If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
That seemed to be the message from voters throughout the region on Saturday, including Burnaby, where the Burnaby Citizens Association won all of the council and school board seats for a second term.
"It's a status quo election," said Gordon Price, director of the Simon Fraser University city program and former Vancouver city councillor.
Those mayors and councillors voted back in throughout the region "learned how to manage growth pretty well," he added.
However, the BCA's second sweep of all positions was unusual, according to Price.
"What an exciting and surprising outcome that was in Burnaby," he said. "It's just so unusual to have a complete sweep at all."
It nearly happened once when Price was a NonPartisan Association councillor in Vancouver, he said, but the party never took all the council spots.
"The electorate, by and large, are clearly not uncomfortable with Burnaby's situation," he said, adding voters usually tend to scatter a few votes around for some diversity on council.
TEAM Burnaby, the Burnaby Municipal
Greens and Burnaby's independent candidates based their campaigns primarily on providing opposition on council, but the election results showed that voters were less concerned with that than the candidates were.
Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan won with 76 per cent of the vote and will be entering his fourth term as mayor.
BCA councillors Pietro Calendino, Dan Johnston, Anne Kang, Colleen Jordan, Richard Chang, Sav Dhaliwal, Paul McDonell, and Nick Volkow were all re-elected, as well.
BCA school board candidates Ron Burton, Larry Hayes, Gary Wong, James Wang, Baljinder Narang, Meiling Chia and Harman Pandher took all the trustee positions.
But on the fringes of the region, in municipalities such as Whistler and on the Sunshine Coast, there were much more dramatic changes with councils being turfed, Price pointed out.
Voters were looking for a positive approach this election, Price said, adding that isn't common.
This could partly be because there's been a consistent and mature leadership in the region for a long time now, he said.
While there were few leading issues in the region's municipal campaigns during the election, there was one major non-issue that didn't come up, Price said, calling it "the dog that didn't bark."
That was the Metro Vancouver Mayors' Council on Regional Transportation's approval of the two cent per litre gas tax hike for TransLink's supplemental budget.
"No one paid any political price for that, as near as I can tell," he said.
E Corrigan was one of the few niversity mayors on the council who didn't approve the supplemental budget, but those who did, such as Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, were also voted back in on Saturday.
"That would have been an unthinkable vote in most places in the States, the idea that you would raise gas taxes a few weeks before an election," Price said.
It says a lot about the maturity of the region and willingness of its leaders to lead, he added.
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