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Gregor Robertson, an NDP MLA, will be the man to run for mayor with the centre-left Vision Vancouver party in this November’s civic elections.

Robertson was declared the winner Sunday of the fledgling civic political party’s first member-driven nomination meeting.

Robertson won with 3,495 of 6,771 votes cast. Raymond Louie received 2,244 votes and third-place finisher Al De Genova received 981. There were 51 spoiled ballots.

Robertson will now battle for the mayor’s chair against Peter Ladner and the ruling Non-Partisan Association, which last week took the unusual step of turfing its incumbent Mayor Sam Sullivan as its party leader.

Robertson spent the bulk of his victory speech slamming the NPA for its last three years in office.

"After governing Vancouver for most of the last 50 years, the NPA rather arrogantly thinks they are entitled to rule the city," he said. "But let’s look at the abysmal record. Let’s just walk around our city and judge for ourselves.

“In this enormously wealthy city, we have thousands of homeless people in shelters every night. This has to stop,” he said. “We have a state of emergency in Vancouver, and we need action. We need a clear commitment to end homelessness in our city. We need an affordable housing construction boom.”

It was another step in an unusual civic election campaign that saw contenders toss their hats in the ring months before November’s election. By comparison, in the 2005 election, the political parties only elected their candidates two months before November.

Robertson, a provincial MLA in the Vancouver-Fairview riding, ran on a campaign of tackling housing affordability in the City of Vancouver. His ideas included a so-called “speculators’ tax,” taxing offshore owners of empty condos in Vancouver, a move he hoped would encourage some 18,000 units to be put on the rental market.

But through weeks of campaigning and three debates, few major policy differences between the three Vision contenders emerged. The most significant of Robertson’s differences has been his support of a gradual tax-shift from business owners to homeowners, a one-percent nudge per year that his Vision colleagues on council have vocally opposed.

Organizers behind the three campaigns spent the day on cellphones and headsets, trying to ensure their newly signed members would come out to support the candidates. Buses hired by the De Genova campaign were used as shuttles between the Croatian Cultural Centre in East Vancouver and Chinatown. Raymond Louie's people had yellow school buses bringing in supporters clad in red scarves.

Throughout the day, talk amongst members centred on who to vote for as a second choice, a decision that could have seen a second-place candidate come up through the middle to win in the ranked-voting system that was overseen by Fair voting BC, the STV supporters. Rumours swirled about the rumored deal between the De Genova and Louie camps to mark each others' names as a second choice - a deal Louie denied.

But in the end, Robertson secured 51.6 per cent of the vote, enough to win the nomination on the first ballot.

Tags: vancouver, gregor robertson, al de genova, raymond louie, peter ladner, politics, npa, sam sullivan, vision vancouver, peter ladner, npa