NPA councillor Suzanne Anton jumps into Vancouver mayoral race party

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NPA councillor Suzanne Anton jumps into Vancouver mayoral race
Former Crown prosecutor risks party’s only council seat to run for top job


VANCOUVER - After single-handedly carrying the NPA’s tattered banner for three years, Suzanne Anton is risking its lone Vancouver city council seat to run for mayor.

In an exclusive interview with The Vancouver Sun on Tuesday, Anton, 58, said she will lead a renewed Non-Partisan Association to challenge Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver council. She believes voters are champing at the bit for change, partly because of the mayor’s disrespect for voters and the way he handled the Olympic village imbroglio.

In her interview, Anton positively vibrated when talking about Robertson’s image as an effective if controversial mayor.

“He’s not effective!” she nearly shouted. “Aside from bringing in chicken coops I don’t know what he’s done with his time. This has not been a council that has accomplished much.”

The raft of city-provincial housing announcements Vision has presided over were all based on the work of former NPA mayor Sam Sullivan’s council, she said. “He [Robertson] is cutting the ribbons on NPA projects.”

Three years ago Anton watched a messy fight between then mayor Sullivan and mayoral wannabe Peter Ladner split apart the NPA, one reason the venerable old civic party was routed at the polls.

When the smoke cleared on voting day in 2008, Anton was the only NPA councillor left standing. For three years she’s poked at Vision’s solid eight-member majority as hard as she could but often with little effect. (The other two councillors belong to COPE, the Coalition of Progressive Electors.)

Now, Anton will carry the banner again, this time leading what she calls “a great, amazing team” of NPA candidates for council, park board and school board as the party’s sole mayoral candidate.

“I think voters really are tired of this council, which I don’t think has done very much. I am very proud of the team I will lead. They’re a superb group of people.”

Half a dozen people have made it public they’re seeking party nominations June 4, but the NPA as yet hasn’t announced the full slate. Anton says she has a genuine chance of beating Robertson. “If I didn’t think so I wouldn’t run.”

Anton says Robertson has engaged in “polarizing politics,” imposing Vision’s will on neighbourhoods and businesses without meaningful consultation. “Gregor has treated some communities abysmally, like the West End residents, when he called them ‘bleeping effing NPA hacks’ because they wanted a say in things,” she said.

She also said Robertson has gone on to anger and disrespect voters more than any recent mayor. The Hornby and Dunsmuir bike lanes are good examples, and she favours removing them if a study being undertaken now shows businesses are being hurt. But she said the mayor’s handling of the Olympic village stands out as the shining example of why he shouldn’t be re-elected.

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“When the mayor stood up and badmouthed this, calling it a train wreck, I felt like someone took a knife and stuck it in my stomach,” she said. “He should have been touting the benefits. Instead, he showed a real failure of leadership. That’s why I think voters are looking for a change.”

Her ascension as the NPA’s only mayoral candidate is rooted in a party history that has often been controversial and turbulent. From Gordon Campbell’s modern remake of the moribund NPA in the mid-1980s through to now, the party has never had a nomination fight between two mayoral contenders, with one exception.

That occurred in 2005 when Christy Clark — now B.C.’s premier — challenged Sullivan for the nomination and lost by 64 votes. Sullivan went on to become mayor. In the other cases, the NPA dumped its incumbent mayors, Philip Owen for Jennifer Clarke in 2002 and Sullivan for Ladner in 2008. Both Clarke and Ladner lost their mayoral bids, two of only five times in the NPA’s 64-year history that it was locked out of the mayor’s office.

Now the party is willing to risk losing its lone outpost in council in favour of an all-or-nothing campaign by Anton, a two-term councillor who was first elected as a park board commissioner in 2002. She knows she faces a tremendous uphill battle in trying to unseat Robertson and his party.

Anton said she’s been reminded of that difficulty every time she shows up for council or a committee, where her skills as a former teacher, Crown prosecutor and community activist have been ignored by the mayor, who instead has given all the plum assignments to his Vision colleagues.

“Gregor Robertson is the mayor only of his Vision colleagues,” she said. “It’s the job of the mayor to be a consensus builder and he really isn’t that. I will not be that kind of mayor who ignores the skills of others for partisan political purposes.”

Anton is married with three grown children. Between 1986-1999 she was a Crown prosecutor with the provincial criminal justice branch. Her highest-profile case involved the first prosecution of Steve Fonyo, the troubled one-legged runner who followed Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope with his own Journey for Lives marathon across Canada, but became embroiled in the courts for driving while impaired, assault and fraud.

Anton won’t reveal her campaign team yet, other than her manager, Norman Stowe, the influential Vancouver strategist and publicist. Stowe is expected to draw heavily on his fat Rolodex of business and political contacts to help lure both supporters and dollars to a fight Anton believes will cost several million dollars.

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After single-handedly carrying the NPA’s tattered banner for three years, Suzanne Anton, pictured outside City Hall, is risking its lone Vancouver city council seat to run for mayor