Mayor Gregor Robertson sure looks like he's trying to win a third term.
Someone I've known for more than 20 years recently posed a startling question to me.
He asked if it's possible that Mayor Gregor Robertson is trying to lose to the NPA's Kirk LaPointe.
I laughed it off as one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard during this campaign.
After all, Vision Vancouver has an entire building to run its campaign.
It has hired people to get out the party's message, placed lawn signs all over town, and lined up third-party endorsers, such as environmentalist Ben West and former premier Ujjal Dosanjh.
The party is trotting the mayor out practically every day to speak to the media.
The conspiracy theory goes like this.
• Robertson has insisted that he won't run for the federal Liberals in 2015 if he's reelected as mayor.
• The person who mentioned this is convinced that Vision Vancouver is "coasting" in this election.
• He said that rather than spending money to market the party to voters, Vision decided to hire lawyers in the last 200 hours of the campaign, turning LaPointe into a martyr for free speech.
• According to this theory, Robertson wants to lose narrowly. He could claim that he was thwarted by Big Oil. Then he could use that as a springboard to get elected to Parliament as a federal Liberal to deliver the Broadway subway to Vancouverites.
I still think the whole idea is preposterous. It would require considerable stealth on the part of the mayor, given that he has a group of candidates who've sacrificed a great deal of time, effort, and money to get elected. I don't think Robertson is that conniving and he's not disloyal to his team.
If in the unlikely event that Robertson loses the mayoral election, I would chalk it up to incompetence and complacency. There's no conspiracy, folks.
