On Saturday, a wave of change swept through British Columbia’s municipal elections. Nowhere more so than in Vancouver, where the newly formed ABC party, led by Ken Sim, took the mayoralty, seven out of 10 council seats, as well as a majority on the park board and school board. Given that Sim was the first Chinese-Canadian to be elected mayor of Canada’s third-largest city, one would think his win would be universally hailed as a victory for progress and racial equality. Unfortunately, it was not.
Rather than acknowledging the historic nature of Sim’s win, outgoing Mayor Kennedy Stewart delivered a concession speech that included a list of his own non-existent or dubious accomplishments and then fled from the media, refusing to answer questions.
His loss was all the more emphatic when one considers that the other candidates for mayor were nominally right-of-centre and should have pulled votes away from Sim. All told, less than 30 per cent of Vancouverites who showed up to the polls voted to continue down the path Stewart had set of the city.
The usual twitterati who cheer every woke event and accomplishment were also surprisingly quiet about Sim’s momentous accomplishment, and those that did opine seemed unimpressed. Sim was accused of various shortcomings, which ranged from the flimsy to the ridiculous.
He had either bought the election, or his victory was not a win for visible minorities, and of course there were the usual accusations of fascism, this time from a former NDP candidate. One person lamented that, “Vancouver is now a police state,” because Sim wants to increase the size of the Vancouver Police Department by a mere seven per cent (and hire 100 mental health nurses, which you’d think people would like). And in perhaps the most extraordinary accusation of all, Sim was painted as an upholder of white supremacy.
One tries to find polite language to describe such accusations. “Deranged” is, I think, as clean as it is possible to keep it. But such deranged thinking does have its benefits. Namely, it should emphasize, like a blinding flash from a Broadway billboard filled with 1,000-watt bulbs, that being woke or “progressive” has nothing to do with race or sex, but is simply, and only, about one’s political leaning.
“White Supremacy:” Is there anything it can’t do?
Related:
Progressives insist that it was a spontaneous eruption of racism and fascism, and not this kind of thing, that led people in Vancouver to vote out their radical anti-police mayor and city council last weekpic.twitter.com/MAV15Xpxcq
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 20, 2022