Do political parties make sense in municipal politics?

As the battle for control of Vancouver city hall tightens ahead of Saturday’s B.C.-wide municipal elections, voters will be doing something most other Canadians can’t; choosing leaders who run under the banners of civic political parties.

Outside of Montreal, Vancouver is the only major Canadian city where civic parties dominate municipal politics. Some provinces, like Ontario, forbid them.

But in B.C. and Quebec civic parties are common, and a political scientist says he believes they could make sense elsewhere as Canadian cities grow and the issues they tackle go beyond maintaining roads and making sure residents can count on police and fire services.

“Once a city gets to a certain size, the issues they confront become more complex,” says political scientist Carey Doberstein of the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. “They become more than simply about filling that pothole.”

The campaign in Kelowna, his home base, now has two civic parties vying for power in the lakeside city, for instance.

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Filling potholes and ensuring the sewage system works is about management, not political philosophy, said Doberstein, who studies municipal government.

But rapidly growing cities have to think long-term on larger questions of livability, the environment, transportation and growth, he told Yahoo Canada News.

“Many big cities are confronting some of the issues they never did before,” he said. “It’s about the strategic decisions the city needs to make and political parties play into that.”

It raises the question whether the inertia critics have blasted in Toronto’s city hall would have been overcome if a slate of candidates under one banner had won a majority of council seats.

But civic parties shouldn’t be confused with those on the provincial and federal scene. They have no direct connections to them, though their supporters are loosely arrayed on the left-right spectrum.

Their job largely is to get their candidate slates elected; the organizations lie more or less dormant between campaigns.

In Vancouver, the ironically named Non-Partisan Association (NPA), a centre-right party formed in the late 1930s, has held power for much of the time. Now it’s trying to wrest control of city council from centre-left Vision Vancouver, created in 2005 by disaffected members of the Committee of Progressive Electors (COPE) and has been in charge for the last six years under Mayor Gregor Robertson.

Poll results suggest the NPA, led by former media executive Kirk LaPointe, has gained ground on Robertson, an organic juice entrepreneur and former New Democrat MLA, in the last couple of weeks.

The campaign has turned nasty, including a lawsuit filed by Vision claiming NPA ads and comments by LaPointe defamed Robertson and top councillor Geoff Meggs. It suggests corruption in promises Meggs made to civic unions to keep a lid on contracting out in exchange for a $102,000 campaign donation.

The NPA’s critics argue the party is largely the creature of railway tourism entrepreneur Peter Armstrong (the Rocky Mountaineer), who is its president. He kickstarted the campaign with a $407,000 donation and recruited LaPointe to run for mayor. Both parties have war chests of around $2 million.

COPE, led by mayoralty candidate Meena Wong, is running a distant third to the left of Vision but might factor in a split that could give the NPA a victory.

Civic parties work especially well in cities with at-large representation, which means councillors don’t represent specific districts or wards. In Vancouver, the 10 candidates with the most votes become councillors.

The ward system that most other cities use makes individual councillors more accountable to their constituents, much like federal MPs or provincial legislature members. The absence of political parties means they may form loose coalitions on specific issue.

Doberstein said he generally favours civic parties but there is a tradeoff.

“There certainly are benefits to having independent council candidates that don’t come with a particular ideological framework that binds them into certain decisions,” he said.

“But I do think that political parties, the benefit of them outweighs the cost of losing their independence in the sense that they can more effectively govern in non-election periods.

“And during election periods it’s clear to voters what they did in office, because they come as a package. And whether we like what they did or not like what they did, we can respond accordingly and not have to sift through the voting records of eight or nine council candidates. Who’s going to do that, right?”

The at-large system, of course, makes it almost impossible for independents to get elected to a council seat, never mind the mayor’s chair. Their message gets swamped by better funded party campaigns. There’s no reason for donors to back you if you’re just one vote on council.

“But if you’re voting in the leader of a party in the mayor’s seat who’s likely to form the majority, then that’s real power,” said Doberstein.

Mike Harcourt was Vancouver’s last independent mayor, serving two terms from 1980 to 1986 before later becoming B.C. premier under the NDP banner. He started out as a city councillor for The Electors’ Action Movement (TEAM) party, part of a successful movement to block construction of an elevated freeway through downtown Vancouver.

Independents who don’t have name recognition can’t do well in Vancouver’s system, he said. Nonetheless, he supports civic parties in the at-large system as a way of focusing on major policies such as affordable housing and transit expansion.

“When you run and get elected and get a mandate to do that, then usually you expect your caucus on council to bring forward policies and ideas that are going to reinforce that,” he said in an interview.

That doesn’t translate into rigid party discipline, whipped votes like you might see in Ottawa or Victoria.

“Ninety-nine issues out of a hundred are changing garbage collection so it’s more efficient or dealing with noisy dogs,” said Harcourt. “They’re pretty non-controversial issues, so it’s more of a give and take consensus thing.”

The give and take has actually produced a basic vision of what Vancouver should be, regardless of which party’s in power, said Harcourt.

There’s consensus on the need for sustainability and livability which candidates are expected to support or “you’re not going to get elected, no matter what party you are,” he said. The friction comes what policies you use to fulfil those objectives.

Harcourt pointed to the 2008 mayor’s race between Robertson and NPA candidate Peter Ladner.

“You get these two tall, slim, movie-star handsome, bike-riding multi-millionaires with a wife and four kids running as to who’s green or greener,” he said.

Former NPA mayor Philip Owen (1993-2002) agreed issues often were resolved across party lines. He recalled a fierce debate over rezoning a property to allow a transition house. Local residents opposed it but COPE councillor Harry Rankin won over the majority NPA council and the zoning change passed unanimously, Owen said.

“I don’t think you always voted the same as other NPA members, at least I didn’t,” said George Puil, who was an NPA councillor for 38 years. “You just felt that this was right and you voted that way.”

Of course, it’s not all sweetness and light. Too much contrariness and councillors might find themselves off a party’s slate in the next election, said Doberstein.

“Those who aren’t good team players are likely to be challenged at the nomination in the subsequent election cycle,” he said.

A ward system might make it easier for council candidates because only the mayor needs to achieve city-wide recognition. But Vancouver voters rejected a proposed change from at-large to ward representation in a plebiscite a decade ago.

Metropolitan Montreal has both a ward system and party politics. Voters there select a metropolitan mayor and 73 councillors by ward, along with 19 borough mayors and councils.

Party slates make it easier for voters to sift through dozens of candidates and platforms, said Jonathan Brun, co-founder of Open Montreal and national president of Open North, organizations that advocate for open data and government transparency.

However he’s not sure parties have had much impact on the way the city is run.

“It’s certainly no magic solution to city problems,” said Brun.

Unlike B.C., where fundraising for municipal campaigns is wide open, Quebec restricts bars businesses and unions from donating and limits individual donations of $200 in election years and $100 in off years, he said.

But the rules didn’t prevent the massive corruption scandal that swamped Montreal and its suburbs, taking down several politicians including Montreal’s mayor over allegations they took money from contractors in exchange for giving them the inside track on work for the city.

The provincial rules were supposed to reduce the temptation for civic politicians to go after private money, said Brun. It hasn’t worked but there’s no agreement on an alternative.

“There’s as many opinions on political financing structures as their are people with political opinions,” he said.

Back in B.C., municipal voters – at least the minority who bother showing up at the polls Saturday – will struggle to find names on the ballot that they recognize. In the end, they’ll likely vote based on the party banner.