For the first time in 16 months, there’s a local election taking place in Metro Vancouver.
On Saturday, New Westminster residents will head to the polls in a school district byelection, choosing between four candidates to replace former trustee Dee Beattie, who resigned in September following revelations that
she ran an anonymous Twitter account to troll community members.
Ordinarily, school district elections don’t really reveal much about the political culture of a municipality, but there’s a number of reasons why the results in New West will be worth watching.
For most of this century, New West politics has been dominated by centre-left politicians endorsed by the New Westminster and District Labour Council. For many years, they ran independently but in a loose coalition. In the last election, however, they formed the Community First New West party, which won the mayor’s seat and a majority on council and school board. One of their elected members was Beattie.
The party has now put forward Jalen Bachra, a 21-year-old who works for NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, as its candidate. The
opposition party in New West has put forward their own candidate in Kathleen Carlsen, a former district PAC chair, and two independents are also running.
The debate between the candidates has been respectful, and there haven’t been serious divisions on issues like SOGI or parental rights that have provoked controversy in other school board elections.
But on social media, there’s a definite undercurrent of the byelection being a bit of a referendum on Community First’s running of the city, and their majority on the school board in particular, including their original endorsement of Beattie. A controversy just this week over the district taking money from a musical theatre program —
which has since been returned — caused further criticism.
No matter what happens on Saturday, Community First will continue to have a majority on school board, and on council.
But byelections provide a unique window to check the pulse of residents (at least, the five to 20 per cent that tend to show up), and Saturday’s results will provide some evidence of which way the political wind is blowing in the Royal City.
