince these companies to come into Vancouver. But other factors played a part. Among them: the downtown is an attractive place to do business for many these days, because of the city’s 20-year plan to bring life to it through the addition of lots of residential.

FUDGEE FACTOR: Moderately low

Vision opened two new fenced off-leash dog parks at Devonian Park and Fraser River Park

Vision may have opened these parks, but surely they were in the planning long before 2008. I can’t find any information on this so don’t want to assign a mark til I hear more.

With @BC_Housing & Bladerunners we repurposed #YVR#DTES Remand Centre into 90 units of supportive housing

This is absolutely a Vision-only initiative, as far as I know. I started hearing about it one year into their mandate and the housing centre and council worked hard to get these extra 90 units added to everything else that was already underway.

FUDGE FACTOR: Zero

Partnered with the federal govt for Stanley Park upgrade, including a refurbished seawall for cyclists and pedestrians 

Good grief, this was just federal infrastructure money that was available to everyone. Surrey also “partnered with the federal government” to get two bike bridges worth $10 million.

Amendment: Vision people are saying I am not giving enough credit for this, because the city got $70 million in spite of people’s worries that this city government could not work with the feds. I checked with Surrey to see how much they got overall, as a comparison. It was $46 million. I’m still not sure that I feel Vision should get high marks for getting its fair share of the money.

FUDGE FACTOR: High

Secured funding for 1,500 new units of low-income affordable housing –http://j.mp/olQPN3

Uh unh. Even diehard Visionistas will admit that the previous Sam Sullivan council did nail down some of the funding for the 14 new social housing sites before he was turfed. (His council also did the gruntwork of getting an initial commitment, as well as taking the 14 sites through an expedited public-consultation process and greasing the wheels for them to go through the development permit process as quickly as possible.) Six of the projects had committed funding. It is true that Vision had to do some serious backroom negotiating to get a firm commitment for the money for the last eight sites. My understanding is that the province, as a result, agreed that ALL of the profits from the Little Mountain site would go to pay for social housing in Vancouver. The original agreement was that only 50 per cent of the profits would go to Vancouver; the other 50 was supposed to go to other municipalities.

FUDGE FACTOR: MODERATELY HIGH

Action on homelessness led to the first decrease in homelessness in over a decade – 110 less people – from 2010 to 2011 –http://j.mp/olQPN3

Homeless count in 2011 was 1605 total for Vancouver: 145 on the streets; 98 no fixed address (couch-surfing etc); 1362 in shelters, according to data from Metro Vancouver.

The counts given in the city’s report on the 2010 homeless count are as follows.

2005: 773 in shelters; 591 on streets; 1364 total

2008: 765 in shelters; 811 on streets; 1576 total

2010: 1294 in shelters; 451 on streets; 1715 total

So it’s right to say that the count dropped by 110 between 2010. It’s also technically right for the NPA to claim that homelessness, by count numbers, increased between 2008 and 2010 (by about 140) or between 2008 and 2011 (by about 30).

The more dramatic numbers are in the people on the streets: from 811 on the street in 2008 to 145 in 2011.

FUDGE FACTOR: Low

Achieved the lowest per capita GHG emissions in North America

Who knows? Is this anything to do with city policy?

FUDGE FACTOR: Potentially high, but who knows

Added 450 new community garden plots in 2010 –http://j.mp/pxUdSB

Yes, many new community garden plots opened up but is any of this to do with Vision policy, except for the one on the lawn of city hall? Unless I’m mistaken, these plots are opening because of policies introduced by previous councils and, in particular, Peter Ladner’s push to loosen up some rules that made it easier to open new plots.

FUDGET FACTOR: High

Made regulatory changes to allow Farmers’ Markets to expand and make them easier to open 

The Vision council definitely did make some changes to rules for farmers’ markets, but according to those running them, there are still some problematic barriers. Farmers markets are still classified as “temporary special events,” meaning they don’t have any certainty about where they can go. And there are still rules that prohibit them from operating in parks or too close to other retail spaces.

FUDGE FACTOR: Moderate

In 2010, Vision partnered with the@RickHansenFdn to build the 1st fully accessible playground at Kits Beach.http://vancouver.ca/parks/news/2010/101213_largestaccessibleplayground.htm

Oh, for crying out loud, as though this is something ANY city council wouldn’t have done. Hadn’t noticed the NPA was anti-accessible playgrounds, the last time I looked.

FUDGE FACTOR: High

Collaborated with YWCA on 20 units of supportive housing for women and children as part of a new library in Strathcona

Technically true, but the Vision councillors got badgered into this by the community and COPE, particularly Ellen Woodsworth.

FUDGE FACTOR: Moderate

2011 Homeless Count shows first decrease in Vancouver homelessness in over a decade. –http://j.mp/r2ve31

As above.

Vancouver is leading the way to help immigrants find work with a mentorship programhttp://j.mp/n9uZfv

Don’t know enough about this to say one way or another. Blogsters?

Deployed 1st time ever in #YVRinjunctions on landlords of #DTESSRO’s, to fix and maintain buildings & protect tenants

FUDGE FACTOR: Zero, as far as I know

despite record deficits due to a global recession, we did not cut city $$ to arts & culture programs

True, though did not increase amounts to match inflation, so equates to a small cut. But I haven’t heard any complaints from the arts community, who generally felt supported by the city in this area. The lack of enthusiasm for the Vancouver Art Gallery and the lack of targets for creating/saving artist studio space — well, that’s another thing.

FUDGE FACTOR: Low

invested in improved pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, including separated bike lanes on the Burrard Bridge

Improved pedestrian infrastructure? Where? Other than putting all the pedestrians on one side of the bridge and removing the bikes, so they won’t get knocked over as they walk, I can’t think of any major improvement for pedestrians. Am I missing something? (NOT including regular improvements the engineering department would be doing as part of its ongoing work.)

FUDGE FACTOR: Moderately high

Thanksgiving weekend is traditionally the time when civic election campaigns in Vancouver really get underway. This year, things got rolling a little earlier, with the NPA starting its campaign in early September, and Vision and COPE upping their activity level last weekend.

My colleague Ian Bailey and I took a look at what both campaigns are doing. As political junkies know, every campaign tries to tell one big story to voters and drive them to the ballot box with one question is their heads. It can be: Who will fix the mess in the Downtown Eastside? or Who will make me feel like they really care about my city? or Is this person really qualified to lead?

On the Vision side, the message is going to be, as Ian writes, targeted to affordable housing, homelessness, transit and (subtext) electing Vision again to avoid another 180-degree turnaround at city hall for the fourth election in a row.

On the NPA side, the message has to be, as several former NPA strategists told me, about Gregor’s ability to lead. Vision will make hay of this, saying that the NPA is only conducting a negative campaign. But everyone I talked to said the party has no choice.

It’s behind. Mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton has low name recognition. And Vision hasn’t faced a persistent months-long scandal. Some definite bumps, not no Montreal-style computer-contract mess or Toronto-style civic strike that had garbage piled on the streets for months.

(Oh, and all the NPA gung-ho campaigning in neighbourhoods all summer? I again asked people both right and left about the impact of this? Zilch, they all said. But it’s a good way to rub some of the rough edges off the newer candidates and keep their spirits and momentum up, as they fan out in teams across the city.)

There is still a long way to go: five weeks, which is an eternity in election cycles. The public is just starting to wake up and pay attention. The heavy artillery will only start to come out later in October and November.

I will bet that there will be embarrassing information that somehow makes its way out about some of the new candidates running. The oppo researchers have been busy for weeks already.

And I also would not be surprised if brown envelopes with damaging information to Vision make their way to reporters. Those could provide the biggest bombs of the campaign.

Vision has created an awful lot of aliented and resentful staffers as they’ve remade city hall. As reporters know, there’s nothing that is more likely to create the conditions for a leak than a lot of disguntled employees who think there’s something wrong being done in an institution they’re normally loyal to. Watergate was the best example of that. The FBI thought the White House and CIA were up to no good and it was one of their main guys who was the source.

That’s a dramatic and extreme example, but we in the media see this all the time in smaller stories. (Think about the leaks from the police department in the days following the riots about lack of staffing and planning.)

It sounds as though Vision has prepared for this because I hear from a couple of credible sources that there’s a lot of shredding going on at city hall these days.

I’m not sure what damaging information there might be inside city hall. But it doesn’t even have to be that bad for it to have an impact. Release it at the right moment, with the right spin, and it will get us MSM reporters all wound up and, if timed correctly, with not enough reporting leeway to figure out what it all means.

Martin Crilly’s report analyzing TransLink’s plan — being voted on this Friday — for what to add to the system and how to pay for it is fascinating reading. Better than the average airport novel, if you ask me.

Mr. Crilly, for those who don’t know, is the regional transportation commissioner who weighs in with an anlysis of plans by BC Ferries and TransLink before they are officially adopted.

His report is a masterpiece of brevity (in the world of government reports) and helps lay out exactly what the new plan, aka The Supplement or “Moving Forward,  will achieve and won’t. (He also makes an interesting comment on TransLink’s base plan, the one already adopted by the board for the base budget to keep the current system going.)

You can read it yourself here, with a handy little chart that explains exactly where the $1.24 billion is going to come from (about one third from the gas tax; one third from increased fares; one third from whatever new mechanism the province and TransLink come up with).

Or, for the attention-challenged, here’s my story in the Globe.