AS had been expected for a long time now — a bit too long, indeed — NDP MLA from Surrey-Panorama, Jinny Sims, officially announced on Wednesday that she will run for mayor in Surrey.
Her Surrey Forward party also announced four candidates — June Liu, Jim Bennett, Ramon Bandong and Theresa Pidcock (no name recognition here!) — for Surrey City Council.
(Sims should stick to provincial politics. It was unfair of Premier John Horgan not to give her a ministry – especially after she had to step down as minister before the last election because of a vicious campaign against her by the BC Liberals that proved to be nothing but slander.)
Of course, we are also waiting for Surrey-Newton Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal and former South Surrey-White Rock Liberal MP Gordon Hogg (who is also a former White Rock mayor and MLA) to declare their run for the same post … and maybe one other prominent name.
The more the merrier, as they say.
Incumbent Councillor Brenda Locke — who’s tried every trick in the book to knock out incumbent mayor Doug McCallum — is getting increasingly frustrated and desperate as she sees her prospects for being Surrey’s head honcho steadily diminishing.
The fascist disruption at Surrey City Hall by the old white folks of the pro-RCMP group — that was apparently in coordination with their white pals in a section of the mainstream media — only ended up backfiring. Surrey-ites were so disgusted by that tactic that even a rabidly anti-McCallum newspaper wrote that that was not the way to behave. Wait for the election, stupid!
Isn’t it REALLY ironical that a politician who won in the last municipal election by promising to replace the colonial RCMP with a modern municipal police force and to build the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension faced a vicious, unrelenting sabotage campaign for doing just that! But he (McCallum) stuck to his promises AND succeeded. There is no way that the Surrey Police Service can be disbanded – and the SkyTrain extension is fully financed.
McCallum’s support in Surrey still remains solid in spite of the ongoing campaign by the RCMP and the mainstream media against him. That was very clear when hundreds of his supporters showed up at Wednesday’s Surrey City Council meeting in reaction to Monday’s racist, fascist disruption of the Council by pro-RCMP old white guys in order to pressure McCallum to step down as mayor. What world are they living in? (The racist, fascist Komagata Maru incident was in 1914, wasn’t it?)
Yes, there was no excitement at Sims’ announcement — and DON’T expect excitement at other announcements, too.
Yes, they will all bring some supporters to robustly cheer them for the cameras.
BUT, in the end, it will be the SILENT majority and not the SCREECHING minority that will prevail.
INCIDENTALLY, you will find this report from The VOICE in February 2019 – “More than $800,000 could not save Tom Gill and his Surrey First from a humiliating defeat” — very interesting:
SURREY First spent $817,136.65 in last year’s Surrey civic election, according to Elections BC documents posted on their website.
Yet despite those big bucks and the advantage of incumbency as well as the all-out support of former mayor Dianne Watts and then-mayor Linda Hepner, Surrey First’s mayoral candidate Tom Gill and the Surrey First team (except for Linda Annis who saved her skin by suddenly going against her own party on the Rosemary Heights development project) suffered a humiliating defeat.
Surrey-ites were simply fed up with the arrogance of Watts and Hepner. Surrey First had taken the people for granted.
Doug McCallum’s Safe Surrey Coalition won eight of the nine Council seats by spending $247,289.48.
Integrity Now – former Surrey First councillor Bruce Hayne’s party – spent $224,915.77 but didn’t win a single seat.
As The VOICE reported last October [2018], McCallum got 45,564 votes, Gill garnered 28,553 votes, while Hayne came third with 28,077 votes.
Not only did McCallum win convincingly, but also seven of the eight candidates for council on his Safe Surrey Coalition slate won equally convincingly.
ALSO READ:
Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum highlights tremendous achievements of the City over last four years
McCallum’s supporters turn up in hundreds to face racist, fascist bullies
