What's in a Name on Municipal Election Ballot

The race for the top jobs at Vancouver City Hall is on

Municipalities in British Columbia will hold elections for mayor and council on October 15. In the cases of 37 cities, the mayors won by acclamation because they had no challengers. 

Some include the mayors of Burnaby, Port Coquitlam, Ashcroft, Comox, Duncan, Invermere, Pitt Meadows and Tofino.

Will Mayor Stewart keep his position Oct 15?

For all the other municipalities campaigning officially began on Saturday, but in Vancouver you wouldn't know there was an election going on except for a few campaign signs on people's lawns for Ken Sim, a Chinese-Canadian businessman.

In the 2018 election he came in second to Kennedy Stewart, and this time around may have the chance to become the first Chinese-Canadian mayor of Vancouver. 

He is the son of immigrant parents, and in high school worked on the weekends at Wendy's where he worked as a janitor cleaning toilets before graduating from UBC's Sauder School of Business. Sim then qualified as an accountant and got a job with KPMG.

Not only that Sim has two businesses, one he co-owns called Nurse Next Door, that operates in North America, serving seniors who prefer to live at home, and Rosemary Rocksalt Bagels, which sells bagel sandwiches named after Vancouver neighbourhoods.

Sim is Stewart's main challenger again

Sim is married to a South Asian and they have four boys. But his one weakness is that he doesn't speak Chinese.

That said, his campaign boards have his Chinese name printed on there.

Will he get the Chinese vote in Vancouver? Hard to say, but 15 other people running for mayor and council are desperate for the Chinese vote or Persian and have petitioned to have their names in Chinese or Persian printed on the ballot for October 15.

This led to Vancouver's Chief Election Officer Rosemary Hagiwara to file an application in provincial court this past Tuesday to disavow Chinese and Persian characters to be used by the 15 candidates because when they filed their nomination papers they did not include their Chinese or Persian names, nor did they use them when they stood for election in 2018.

However, given the short time frame, Judge James Wingham ruled it would be "unfair" to proceed with the application under the timeline set out in the Vancouver Charter and adjourned the hearing to a later date, sometime after the municipal elections.

Harding has Chinese name on campaign board

For the 15 candidates they are thrilled with the ruling, with some ethnically Chinese candidates claiming it represents their heritage, while others like Fred Harding say they have a Chinese name because their spouse is Chinese, or they have connections to Chinatown like Melissa DeGenova... 

Meanwhile former three-time city councillor Kerry Jang dismissed the need to put Chinese and Persian names on the ballot, and that this is a way for candidates to procrastinate from talking about the real issues of the election which are in order of importance:

- Housing (35%)

- Drug overdoses (14%)

- Crime/Poverty/Property taxes (three-way tie at 9%)

- Climate change (7%)

- Jobs (6%)

- Covid-19 (5%)

- Traffic congestion/Public transit (each 2%)

Now that the ballot question is sorted, can we talk about issues voters really care about?