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First Election

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The first Vancouver civic election, May 3, 1886, was a crooked affair and, though the “good guy” won, only the chaos of the Great Fire saved it from being declared null and void.

There were two candidates for mayor Richard H. Alexander, the manager of the Hastings Sawmill, and Malcolm Alexander MacLean, recently arrived and virtually unknown in Vancouver, who was approached and persuaded to run.

It was an “anybody but Alexander” campaign and about forty men cajoled and concocted the election results in favor of MacLean that day. Those who worked at Hastings Sawmill were “sore” at Alexander as he was arrogant and a bit of a tyrant as well. A few days before the election, at a strike at Hastings Sawmill, Alexander, threatening the workers and revealing contemporary racism, said he could run the mill more cheaply by using native and Chinese labor and that Canadians were “North American Chinamen” anyway.

Alexander’s arrogance didn’t make his employees inclined to vote for him, and retaliating forces went to work to ensure he didn’t win the election. Vancouver pioneer Mr. Haywood told the story, “We wanted to put MacLean in and we did. There was a lot of people who voted who did not have a vote. Lots of people stopping in hotels had no qualifications.” Hoteliers went along with the ruse to exaggerate the number of tenants in their rooms and also backdated receipts so that more pro-MacLean people could satisfy the residency requirement.

The Hastings Sawmill people coerced the Chinese employees and sent them up to vote for Alexander. But there were a lot of anti-Alexander navvies (laborers) hanging around Granville on election day and they threatened the Chinese and prevented them from voting.

At the end of the day, 499 votes had been cast and MacLean was elected by a margin of 17 votes. The citizens were said to have been so excited that they “took him in the back seat of a buggy and hauled him all over what there was of the little town.

Before a judgment could be made on the validity of the election, however, the Great Fire of June 13, 1886, occurred. In the confusion that followed, the protestations were dropped and Mayor MacLean went on to become elected for a second term.

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