Gregor Robertson, a smiley fellow reminiscent of Jim Carey in both looks and manner, except he isn’t a comedian--but he is the founder of Happy Planet Juice Company which offers pretty much the same thing--was last week nominated the mayoral candidate for the Vision Vancouver Party in city elections coming up this fall. The fit, white, moderate businessman is favored to beat the Non-Partisan Association’s candidate for mayor, Peter Ladner, also a fit, white, moderate businessman in a city that may be fit but is not white, not moderate, and not really about business at all in either the juice or newspaper sense. (Ladner launched a small, useless, unread but lucrative, business rag).

The nomination of Robertson and his likely win this fall finally completes a nasty job begun in the summer of 2002. That’s when a contract was put out on the life of radical left politics in Vancouver.

The radical left has a long and proud tradition in this rough and tumble port and resource extraction town. Long a boisterous jumble of lumberjacks, fishermen, miners, sailors, stevedores, hookers, lost souls and the dispossessed from across Canada, as well as Pacific and Indian Ocean immigrants that wash up on shore with the regularity of waves, the labour movement and the leftist issue-oriented politics it nurtures have always found fertile ground here. Intellectuals of the left followed, drawn by the freshly tilled soil of this, the last place in the world to be mapped (we’re typically under the label of older world maps), seeing in the cross-pollination of various underclasses opportunities to test new ideas of organization and revolution. The over-class here, by contrast, has always been small and nervous. Their grip on the place has always been as tenuous as the city’s grip on the sliver of coast it occupies on Canada’s far west extremity. It has always been their mission to contain and neutralize the explosively dangerous radical left that always threatens to swamp them.

Like in the 1930s. The intellectuals then pointed out to the out-of-work workers that not everyone seemed to be suffering setbacks in the Great Depression. The well-off seemed to get a lot better off while the middle class was evicted from homes and lower classes were starved. Theories were proffered that the depression might not have been accidental, that its longevity might not have been battled with enthusiasm, and that opportunities—particularly in rollbacks to labour rights and wages—might have been eagerly exploited, a point easily made by referencing the proliferation of police and private security guards armed with clubs or worse.

So popular did these theories become that the radicals very nearly won a majority on City Council in 1932. Terrified at the prospect that property taxes might be used to address homelessness, drug addiction and other poverty-related issues, the well-off founded a civic party to battle the socialists back in organized and well-funded manner. They named it The Non-Partisan Association to convey the impression they were not Socialists, Communists or Fascists, partisan labels then sweeping Europe and threatening to bring war again to the place where, only a decade-and-a-half earlier, The War to End All Wars had devastated the continent. The implication was that Vancouver’s socialists were partisans and hence would bring Euro-war to Vancouver in their zeal to take on the popular issues—homelessness, addiction and poverty.

The trick worked for most of seven decades, until the summer of 2002. That’s when 10-year NPA mayor Philip Owen, who had dutifully done nothing to address homelessness, addiction and poverty, suddenly had a road-to-Damascus conversion on Hastings Street East and began speaking about deploying tax money on homelessness, addiction and poverty issues. He was ousted from the job at once, but not before the party was nearly fatally wounded in the ugly process.

The well-off suddenly realized the NPA was a tired and worn-out old creaky ship no longer reliable for keeping the ubiquitous socialists at bay. But the problem was, the only other viable party in the city was COPE, the partly but by no means wholly, left leaning home for the socialists and radicals.

Since COPE would likely win the 2002 election with the NPA crippled and staggered from its self-inflicted wounds, the call was put out for a take-over. Enter celebrity ex-cop Larry Campbell, then famous for having a TV show, Davinci’s Inquest, loosely based on his short 18-month stint as a coroner. Campbell is a smarmy pasty-faced grinner with a foul mouth and an ex-cop’s tolerance for the vagaries of life, which is to say, none. Quick to judgment, short on attention, willfully ignorant of niggling details and far too sure of himself to a defensive degree, he was about the exact opposite of the character in the show based on him. He won the mayoral nomination at COPE unopposed, so rich was the smell of power to the forever locked-out-of-power party of the left. He won the election as promised, in a sweep.

Before the first of his three years in the Mayor’s office was over, his real mission was revealed. He first created his own demagogic power base within COPE by forming the sycophantic and self-aggrandizing Friends of Larry Campbell group. The implication was that not everyone in COPE was friends with the lovable oaf—namely the socialists and radicals. Before long, Friends of Larry Campbell, having raised sufficient funds through COPE party channels, morphed into Vision Vancouver Party and then formerly split with COPE, taking its money but leaving the debts behind.

The 2005 Vision election strategy was not so much to engage in battle with the limping but still alive NPA, but to finish off forever the radicals and socialists left behind in the abandoned Good Ship COPE, and thereby banish forever any more talk of city taxes being used to address homelessness, addiction and poverty—elements that had by now come to define the city around the world as much as ocean, mountains and climate did.

Jim Green, the new Vision Vancouver candidate for Mayor in 2005 (after Campbell fled to the Senate, mission accomplished), failed, surprisingly, to win after the NPA’s Sam Sullivan pulled off the narrowest of victories and his colleagues won a bare majority on council. So the old warhorse wasn’t quite dead yet!

But three years later, Sullivan, a universally reviled disaster in the Mayor’s office—he both spoke about homelessness, addiction and poverty, alienating the well-off, but served only to exacerbate the issues, alienating the rest of the city—was turfed two weeks ago by forces lined up by Peter Ladner who campaigned within the NPA by promising never to raise the issues of homelessness, addiction and poverty again.

He will contest the Mayor’s office against Gregor Robertson of Vision this fall, a contest COPE will likely withdraw from on the grounds that running a third candidate for Mayor could split the centre-left vote and deliver yet another term to the not-yet-moribund NPA. That at least has been lone-COPE councilor, and presumptive Mayoral candidate, David Cadman’s position. We now understand why the strongly pro-Vision leader of COPE stayed as leader of COPE: to be a place-holder lest socialists and radicals be left alone to run their own candidates against both Vision and NPA candidates, whom they detest equally. (The split between COPE and Vision three years earlier was, after all, mutually welcomed). Without a candidate for Mayor, there will be no campaign and media publicity for any COPE candidates for council, and so it is more than likely COPE will not survive to see 2010.

The Campbell/Green/Cadman/Robertson plan will have achieved what the NPA could not in over seven decades: kill off for good the socialist and radical tradition in Vancouver politics. The cat is in bag and the bag is in the river, as they say. After 70 years of a strong, effective and world-leading voice for the rights of the remainder of citizens who are not of the well-off caste--those who suffer directly or indirectly by policing costs, break-ins, loss of small businesses, etc the effects of chronically unaddressed homelessness, addiction and poverty--the socialist and radical tradition in Vancouver is finally about killed.

It took them long enough. The model was always sitting there south of the border. Instead of taking on the socialists one¬-on-one, all the well-off had to do was what the well¬-off in America figured out long ago: set up two parties under their control, not just one, and then let everyone’s energies dissipate in that staged contest and don’t even acknowledge anyone else effectively pushed to the edge of the stage—namely the socialists. The Vision-NPA “battle” this fall will be as meaningful as your usual Democratic-Republican “battle” staged every four years in the US. But everyone—the activists, the letter writers, the outraged, and especially the media “watch dogs” will take to the staged battle like dogs to the bone.

Everyone thinks Coke made a terrible mistake when it brought out its New Coke then was “forced” to re-introduce Coke Classic. But everyone got so caught up in the contest between New Coke and Coke Classic, they forgot all about Pepsi. Coke sales overall have never been higher. Brilliant, really.

Now it’s fit white moderate businessman from a juice company versus fit white moderate businessman from a newspaper company and everyone’s forgot all about the socialists and radicals. The six year plan is nearly complete. By 2009, COPE will be gone for good, and the socialist and radical traditions that built this city--and quite literally so, too, in terms of cement, bricks, and wood construction--will be buried.

Or they could find a new home in the intriguing Work Less Party. It’s already nominated its Mayoral candidate, none other than Betty Krawcuk, twice jailed senior citizen who bravely fought to save Eagleridge Bluffs, amongst so many other noble, radical, battles. She’s fit and white too, but she’s no moderate, she’s not in business, and she’s no man. Hey, the right routinely jump ship to whatever floats them anew, why shouldn’t the socialists and radicals do the same, and jump sinking COPE for buoyant Work Less Party? Maybe the radical tradition in Vancouver is not as dead as Ladner, Robertson, Campbell, Green and Cadman hope it is.