Vancouver civic candidates court ethnic voters

This video showing NPA Mayoral candidate Peter Ladner touring Victoria Drive (link now deprecated) alongside City Council candidates David Lee, Kanman Wong and Daljit Sidhu typifies where politics is today in our city. The NPA have always been the political force who have worked best with Vancouver’s diverse ethnic communities, as Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith once described on his blog:

Vancouver has experienced monumental demographic changes since the city hosted the World’s Fair in 1986.
[Left wing party] COPE was slow to adapt to those changes, and did a poor job of recruiting candidates from the growing communities of Chinese, Filipino, South Asian, and Latin American immigrants.
The NPA fared much better in this regard. Even though many of those candidates weren’t elected–and particulary those of South Asian descent–the NPA paid more attention to multicultural communities in the 1990s.

It’s good to see Peter and the NPA keeping up this important tradition.