DAVINCI'S MAN SWEEPS VANCOUVER

One's frustration as a westerner with the city of Vancouver can be
compared with that of a father with a favourite daughter who is both
beautiful and unstable.

You, of course, love and cherish her for her beauty, her vitality and
what you're sure is essentially a warm heart. But then she'll suddenly
decide to dye her hair bright pink, experiment with crack cocaine and
bring home mentally ill street folk for Sunday dinner. And you'll
wonder if perhaps she wasn't shaken rather too hard as an infant by
that nanny you never quite trusted.

Such were my feelings Saturday night when Vancouver voters
overwhelmingly elected a slate of left-wing candidates led by a guy in
a funny hat whose main campaign plank was to provide a warm and dry
facility in which people may smoke crack and inject heroin.

Larry Campbell, as I'm sure you know by now, is the 54-year-old former
RCMP narcotics officer and former Vancouver chief coroner upon whom
the CBC series DaVinci's Inquest is based. He has written or
co-written 11 of the episodes, his favourite being the one concerning
shaken baby syndrome.

He's a likable guy with a devilish smile and those qualities alone, in
a town with a recent history of wooden mayors, is enough to earn him
the label "charismatic."

Campbell's main competitor for mayor, the traditionally uncharismatic
nine-year council veteran Jennifer Clarke, was whomped by Campbell by
a two-to-one margin Saturday.

She'd seen it coming. In interviews before the election, Clarke
complained that running against the DaVinci prototype was like running
against Martin Sheen or Ronald Reagan for president.

During a sushi lunch with campaign workers on Saturday afternoon,
Campbell emitted a pleasantly pragmatic whiff. He eschewed chopsticks
for a fork, cast aside the tempura portion of his bento box with the
manly declaration that he hates vegetables, made the familiar claim of
being a social progressive but a fiscal conservative, and assured me
that his promised initiatives would not come from tax increases, but
from efficiencies.

One must be skeptical. For Campbell, although having an MBA, living in
a half-million-dollar house in west Point Grey, and claiming an
affinity for business, has never held elected office and is among a
group of eight members of the NDP-affiliated, union-endorsed Coalition
of Progressive Electors, or COPE. Formed in 1970 to block a proposed
freeway in a city that badly needed one and still does, COPE had not
actually controlled council until now.

For the past 16 years, the centre-right Non Partisan Association has
controlled council. For the first seven of those years, the NPA's
mayor was now premier Gordon Campbell (no relation to Larry.)

Suddenly, COPE now not only has eight of the 10 council seats, but
also controls the school board and that uniquely Vancouverish elected
body, the parks board.

Thus Gordon Campbell's attempt to effect a Klein-like revolution in
B.C. will be challenged at every pass by the solidified left-wing bloc
of Vancouver. Larry Campbell and his team are already talking about
fighting the province over its planned spending reductions in health
care, education and infrastructure. Campbell admits he is
fundamentally against the provincial government's supply-side fiscal
model.

What is it about the city of Vancouver that it makes it elect such
problems for a province just starting to get its house back in order?

The most common explanation heard from Vancouverites was a variation
on the exchange I heard on a walk around Stanley Park during a break
in the rains Sunday morning.

"Didn't you hear? COPE swept everything."

"Great, it was time for a change."

"Yeah, change is good."

But why? Vancouver wasn't being run badly. Under the NPA, the economy
was good, crime was declining and, aside from last year's transit
strike and the continued blight in the skid-row area known as the
Downtown Eastside, things had been ambling along as well as they ever
do here.

Perhaps the best explanation is that the NDP saw an opportunity and
leapt on it. The opportunity was that Downtown Eastside. This area of
Hastings Street has, indeed, been attracting a growing number of
junkies who commit crimes to support their habit. All of the bank
machines in downtown Vancouver now have 24-hour security guards to
deter junkies from stealing money from customers by using infected
needles as weapons.

I walked along Hastings on Saturday afternoon and can attest to the
dire and decrepit atmosphere of the place. People are shooting up in
doorways, emaciated middle-aged hookers and rat-faced dope dealers
proposition you four or five times a block.

A couple of dozen derelicts have established a row of tents and
mattresses on the sidewalk outside the closed Woodward's store that
looks like it belongs in the Bombay ghetto.

The old store is owned by the province and was about to be turned into
low-income housing when the Liberals gained power and cancelled the
project. Now it is an NDP photo-op.

I spoke with a tent-dweller who called himself "Taz." He claimed not
to be a heroin addict and said he preferred living here to the
low-rent apartments where one's sleep was constantly disturbed by
junkies fighting with one another.

The police have given up making arrests, partly because the courts are
reluctant to convict and partly because of a successful campaign by
NDP-affiliated advocates to portray the junkies as blameless. The
problem is, in Larry Campbell's words, "a health issue." He claims
that 1,200 addicts have died, mostly of overdoses, in the last six
years.

Many business owners in the area, especially those in nearby
Chinatown, tend not to sympathize with the addict-as-victim position.
They launched a campaign to sweep the drug trash from the streets.

But that battle was lost last year when Philip Owen, the three-term
NPA mayor who bears a resemblance to an older Perry Como, realized the
political downside -- and probable futility, given the courts'
reluctance to convict -- of decisive police action.

Owen convinced his council to approve a German-style program that
would, among other things, provide safe houses in which junkies could
shoot up.

The election intervened. NPA backers, opposed to the drug program,
insisted there be a nomination for the mayoralty candidate --
something that is rarely required for incumbents. Owen, insulted,
resigned and Jennifer Clarke was nominated.

Although Clarke eventually came out in support of the safe-house
program, Campbell had already seized the issue away and made it
DaVinci's -- the crusading coroner fighting for the oppressed.

His campaign also exploited the recent victimhood of Philip Owen and
painted Clarke as part of the heartless NPA machine that destroyed
poor Philip.

I doubt that such a campaign could have worked in any other major
city. It's certainly inconceivable that it would have caused the same
complete shift from one party to another.

But this is Vancouver. And Vancouver is a fickle girl. She got tired
of her blue hair, and decided to go with pink. Change is good. As for
Premier Campbell's hair, I would expect that he is tearing it out right now.