At about 2 PM last Friday, the Vancouver Whitecaps football club sent an email out to their list of supporters. “Vote in today’s Province poll,” read the title, and continued, “We wanted to inform you that the Province is conducting an online poll to gauge interest in the proposed new stadium . . . . Register your vote by 4 PM today. In addition, please forward this to your friends and colleagues, as a strong public show of support will greatly help our cause.”
A strong show of public support would indeed help the Whitecaps’ cause. The new owner of the club, billionaire Greg Kerfoot, has proposed a spectacular soccer stadium on the waterfront east of the old CPR building at Cordova and Granville streets—and 30 feet above the CPR tracks. The only problem is it would present a huge concrete wall between the waterfront and the already distressed neighbourhood in the Downtown Eastside, not to mention it would add significantly to traffic, noise, and yet more alcohol consumption in an area already soaking.
The process of obtaining permits to build the stadium is moving through City Council now, and Council’s sensitivity to public approval or dissent is high at this early stage of the process, when it can still easily kill the plan before anyone is too deeply invested in it.
It is dearly important to the football club’s owner for yet another reason, too: Kerfoot not only purchased the rights 30 feet above the railbeds for his stadium, but also many more hectares of rights above the railbeds stretching all the way to Main Street, the last unredeveloped industrial waterfront remaining in Vancouver. Broad public approval of the stadium would encourage Council to allow the permitting process to proceed, thereby setting a precedent for the rest of his property.
The Province newspaper, it must be noted, is a “partner” of the Whitecaps football club (and the Vancouver Sun, its sister publication within the CanWestGlobal media empire, is a “sponsor” of the Whitecaps’ stadium proposal).
The poll the Province ran last Friday asked the question, “Do you favour a 15,000-seat stadium in the waterfront area of Gastown?” In the early hours, the poll was running as high as 74% in favour. That’s when the Whitecaps sent out their email asking supporters to tell their friends to go vote in order to push the results up higher still.
But that’s when the numbers began to seriously slide instead. By the time the polls closed two hours later, they had swung almost entirely the other way: 72% opposed, 28% in favour.
Ten minutes after the poll closed, the results were removed from the Province’s website. Fifteen minutes after that, John Rocha, president of the Whitecaps, told me the poll had been “suspended” “because the system got hacked,” he wrote. “They are investigating as to who hacked the system,” he said.
His information, he told me, came from Province sports feature editor Paul Chapman, who told me he had been preparing a story for the Sunday edition about what he expected to be a high level of support the poll showed for the stadium. He said the poll results were pulled down from the website because the big swing to the “No” side caused suspicion that it had been hacked. To his knowledge, however, no Province online poll had ever been hacked, and its numbers had never before been thrown into serious doubt. Nor had Province online poll results ever been pulled down from their website.
Nathan Vanstone, communi-cations manager for the Whitecaps, denied that anyone associated with the Whitecaps called the Province to ask that the final poll results be pulled down. “We were told by the Province that something strange was going on with the poll and they are looking into what happened,” he wrote.
Ros Guggi, the deputy editor-in-chief at the Province, and the person on whose authority the poll was ditched, was at her desk, said the newsroom personnel I was on the phone with, but when the subject of my call was explained, she was suddenly said to be in a meeting, and the newsroom staffer quickly terminated the call. No phone calls or emails from Guggi or from the Canada.com webmaster were ever returned.
When gauging the level of public approval for the proposed stadium, city councillors should take into consideration the fact that the major media in this city are intimately involved with the proponents of the stadium and are pushing hard for approval of the plan, even while evidence of public disapproval of the proposed stadium may be subject to censoring by those same media properties.
The Province’s immediate removal of the poll results the moment they went negative is certainly complicating the picture immensely.
