How Shauna Sylvester Almost Became The NPA’s Greatest Mayoral Candidate
In the early morning of Sunday, October 21st, Vancouver elected Kennedy Stewart as its mayor, marking a historic victory for an independent nominee. The last mayor to be independent of any political party (note that this does not mean the mayor was not part of a political alliance or coalition) was Mike Harcourt, who served three terms from 1980 to 1986. Mayor-elect Kennedy Stewart is joined by five NPA, three Green, one OneCity and one COPE Councillors-elect, which is one of the most divided Vancouver city councils in recent history.
The election came down to the wire, as polling stations were late in giving in their results to City Hall, which extended the counting process over an hour than expected. Mayor-elect Kennedy Stewart won the election in a tight margin of less than 1000 votes, beating out the likes of Fred Harding, Wai Young, Hector Bremner, and David Chen. However, his two main opponents, Ken Sim of the NPA and Shauna Sylvester (also an independent), were very close to beating Kennedy Stewart and taking the position of Mayor-elect. It was the NPA’s Ken Sim who was less than 1000 votes away from reclaiming Vancouver for the Non-Partisan Association.
Even a novice political strategist would recognize that this mayoral race consisted of two types of mayoral candidates: Actual candidates, and spoiler candidates. Anyone with an inkling of knowledge about the views of politics within Vancouver would realize that a strictly conservative candidate like Wai Young or Fred Harding would not have a shot of being elected mayor of Vancouver. The parties have no positive results in their short histories. Same goes with Hector Bremner and Yes Vancouver, who fell flat on their face and only succeeded (alongside Young, Harding, and David Chen of the far-right ProVancouver party) in costing Ken Sim this election. This is partially because these four political candidates were splinter groups, in one way or another, of the NPA, and took along many of the NPA’s voters with them.
However, if only one of those splinter parties did not exist, Ken Sim would be your Mayor-elect instead of Kennedy Stewart. This is because of the presence of Shauna Sylvester, an Executive Director from SFU. Sylvester ran a similar campaign to Kennedy Stewart, being independent and having large grassroots support across the city. The one difference between Stewart and Sylvester was that the latter was not officially endorsed by any of the major political parties that chose not to run a mayoral candidate. Stewart had the support of the Green Party and OneCity, and had on and off ties with COPE throughout the campaign process.
Shauna Sylvester received over 35,000 votes to her name, no doubt taking those votes away from Mayor-elect Kennedy Stewart, who ended up with just under 50,000. If Sylvester was running her campaign to be an actual candidate, she almost unintentionally hand delivered Ken Sim the victory. This is not something to take lightly, as Kennedy Stewart and Ken Sim were clear front runners throughout the entire campaign, and Shauna Sylvester was no where close to being in the Top 2 of any decisive opinion poll.
Sylvester’s presence would have been catastrophic for Vancouver’s majority left leaning and moderate population had one of the four NPA splinter groups had not existed. Many of Shauna Sylvester’s supporters will claim that the election of Kennedy Stewart was not the result they would have hoped for, which begs the question: “Then what was the result you wanted? For Ken Sim to be elected mayor? Because you almost made that a reality.”
There were twenty-one mayoral candidates in the 2018 municipal election in Vancouver, seven of which among those who received more than 2% of the popular vote. If all of the right-wing and left-wing candidates were aggregated into two candidates, those being Kennedy Stewart and Ken Sim, then the former would have 85,349 votes and the latter would have 79,853 votes. It’s hard to say that this would play out exactly as detailed, but the lack of Shauna Sylvester’s presence would more than likely have guaranteed the centre-left of Vancouver a victory over the NPA once again, while the lack of one of those four splinter parties would have done the opposite. Had one of ProVancouver, Vancouver 1st, Yes Vancouver or Coalition Vancouver not existed, Shauna Sylvester would have gone down as the greatest mayoral candidate in NPA history, and an enemy to the majority of Vancouver’s electorate for the rest of time.
