A diverse slate of First Nations and Métis candidates is running in Vancouver’s upcoming election, each hoping to advance reconciliation and quality of life for all.
Voters will hit the polls on October 15 to elect their next mayor, council and park board commissioners, and Indigenous people have tossed their rats in the ring for every race.
Leona Brown, an independent candidate, is hoping to take the top job from incumbent Mayor Kennedy Stewart. She told Global News she initially ran as a way to encourage Indigenous people to vote, but her campaign has shifted into something more.
“Looking at all the political stuff that’s happening now, we really need to have Indigenous people at the table,” Brown said Wednesday.
“It’s not enough to just say this is a city of reconciliation.”
If elected, she said one of her priorities would be to restructure and decolonize the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) with an infusion of mental health supports for the unhoused in downtown Vancouver.
Brown is a proud Gitxsan and Nisga’a woman. She said she hopes to quell some of the mistrust that exists between Indigenous Peoples and municipal governments.
“You have to vote in order to have reconciliation occur in this city,” she explained.
“We’ve already been assimilated in society and made to feel like whatever we have to complain about is not going to be heard and nobody cares. Voting is the way to say, ‘I care.'”
It’s a mission that resonates with Non-Partisan Association (NPA) Vancouver council candidate Cinnamon Bhayani, a Métis woman, recent law school graduate, and current regulatory compliance officer with the Department of Finance.
If elected, Bhayani said she wants to be a “bridge” between city council and Indigenous constituents to make civic participation in a colonial system less intimidating for all.
“I can help guide them through the process if they want to come speak at city hall, or they just want to come watch — they’ll know there’s someone like-minded within city hall.”
Bhayani said she would like to see Vancouver build a wellness and healing centre where both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can congregate, and as a councillor, would work to secure the lands and funding for it.
If elected, COPE council candidates Tanya Webking and Breen Ouellette said they would support incumbent Jean Swanson’s proposed “mansion tax,” along with vacancy control measures and protection for renters through tenants’ unions.
“We absolutely cannot be afraid to tax billionaires,” said Webking, a Dene-German woman from Tlicho Nation in Yellowknife.
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“The middle-income earners cannot bear that weight and we have millionaires and billionaires making their living on unceded and stolen lands. It’s time for a little reconciliation.”
Webking, a housing and anti-poverty activist and Indigenous health promotion case manager at AIDS Vancouver, has worked in the Downtown Eastside for decades.
She called for an immediate safe supply strategy to combat the toxic drug crisis, along with interim measures to give the unhoused somewhere to sleep as the rainy season approaches.
“There are some easy, quick solutions around tiny homes and tent communities while we work on our long-term solutions. We just need some immediate needs like washrooms and showers and laundry and support workers.”
Ouellette, a Métis lawyer, father and activist, said he was motivated to run for city council by the disproportionate representation of Indigenous children in foster care — a system that is known to discriminate against, and traumatize, Indigenous families.
“We are feeling from our communities in the city that people want to hear our voices, they want to see us in elected roles. We will bring a lived perspective of what’s happened to us,” he told Global News.
Ouellette assisted family and survivor witnesses as a lawyer for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. If elected, he said one of his priorities would be creating an independent representative for Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people for Vancouver, both to monitor the city’s progress in implementing the inquiry’s Calls for Justice, and to devise a plan to improve quality of life for those underrepresented residents.
Matthew Norris, president of the Urban Native Youth Association, is running as a council candidate for OneCity Vancouver. The Lac La Ronge First Nation citizen said representation will improve the services most often access by Indigenous Peoples.
“We’ve seen a city that has inequities baked into it, within our housing supply, within our health-care system, within our justice system, within our educational organizations,” Norris explained.
“When you’re missing that experience and that voice, you’re not going to create policy that is effective or efficient in responding to the needs of that community.”
Norris, who is working on a PhD focused on the implementation of international Indigenous rights frameworks, said he wants Indigenous cultures and languages to be seamlessly woven into the fabric of more Vancouver neighbourhoods.
If elected, he would push mayor and council to green-light Indigenous-led projects that provide affordable places to live and open community spaces grounded in local First Nations’ values.
“We’re seeing some of the most groundbreaking projects in Sen̓áḵw, in Jericho Lands, in the Heather Lands project … we shouldn’t be delaying these projects we should support them,” Norris explained.
“We need a city council that has the experience and understanding about how to do that work in partnership with the Indigenous nations and in partnership with the Indigenous community as well.”
There are two First Nations people running to become commissioners on the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation: COPE’s Ukws Kots’a Chris Livingstone and OneCity’s Tiyaltelut Kristen Rivers.
Rivers did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. Livingstone, of the Nisga’a Nation, said parks are very important to him because he has slept in them himself.
“I’ve got a lot of ideas about how to help people who are sleeping out in the streets or in the parks, and I think at the park board we’re at a level where we can actually help the community,” he said in an interview.
“For me, it’s about community and how we connect to the land that we live on.”
In an expensive city like Vancouver, he added, parks are “really the only escape.”
Livingstone, who has worked in the Downtown Eastside for about 20 years, is a peer navigator for the Metro Vancouver Aboriginal Executive Council, and a member of the VPD’s Indigenous Advisory Community Action Team.
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