News & Updates
★ PRESS RELEASES & STATEMENTS
★ IN THE NEWS
• Vancouver Election: 12 hot topics and where 10 different parties stand. Read article in Vancouver Sun here →
• VOTE Socialist’s free Vancouver bus in Stanley Park estimated to cost only $3,200 per weekend Read in Georgia Straight →
• COVID-19 and the Vancouver school board election. Dr. Karina Zeidler is running for Vancouver school board to try to save lives by educating those in the system about how COVID-19 is spread. Read in Georgia Straight →
• Socialist Seeks Breakthrough in Vancouver City Election. Read more in The Maple →
• Dr. Karina Zeidler is quoted in Child Care Workers Have Been Left Behind During The Pandemic. Will This Fall Be Different? Read more in The Maple →
• Dr. Karina Zeidler: Sewer Socialists of the 1900s knew how to make healthy cities (we can learn a lot from them) Read in Georgia Straight →
• Protect Your Province BC’s open letter to Adrian Dix on school safety Jas Johal Show CKNW
• Opinion: Vancouver public safety can’t be the sole realm of the police. Sean Orr Op Ed Daily Hive here →
• Socialism for Vancouver City Hall? Podcast with Sean Orr North Untapped
• On Running for City Council, Playing Whack-a-Mole with Homelessness, and the Public Washroom Deficit. By Sean Orr. Read article in Scout Magazine here →
• CBC News. Profiling the Vancouver Political Parties: VOTE Socialist. Read article here →
• VOTE Socialist’s free Vancouver bus in Stanley Park estimated to cost $3,200 only per weekend Georgia Straight Read Article Here ⇢
• Sean Orr: It’s time for radical change in Vancouver, and that’s why I’m running for city council. Georgia Straight Read Article Here ⇢
• Trustee candidate Dr. Karina Zeidler promises to restore universal masking to Vancouver public schools. Georgia Straight Read Article Here ⇢
★ ARTICLES
Radical Vancouver Politics — The Birth of Vote Socialist34:49
All the people who work on The Red Review live and work on stolen Indigenous lands across Turtle Island. There can be no reconciliation without restitution, which includes Land Back, RCMP off Indigenous land, and seizing the assets of the major resource corporations and returning them to the commons. On May 1st, 2022, a new united front electoral alliance launched in Vancouver. With demands to defund the Vancouver Police Department, build public housing, and to tax big corporations, Vote Socialist ran a five month whirlwind of a campaign that netted its three candidates over 47,000 votes. This is the story of how Vote Socialist came to be.
We sat down with two core members of Vote Socialist, Yvonne Hanson and Mark Lister, who breakdown key demands, political stunts, and the future of this grassroots united front.
★ PODCAST
Socialists at City Hall
by Andrea Pinochet-Escudero
VOTE Socialist, which received party status less than three months before the election, didn’t come close to getting elected in our inaugural effort. But we showed that it’s at least possible for socialists to run a serious campaign and propel our ideas into the mainstream discussion. We were the first party to release a full platform, and several of our proposals got picked up or echoed by more established parties: granting the city the option to acquire apartment buildings or land for sale in order to expand the stock of public housing, for example (a policy already in place in Montreal), as well as my proposal for a free shuttle bus around Stanley Park.
Given the state of the world and of politics in Canada, we hope others will take heart from our emerging efforts here. The story isn’t epic or glamorous; it’s just a tale of rank-and-file working people getting together to raise the basic demand that society needs to, and can, do better for the majority.
Read full story on Midnight Sun Mag here →
Andrea Pinochet-Escudero is a Chilean lifelong socialist and frontline housing support worker and union member who ran for Park Commissioner as part of VOTE Socialist in the 2022 Vancouver municipal elections.