Vancouver Mayoral Election is Spendorama

Vancouver city councillor Raymond Louie has been attracting attention even among those who don't read Chinese with his full-page ages in all the local Chinese media asking for support in his bid to become the Vision mayoral candidate. They've got a poetic touch and are definitely appealing to the Chinese pride element. See text, which is running in World Journal, Ming Pao and Sing Tao, below.

But the more interesting part of this is the money.

Louie's campaign manager, Neil Monckton, says that ad budget is about $30,000, which represents about a quarter of what the campaign intends to spend on the nomination. Considering that Louie's campaign is probably spending the least of all five declared mayoral candidates, this represents a staggering amount of money that's being spent just on nomination campaigns -- a minimum of $600,000 if everyone is even spending as much as Louie. That's what an entire three-slate-plus-mayor regular civic election campaign used to cost not that long ago in this city.

And it could even be more than that. Gregor Robertson shows all the signs of running a very well-financed campaign. Allan DeGenova has been spending money like he's printing it in the basement. Mayor Sam Sullivan has a well-publicized hope chest of money he's been collecting and is willing to spend to win against Peter Ladner. Ladner's financing hasn't been much talked about yet, but given his connections in the business community, I can't imagine it's peanuts.