Kennedy Stewarts is mayor-elect of Vancouver. He was endorsed by several former and current NDP politicians, including Vancouver-Kingsway MP Don Davies former Vancouver-East MP Libby Davies and former B.C. premier and Vancouver mayor, Mike Harcourt.

Kennedy Stewart will be the next mayor of Vancouver after a nail-bitingly close race to the finish against NPA candidate Ken Sim. He will now preside over a city council that is at once more progressive and more conservative than the previous council. “Was that close enough for you?” Stewart said to roaring applause in the basement of the Waldorf Hotel in east Vancouver. Stewart beat Sim by just under 1,000 votes, according to unofficial election results posted on the City of Vancouver website. Independent candidate Shauna Sylvester placed third. During an election dominated by housing and unaffordability, Stewart promised to build tens of thousands of non-market housing units, create a new city position to advocate specifically for renters and form a Downtown Eastside emergency task force to address the opioid crisis. “Today people voted to take action on these challenges,” he said. “What we do has to make life better for everybody. .. At Stewart’s event, former NDP MP Libby Davies said the success of progressive politicians in this year’s municipal election was driven in part by a popular backlash against Vancouver’s developer community: “I feel like we’re in a period of time now where most people feel like developers have too much control over City Hall, they have too much influence over what’s going on in terms of development,” she said.

Former Vancouver East NDP MP Libby Davies, who was at the Waldorf, said she was “very happy” to see Mr. Stewart elected mayor after a civic election the likes of which she hasn’t seen in a long time. Ms. Davies said she believed the electorate voted for someone who would keep his promises and work well with others. “I think he showed in parliament that he’s an easygoing guy, and that he likes engaging with people,” she said. “He’s the kind of guy who can reach across the table and say, ‘Let’s get partisanship out of the way.”

Taylor Holroyd, who attended the trip through the McGill program in 2014, shared her experience on their website. According to Holroyd: “On the second day, I had the amazing opportunity to shadow with MP Libby Davies of Vancouver East. Libby made me feel extremely welcome and engaged throughout the day. The highlight was certainly the meeting of the Standing Committee on Health, where I got to see Libby in her element: asking candid questions and responding with eloquence and ease. Libby has over 17 years of experience as an MP, so she had many fascinating stories to tell about her time in Parliament. We were able to speak frankly about sexism on the hill, overcoming gender barriers, and the importance of women in government.”

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Canada's provincial and territorial leaders vowed Thursday to fight Ottawa's controversial plan to fund jobs training for workers, saying the new scheme would require them to come up with more than half a billion dollars in extra cash…"It's clear the Harper government, who spent a great deal of money on ads extolling the virtues of a program that doesn't yet exist, is trying to pit some provinces against the others, said NDP critic Libby Davies. "One can only surmise that this is a calculated decision to divide the provinces, and to play one off against the other, and to give some information, and others no information," she said. "That creates a very unstable situation, makes it more difficult for the provinces themselves to work together."

In association with her recent book, Outside In: A Political Memoir, Libby Davies is crisscrossing the country and engaging in conversations about the intersection of activism and politics in pursuit of social change. And now, she’s coming to Nelson on Thursday, Aug. 29 at 6:30 p.m.