Community First New West retains its control of New Westminster school board, as all six of its candidates finished victorious Saturday night.
The path to victory looked clear from the outset for five of those candidates, while the sixth, New West poet laureate Elliott Slinn, was in a seesaw battle for that seventh and final trustee spot with the New West Progressives' Kathleen Carlsen throughout the evening. In the end, however, Slinn's 338-vote margin of victory over Carlsen was decisive.
And, as it turned out, Community First incumbent Maya Russell was the top vote-getter of the night — her 8,785 votes were more than any other single candidate earned in any of the three races for mayor, council and school board.
Also cracking the 8,000-vote mark were (in order) Community First's Marc Andres, New West Progressives' Danielle Connelly, and CFNW's Dee Beattie and Cheryl Sluis.
Connelly, speaking to Record reporter Theresa McManus at the Progressives' election night gathering at Inn at the Quay, said she was happy and excited by the victory — though disappointed that no other Progressives candidate made it onto the board.
"I was hoping to have a couple of other diverse voices at the table. So it's definitely disappointing in that regard," she said.
But Connelly said she's ready and willing to work with Community First, as she has done for the past term.
"That's something that I pride myself on bringing is the ability to collaborate and work with others at the table to get things done," she said. "I'm ready to just hunker down and then get the work done because there's there's a lot of work ahead of us."
Incumbent Gurveen Dhaliwal also secured her spot once again, placing sixth in the race, with 7,953 votes to Slinn's 7,756.
The Community First candidates are those who ran in 2018 as Team Cote, an informal slate that had the backing of the New Westminster and District Labour Council. This year, the new NDP-affiliated electoral organization earned the labour endorsement again — an endorsement that, in New Westminster, is often a ticket to victory.
It proved to be so again.
An incident that arose during the final week of the campaign did not, as it turned out, prevent Dhaliwal from winning back her seat — although whether it factored into her vote count remains an open question.
Dhaliwal became the subject of headlines just this week, when the Progressives’ campaign manager went public with news that Dhaliwal was being investigated for a breach of the Local Government Act. The incident in question was Dhaliwal serving as a scrutineer at a polling station — when, in fact, candidates are not allowed to be in polling stations except for the purposes of voting.
The city's election office chose not to pursue the matter further after ensuring Dhaliwal was clear on the rules and left the polling station, but the Progressives' campaign manager, Jason Chan, lodged a complaint with police about the breach.
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