Vision Vancouver, the political party, is very slick and spends an order of magnitude more on PR than anybody else in the city, in a town now with little news reporting.
1. It's well known who killed 2 of belugas -- somebody who publicly presents themselves as caring for whales -- but there is no discussion of it in the reporting.
2. There has been zero effort to have a conversation with the people at the Aquarium. There is an intentional effort to get shock value, encourage a public squabble that rouses some of their base and that distracts from their overall performance.
Vision Vancouver is now feeling the heat for freezing upzoning of single family home neighbourhoods so that they can direct hundreds of millions annually in buildable land grants in one-off variances to the large developers who are their main donors (Wall, Westbank, Concord). The problem in Vancouver is a monopoly of new buildable land where a single marketer, Bob Rennie, can dictate pricing for a year by virtue of controlling over 80% of new units in any given year under Vision Vancouver.
The next municipal election is a year away, but they've been around at full speed hiring PR folks on the public dime, setting up astroturf groups, wining and dining the few remaining beat reporters, and sending moles to infiltrate the new Vancouver Renters' Union. They're picking fights that are fake and real, any news is good news now if they can be ahead of the story instead of chasing to catch up for once.
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Disclosure: I volunteered for the last two Vision Vancouver campaigns, as a favor to a friend and when I believed they actually meant what they said. I had already given up on them when I was asked to join an astroturf group by Mike Magee last summer