New West candidate questions endorsement process

Candidates were still seeking an endorsement from the New Westminster and District Labour Council long after selections had been made.

Scott McIntosh, a concrete construction foreman with the City of Vancouver, is a member of CUPE Local 1004 and a shop steward. When he made it known he was considering a run for city council, he was encouraged to apply for an endorsement.

“My union asked me to go through that process. District labour doesn’t actually have the money – they are supposed to be a voice for the unions and stuff like that,” he said. “Yes, I did go through that process and it turned out to be a very negative process.”

McIntosh, as well as some of the candidates seeking an endorsement from the New Westminster and District Labour Council, were still being interviewed months after decisions had been made about endorsements.

“The policy of the council is that we interview every candidate that makes an application,” explained Carolyn Rice, secretary-treasurer of the labour council. “In this particular election cycle, we definitely interviewed more candidates than there was positions.”

Early in the election year, the New Westminster District and Labour Council sends out packages to incumbents, candidates who may have sought the labour council’s endorsement in previous years and people who contacted the labour council in the years between elections and expressed an interest in getting an endorsement in the future.

“We start early,” Rice said. “We’ve got 14 municipal governments and school districts in our region. We have the largest area in terms of local government so it’s a long process.”

Candidates seeking the labour council’s support fill out an application, which is revised after each election in order to remain current and address today’s issues and trends, such as climate change. The majority of interviews, before a committee of eight to 12 people belonging to unions represented by the labour council, took place between April and June.

“In June, anyone who had already come through the process was recommended to our membership in June,” Rice said. “Anybody who didn’t get through the process by that time, because of the sheer numbers, then came first-come, first-serve, in a late round of interviews in September.”

A June 16 notice posted on the labour council’s website stated that the council/school board candidate interview committee had completed its interviews and would present a report and recommendations to the membership on June 25.

“I’d already heard through the grapevine, although they denied it to me, that they had already chosen their slate before the summer,” said McIntosh, whose interview took place in September.

Rice told The Record that candidates were still seeking the labour council’s endorsement for this November’s election in the third week of October.

With the province proposing to move civic elections from November to October in future years, timelines for those seeking endorsements will be pushed back.

“The reality is we interview everybody who applies,” she said. “We did that as we would do in any other year. The difference this election is that we called this our transition year – we knew the changes were coming to the election timetable.”

This year was meant to be a transitional election cycle, she said.

“It wasn’t perfect; we did the best we could under the circumstances to have this early set of interviews,” Rice said.

Follow Theresa McManus on Twitter, @TheresaMcManus