Vancouver

WHO IS THIS SULLIVAN GUY ANYWAY?

The New Mayor Is Raising A Lot Of Eyebrows By What He Is Saying And
Doing, Now That He's Elected

I thought Philip Owen's bizarre tale of being hung upside down by his
ankles over the edge of a bridge above heaps of industrial sulphur
for some health problem he suffered as a kid was the weirdest thing
uttered by a mayor of Vancouver since the totally mad Amore de
Cosmos--Lover of the Universe--changed his name and got elected our
first mayor. But current mayor Sam Sullivan last week made a
remarkably strong bid to take that prize away from Owen for an
impressively good run at The Amore de Cosmos Cup.

Sullivan last week released to the Vancouver Sun his statement to
police, who are investigating his habit of helping young people buy
illicit drugs. The statement is problematical on a number of levels.
In it, and for reasons only Sullivan knows, he elaborates about how
he conducted a "goal-setting session" with a 20-year-old
drug-addicted hooker, in which she told him, he relates, of "a very
clear vision of being curled up on her sofa in front of a fireplace
with a white fur throw carpet on a hardwood floor."

Life goals usually are stated in terms of getting a job in a field
one finds suitable, having kids, and that sort of thing. No one who
read Sullivan's published statement could possibly have avoided the
suspicion that they were reading an unoriginal and awfully
familiar-sounding middle-aged white guy's fantasy, instead of a
distressed 20-year-old's ambitions. Sullivan relates that he was at
the time giving the young woman almost $300 a week explicitly to help
her buy drugs. He excused this, as well as another incident involving
a young man he gave money to and drove around to help him score his
hits, as "research."

I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of and I've justified them by
claiming I was doing research. I'm not the only one out there who
recognizes Sullivan's claims to doing research for what they really
are--a thinly veiled pre-concocted cover story should the sordid
events ever fall out into the light of day, which is exactly what
happened to Sullivan. He's looking an awful lot like a Christian
Republican Congress-man these days--with credibility to match. But
all this is his personal life and none of our business--unless it
impinges on his public policy-making role as Mayor of Vancouver and
chair of the police board, which it now appears to be doing. At the
same time that he'd been going public about helping young people buy
illicit drugs, Sullivan announced a mysterious and private
arrangement with an anonymous and wealthy donor to enable City Hall
to help many more addicts buy illicit drugs. This
initiative--apparently a surprise, and not a very pleasant one for
his NPA colleagues at Council chambers--was justified by Sullivan as
a harm-reduction effort, one of the four pillars in the Four Pillar
Strategy originally adopted by former NPA mayor Philip Owen.

But when using the term "harm reduction" in the context of the
official civic policy initiative called The Four Pillars, no one ever
meant private individuals taking it upon themselves to hand out rolls
of cash to 20-year-old women on street corners in the night or
driving young men around in dark vans through drug markets--and it
certainly doesn't include private discussions about fur rugs and
fireplaces, or the curling up in front of them on a couch. It is also
unlikely anyone with expertise in the field would endorse a civic
policy involving a private wealthy donor pursuing anonymity while
funding massive drug purchases for distribution to addicts.
Sullivan's is a frighten-ingly twisted interpretation of an otherwise
earnest and laudable policy idea, and I suspect the only reason there
hasn't been a louder public outcry about it is because, frankly, the
whole tale is too shocking and disturbing. No one is ready yet to
confront the question, "Just who is this guy we elected mayor?"

Sullivan has likewise so far received a pass on his direct assault on
the core credibility of the police. In his statement, Sullivan goes
to great lengths to accuse the police of acting on the allegations
against him only when prompted to do so by his political opponents.
Of course, accusing the police of selectively enforcing laws
according to partisan favoritism is about the most damaging
accusation one can make against any police, and it does severe damage
to police integrity in the eyes of the public.

"My political opponents," Sullivan writes, "made these experiences a
focus of their campaign . . . . [and] because of the increased public
awareness, the Police Chief had no alternative but to request that
the RCMP investigate." One would like to ask the Police Chief if
indeed this is why an investigation was launched. I did ask the Chief
that question at a press conference, but Jamie Graham only turned
away from me in utter silence. What could he say? The new mayor had
trapped him to save himself.

Because this statement was released to the press for publication by
Sullivan, one would expect a defamation suit by the Chief of Police
against Sullivan for impugning his and his office's integrity so
brutally as to suggest investigations can be launched by partisan
political pressure between opponents in a tight election. We await
news of such a suit.

One also worries about the integrity of the Office of Mayor if it
continues to be occupied by a person so cavalierly given to impugning
the integrity of the police and of assigning blame for the worst kind
of dirty political tricks ever seen in this city to former mayor and
now sitting senator Larry Campbell. He seems also to find nothing to
apologize for in giving lots of money to young people explicitly to
buy hard, illicit drugs on at least 23 occasions over the course of
several years, even while claiming to uphold the traditions and the
laws of the Office of Mayor.

Sullivan, whoever he turns out to be, may well be the oddest
character ever to occupy the Mayor's Office, despite the fact our
first mayor was a certifiable nutcase, and the most recent NPA mayor
likes sniffing sulphur up-side down hanging over a bridge.