The Hongcouver | Vancouver’s first mayor and the modern myth of the Chinese vote

There, faintly, behind the guffaws of Councillor Kerry Jang next to Robertson.

The sound of Vancouver’s first mayor, Malcolm Alexander MacLean, spinning in his grave.

Civic elections these days are a pretty civilised affair, the odd lawsuit notwithstanding. But when MacLean – a real estate agent who refused to sell to Chinese - stood against Richard Alexander in the first polls on May 3, 1886, things were different.

When sawmill manager Alexander turned up at the polling station with 60 of his Chinese workers intending to vote, they were driven back by MacLean’s supporters using “fists and clubs”, according historian Kay Anderson in “Vancouver’s Chinatown”. MacLean’s thugs had the law on their side: Chinese had been barred from voting by the city’s statutes of incorporation a month earlier.

MacLean won, then was re-elected on a platform that included restriction of Chinese property rights, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

MacLean was probably right to fear the impact of the Chinese vote– he beat Alexander in the first race by 242 votes to 227– but he would be disoriented by Vancouver’s modern political landscape. The three major parties that contested Saturday’s municipal elections all fielded ethnic Chinese council candidates and Meena Wong of the leftist COPE group became the city’s first ethnic Chinese mayoral candidate. A simplistic reading would be that the power of the Chinese vote has asserted itself on Vancouver.