Sam Sullivan: Vancouver's Passive-Aggressive Mayor
Vancouver has never had a mayor quite like the passive-aggressive Sam Sullivan before, so apparently willing to lie down at a moment’s notice and show the world his underbelly.
Sam Sullivan is doing it again.
He should be talking non-stop about what he’s achieving for the city and how he’s bringing everything under control and what he’s doing as a leader. And he is doing some of that, delivering the upbeat, positive message track so beloved of politicians and corporate leaders everywhere, in his earnest, gosh-isn’t-governance-just-amazing style. He’s carrying out his plan, he’s pulling his caucus together and getting his 6-5 votes. He’s bringing sanity back to the city.
But along the way, he just can’t resist the occasional morph into his other self.
So here is our mayor, His Worship, cheerfully telling me over the course of our mental-whiplash-inducing 90 minutes – his legs propped on the desk in front of him to ease the swelling in his feet brought on by a series of long days – that he’s a hopeless manager and he doesn’t understand process and the meetings he chairs are a shambles. Oh yes, and since I’m asking about his background, he’s always deliberately schmoozed rich or important people to help him get what he wants and, yeah, well, now that you ask about it, he has pulled more than one ethically dubious scam in the past.
Vancouver has never had a mayor quite like this before, so apparently willing to lie down at a moment’s notice and show the world his underbelly, so blithely confident about displaying himself as a beta male while whispering conspiratorially, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this…”
The many-layered Sullivan persona is one that’s difficult enough for the average observer to decipher. But for Vancouver’s business community, a group whose code of conduct is founded on projecting a positive image and telling people clearly and directly how and when you’ll achieve your goals, the city’s new mayor and his style have evoked a wary, hedging approval – we think he’s okay, even though we’re not quite sure what he’s saying, why he’s saying it this way, or whether he’s going to carry through. Bob Laurie, the no-nonsense realtor and Vancouver Fair Tax Coalition offensive tackle who’s been wrangling with Sullivan for more than a decade, beginning with industrial land in False Creek Flats, calls him a Columbo.
That would be that anti-hero TV detective played by Peter Falk, who fumbled around crime scenes acting like a simple-minded rube, much to the scorn of everyone else, including the criminal mastermind. Then he’d solve the mystery by zeroing in on small details that others had overlooked.
Others have compared Sullivan’s style to Howdy Doody and the obsequious Uriah Heep character created by Charles Dickens. And those are people who support him.
In more rigorous analysis, people who study organizational behaviour say that he’s a classic wielder of indirect, passive-aggressive power strategies.
Instead of the “big male presence” that the majority of Y-chromosome-carrying politicians try to project, Sullivan has chosen what Simon Fraser University business professor Mark Wexler calls the “ingratiating” mode: “His public persona is one that oozes a complex message of ‘You don’t have to worry about me, I’m not dominant, I’m not powerful.’”
It’s a technique used by people from groups shut out of the kind of formal, expert power of those in authority. Back in the old days, women and minorities typically were the most likely to employ that approach.
Wexler can think of only one other politician who came close to Sullivan’s style: Réne Lévesque. “He cried in public. He frequently played the victim. He used his weakness as strength.”
It doesn’t mean people playing the Can You Help L’il Ole Me card don’t want power. They want it just as much as any high-testosterone golden boy. It just means they get it and exercise it in a very different way.
But the result of Sullivan’s unique style is that, although he’s been in the public spotlight for almost a year, people are hesitant to say with confidence that they know who he is or what he will actually do at City Hall.
Theoretically, he should be an unambiguously beloved and admired figure. He has risen above an exceptionally challenging handicap. He champions causes that help the disabled. He’s backed by a hard-working East Vancouver family. He’s received the Order of Canada. He comes across as charming, empathetic, intellectually curious, open-minded, kind, unpretentious, honest, and as clear and transparent as a pool of forest water.
At the moment, Vancouver’s business world, among the most dedicated observers of every twitch at City Hall, has a lot of time for an avowed free-market advocate who cancelled the worrisome Burrard Bridge bike-lane experiment, fired a board of variance perceived as being anti-development, and carries the flag, literally, in front of fascinated international media for the project that means the world to them, the 2010 Olympics.
And, unlike the previous circuses of battling councillors from the same party, Sullivan’s Non-Partisan Association team is making extraordinary efforts to stay together. It’s unclear whether that’s due to any leadership from Sullivan or whether it’s a combination of two other factors: thoughtful, well-run strategy sessions conducted by chief of staff Daniel Fontaine, and a general terror of allowing any kind of dissension after having watched two previous councils suicide-bomb themselves into defeat with infighting.
At any rate, there appears to be some calm.
Few people are willing to pronounce harsh judgment on the record at this early stage, when it’s hard to tell which way things will go.
But there’s a lot of chatter backstage: constant rumours that Suzanne Anton or Peter Ladner, the two councillors people are turning to because they’re accessible and they talk in direct, practical language, will or should replace him as mayor; the conviction by some that city manager Judy Rogers and senior staff, working with a mayor uninterested in what he sees as details and an inexperienced council, are now happily running the show; confusion over Sullivan’s oblique and vague way of talking about his goals; frustration, including from some of his closest supporters, about his constant emphasis on his disability and the lack of emphasis on doing something positive for the city, as opposed to just cancelling everything the previous council did; and a dawning realization that this sweet-looking guy, backed by a very effective backroom team that’s gathered around him, doesn’t forget people who crossed him and is very capable of hardball.
Just ask police chief Jamie Graham, who found himself skewered a couple of times by Sullivan chess moves that forced him to beg for extra officers he thought he had made a deal for in April and, in July, exposed him to public roasting over a bad-taste message he left for the city manager, complete with target-practice poster. Or park commissioner Al de Genova, the never-a-bad-word A&W Root Bear among politicians, who found himself tossed out of caucus for not being onside enough with his Non-Partisan Association colleagues. Or Lynne Kennedy, the NPA elections co-chair suspected by Sullivan’s team of secretly favouring Christy Clark in the race for the mayoral nomination last September, who got yanked from the police board unceremoniously last month.
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