Meet the Candidates
My campaign website: russil.ca.
Upcoming events:
Thursday April 30 - Council candidate debate, online
Sunday May 3, shortly after midnight - ballots sent by email to OneCity members as of April 10, from SimplyVoting
Sunday May 10 at midnight - deadline to submit your ballot
Monday May 11 - results announced
If you’re interested in volunteering to help my campaign make phone calls to OneCity members between now and May 10, please let me know!
We held a “Meet the Candidates” event at Heritage Hall last Wednesday. The room was packed, which was great to see.
Each candidate had two minutes to introduce themselves. My speaking notes:
Hi, my name is Russil Wvong. The single biggest challenge facing Vancouver is that housing is so maddeningly scarce and expensive. This is a solvable problem. People want to live and work here. Other people want to build housing for them. The problem is, we don’t let them. The result is that Vancouver is like a bonsai tree. It’s lovely, but it’s much too small. So prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to push people out.
I spend a lot of time as a volunteer housing advocate, both online and in person, helping to mobilize people to counterbalance opponents of new housing. A fair number of people know me from Reddit. I have a daily blog, morehousing.ca. There’s an unending stream of reports and memos related to housing, and I have a lot of practice at rapidly absorbing and summarizing technical information.
To tell you a little about myself: My parents are from Singapore and Malaysia. Like a lot of immigrant parents, they emphasized the importance of working hard, sacrificing for the future, and especially taking school seriously. One of the things I really like about Canada is that your family doesn’t need to be rich to have access to good education and healthcare. I went to high school out in Pitt Meadows, I studied math and computer science at UBC, and I’ve been working as a software developer ever since.
I’m married, and we have two kids who are now young adults. Like a lot of parents in Vancouver, we’re worried about where our kids are going to be able to live.
Besides work, I do a fair amount of community volunteering, and I serve on a couple of boards.
In terms of political experience, I ran for Vancouver city council in 2022 on Kennedy Stewart’s slate. I’ve done a lot of volunteering for both the federal Liberals and the BC NDP, on five different campaigns over the last 12 years.
I’m asking for your support to be on the ballot again this October, as a OneCity council candidate.
Thank you.
The other big news from last Wednesday is that OneCity, COPE, and the Greens have agreed to limit vote-splitting among the left-of-centre parties, by limiting the number of candidates each party will run. For council, it’s no more than five each. That still leaves the path open for a party to elect a mayoral candidate and five council candidates, and to be able to govern with a majority.
So the OneCity council nomination race has 11 candidates competing for four open spots. Iona Bonamis, Frances Bula, Jarrett Haglund, and Mike Tan have joined forces and formed a slate. The other seven candidates are Aaron Chapman, Armor Corrales, Ashley Fehr, Azeem Ali, Caitlin Stockwell, Peter Waldkirch, and myself.
For more information and candidate websites, see Christopher Porter, Potential Candidates for the 2026 Vancouver Election.
I’ve heard from a number of people that they’re having a hard time deciding who to include - there’s more than four candidates who they really like. The good thing about the OneCity voting process is that it’s Single Transferable Vote, which means that you can rank more than four candidates. If you rank someone #1 and they get eliminated, your vote isn’t wasted - your vote is simply transferred to your next choice.
If you want a particularly pro-housing council, my suggestion would be a ranking something like this:
Myself and Peter Waldkirch
Perhaps other candidates that you especially like
Frances Bula (who helps to broaden OneCity’s appeal) and Iona Bonamis (who placed 12th in 2022). I think it’s important for both Frances and Iona to be on the ballot. I also think they’re very strong candidates (as shown by the cross-endorsements from Jarrett and Mike), and that they’ll make it even if they’re lower on some people’s rankings.