Adriane Carr won’t run for Vancouver mayor, will be one of five Green Party nominees for council

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Adriane Carr announced she will not be running for greater Vancouver as has been widely speculated in recent weeks. It’s a move that will change the dynamics of the municipal race in October and prevent the left-leaning vote from being split.

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The Green Party of Vancouver said in a news release Sunday morning that at a special general meeting, its members nominated five candidates, including Carr, to run for city council.

Carr was nominated as a Green city council candidate along with the two other incumbent councillors, Pete Fry and Michael Wiebe, plus two new candidates, labor and social justice activist Stephanie Smith and climate scientist and economist Devyani Singh.

“I am confident that the residents of Vancouver will elect all five of us, along with enough progressive candidates to make meaningful progress on issues that matter: Climate action, housing affordability, and a just green economic recovery,” said Carr in a statement.

She told Postmedia “it was a difficult decision (not to run for mayor) and it did take me a while to really think through the pros and cons.”

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She said her motivation to run for mayor “was really based on this next council being a pivotal time for action. I mean, bold action on climate and housing equity issues.”

Last October, Mayor Kennedy Stewart cast the deciding vote against approving a $45-a-year charge for permits to allow car owners to park their vehicles on city streets because he thought it would unfairly tax renters who have to park on the street over homeowners with access to their own garage or driveway.

Carr felt the vote not going through potentially means the city loses $20 million in revenue that could have gone toward greenhouse-gas-reduction projects and that low-income drivers would have qualified to pay only $5 a year for the permit.

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“Scientists are saying that the turnaround in terms of climate action has to be in the next four or five years. So that’s what was motivating me. Certainly, a lot of people were encouraging me to run for mayor and offering their endorsement and support,” said Carr.

However, in the end, she said she “looked at how things get done at council and what’s important, and certainly what we saw in terms of that vote that failed around climate action last fall, was that you need six votes. That’s how you get things passed.”

She said she also assessed her own chances of being elected Mayor, realizing that incumbent Stewart and some of the other candidates are “pretty robustly funded. And the chance that I might not win would mean one less vote for the kind of action we needed on climate and truly affordable housing and reconciliation and equity issues at the council table.”

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Carr, who was first elected to council in 2011, acknowledged the other risk in her running for mayor would be the splitting of left-of-centre voters choosing between her and Stewart. This would increase the chances for more central and right-leaning mayoral candidates and parties that have declared their intention to run such as the NPA’s John Coupar, A Better City’s Ken Sim, TEAM of a Livable Vancouver’s Colleen Hardwick and Progress Vancouver’s Mark Marissen.

in the 2018 electionsStewart won with 49,705 votes, but only narrowly beat Sim by 957 votes as Shauna Sylvester, who ran as a left-of-centre, independent candidate with no city hall experience, got 35,457 votes.

“There is risk there, and there’s the risk that I wouldn’t win and there’s not me at council,” she said.

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