Sam Sullivan under fire, the weekly update

Larry Campbell he's not.

Mayor-elect Sam Sullivan has learned the media has yet to take to his humour as quickly as they lapped up Campbell's dry one-liners.

Facing a gauntlet of reporters before yesterday's council meeting, his last as a city councillor, Sullivan tried to shrug off news the RCMP may look into his past behaviour, with a joke:

"Well, you've got intrigue, you've got conspiracy theories . . . you've got prostitution and drugs. And they thought I would be a boring mayor."

cough

After the awkward silence, Sullivan got down to business, trying to turn the spotlight on Campbell, who asked the Solicitor General during the election also to look into Sullivan's behaviour.

"I very much question the fact that Mayor Campbell wrote a letter to the Solicitor General in the middle of an election campaign, brought this up in the media," Sullivan said. ". . . I question whether that was appropriate when he was so clearly advocating for Jim Green and against me."

And Sullivan later seemed to draw support from an unlikely source. COPE Coun. Tim Louis, perhaps Sullivan's exact political opposite on council, urged the police to remove itself from "involvement in the political arena", alluding to Vancouver Police Chief Jamie Graham this week asking the RCMP to look into Sullivan's past.

That past, of course, is Sullivan's admission during the campaign that he payed for crack, then allowed an addicted friend to smoke it in his van several years ago. Sullivan has since publicly apologized for his behaviour, saying he was trying to learn about what an addict goes through. The story's been floating around and was generally known well before the campaign, but only seems to have stuck to Sullivan during the election.

Meanwhile, Jim Green ducked out early from this current council's last meeting. He missed a rare event - the councillors one by one standing up to say (generally) nice things about each other.

Most touching speech:
Departing COPE Coun. Ellen Woodsworth, somewhat emotionally imploring the new council, for the second time yesterday, to take care of Vancouver's sizeable homeless population, all the while looking straight at mayor-to-be Sullivan.
Most uncomfortably touching speech:
Tim Louis eulogizing good friend and departing Coun. Fred Bass, who was not deceased, but in Toronto on business. At one particularly awkward point, Louis invoked the spirit of NDP power couple Jack Layton and Olivia Chow to describe his relationship with Bass and his ideal relationship for any council. Layton and Chow, you see, could vote differently at Toronto city council, yet, we suppose, still stay married.