Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
NDP. The vote was close in even the well-heeled Westside polling districts
and in 1986 an NDP candidate defeated an incumbent Minister in a
Westside riding. Then in 1991, Michael Harcourt led the NDP to victory in
the provincial election, winning eight of ten Vancouver seats. Though
Harcourt was not opposed to Asia-Pacific immigration and investment, and
quickly visited East Asia to reassure economic elites, nonetheless the
excesses of neo-liberal social and economic policy were reined in.
At the senior levels of government, then, the promotion of neo-liberalism's
open borders through policies of free trade, the disciplining of labour, wel-
fare state cutbacks and the removal of barriers to the anonymous forces of
the market encountered significant resistance, independent of flows from
Asia Pacific. This was the complex and prevailing political geography into
which millionaire migrants moved.
Municipal Affairs: The Rise of the Neighbourhood
But it was in municipal politics, the jurisdictions governing land use, that
opposition to the unimpeded march of the market in land development was
most clearly expressed. Two new municipal reform parties had emerged in
Vancouver in 1968 during a period of rapid growth, one liberal, the other
left wing. They were opposed to the one-dimensional preoccupation with
growth and development that was the leitmotif of the long-established
incumbent Non-Partisan Association (NPA), heavily influenced by real
estate and business values (Tennant 1980). The reform parties proposed
instead a more varied set of quality of life objectives that included environ-
mentalism - not surprising in the city where Greenpeace and Canada's first
Green Party were established - and upholding the public household by sup-
porting transit not freeways, pressing for substantial commitment to social
housing, and enlisting public participation in decision-making (Ley 1980).
The crucible in which these parties were born was a prolonged conflict
over the imposition of an urban freeway system upon Vancouver, the first
leg of which would dismember Chinatown-Strathcona, long a victim of
social exclusion and political harassment (see Chapter 2). Success in the
'great freeway debate' and against a parallel urban renewal plan that would
have razed Chinatown's residential extension, Strathcona, sparked the
desire for an urban politics more attentive to the needs of local residents
and less controlled by urban boosterism. The saving of Chinatown, the
weakest district in the city politically, was also an inspiring test case for
emergent neighbourhood anti-development movements. In 1971 both
Chinatown and Gastown, the city's historic town site (also facing destruc-
tion from the freeway alignment), were designated protected Historic Areas
by the provincial government. The same year multiculturalism with its
defence of cultural diversity was declared in Ottawa. The protection offered
