Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not
Larry Campbell’s
Second Coming
Incompetent but opportunistic, repellent
but adulated, he’s just what Vancouver deserves
Greg Klein | October 6, 2025
Everything the Enlightened pretend to see in Rob Ford and Donald Trump
should apply exponentially to Larry Campbell. But a TV show gave media
the opposite impression.
“I am not a saviour,” he declared. Really. No shit. He actually said that. Larry Campbell actually denied his own divinity.
False modesty? Disingenuity? Or, at age 77, has this exalted gasbag finally toned down his normally enormous self-esteem? Whatever accounted for his self-blasphemy, Larry Campbell effortlessly charmed the assembled reporters and poverty pimps at the announcement that he’s the province’s new advisor on Vancouver’s “Downtown Eastside.” That’s the term coined by American poverty pimps for their Main and Hastings-centred land of opportunity.
Campbell’s new duties apparently consist of meeting, talking, consulting, empathizing, commiserating etc. etc. with the many groups given a prominent and lucrative role in the issue. Two months of that, he said, as if we haven’t had decades already. Then he’ll make his recommendations, which he helpfully announced in advance: Housing and “supports.” That means a lifetime of free homes, income, entitlements and services that include 24/7 babysitters along with a considerable degree of leniency or outright immunity from criminal justice.
All of that’s already in place, but the pimps want more. Wendy Pedersen of the almost entirely tax-funded Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative Society said, “There are 10,000 people without proper housing there.” She’s referring to just one neighbourhood in one Canadian city.
However Pedersen includes people living in single rooms, a modest mode of life once common among lower-income Canadians including many working people. That was before junkies destroyed from within what developers hadn’t demolished of the country’s cheap-but-decent housing.
Nevertheless any monumental expansion of junkie housing and services constitutes a win-win-win-win program that boosts pimp careers, NDP-empowering public sector unions, big government and social breakdown.
Campbell’s qualifications—apart from media adulation—supposedly consist of tremendous compassion for “society’s most vulnerable” along with extensive contacts at all levels of government. Neither attribute looks credible to non-worshippers.
Campbell took up the junkies’ cause soon after they became Vancouver’s blacks, fashionable objects of superior condescension and subjects of sanctimonious declarations. His political experience is actually quite limited. A novice who spent just two years as mayor, he appeared to be a figurehead getting strong direction from behind the scenes. Purely through other people’s machinations, he suddenly levitated to a do-nothing Senate sinecure.
A shrunken, slouching, lightweight late-septuagenarian shell,
Larry Campbell can no longer use his size and weight to bully
people. But he still uses fashionable rhetoric like a Bible-punching
opportunist in a hypocritical theocracy. On top
of his three
gold-plated tax-funded pensions, the sanctimonious old fart gets
an additional $92,000 plus expenses for 10 months of “work.”
His mayoralty had been an even more unusual fluke. It resulted from a TV series supposedly based on his work as a coroner. His unbelievable identification with the fictional SJW resulted from the propensity of journalists and other really average people to confuse TV with reality.
Prior to his coroner position he was an RCMP cop, working in a milieu where competence can be irrelevant.
Even apart from the romanticized TV portrayal that accounts for his public image, could Campbell have been halfway competent as coroner? Surely the job calls for an inquiring mind. As mayor he demonstrated the opposite through his contempt for public input and tendency to shout down opponents.
But those qualities will actually benefit his new role. He’ll have to shut out any dissenting suggestions, for example that a lifetime of free-everything could encourage addiction. Or that root causes can be found in Canadian superficiality and destructive social conditioning that breed profoundly confused wastrels. Certainly, he won’t be asking questions about how much public money goes to which groups and how they spend it. This is a guy who spoke highly of the Portland Hotel Society (PHS Society) after the pimps’ colossally extravagant personal spending finally came to light.
As for his solutions, all those free homes and other inducements demand one hell of a lot of money, and at a time when even provincial NDPers express concern about public spending, debt and debt servicing costs. So what was premier David Eby’s strategy in appointing the gasbag?
The announcement follows the Union of B.C. Municipalities’ annual convention with its now-annual emphasis on the barbarity known as public disorder. More free housing is the consensual solution from B.C.’s entire political spectrum, all the way from the “Conservative” Party left to the destroy-normality left. UBCM delegates include a lot of NDPers, some of them influential. Any lack of confidence in Eby’s ability to provide unlimited free housing and other entitlements could further destabilize his leadership. Campbell, and his supposed contacts at the federal level, might be a ploy. When the proposed solution falters on insufficient funding, Desperate David might deflect blame onto Ottawa.
Of course that’s just speculation. Maybe the Campbell appointment simply comprises another of Eby’s ineffectual inquiries, ranging from money laundering to Lapu Lapu. It’s hard to evaluate his thinking as the guy flounders through administration, policies, political judgment and, maybe, his position as NDP leader.
But back to Campbell. Vancouver’s strange little world propelled the poseur to considerable success and so Vancouver deserves him, just as it deserves several other especially destructive public figures. One recent example is former mayor Gregor Robertson, a pusher of both addiction and real estate speculation who made his second coming last April as a newly elected MP. In keeping with Vancouver flakiness, voters consistently reward the opportunists intent on destroying whatever semblance of civilization remains in their city.
Even in that context, Campbell’s serendipity resulted from a series of unusual developments. They’re recounted in this short history of Vancouver’s rise as Canada’s drug and poverty pimp capital. Here’s an excerpt:
The junkie agenda overtakes Vancouver politics
Playing up addict victimhood, tax-funded and unionized poverty pimps
organized the Woodward’s occupation during Vancouver’s 2002
election campaign. Extensive media coverage added a sense of
urgency to the junkie agenda of pimp-friendly Larry Campbell
and his pimp-infested COPE. The junkie agenda continues
as a mainstay of Vancouver politics.
In 2002 junkie pity became the central theme of a municipal election. While unionized tax-funded activists organized a highly publicized occupation of the prominent Woodward’s building and surrounding Hastings-Cordova-Abbott streets, a pro-junkie media campaign backed the suddenly pro-junkie Larry Campbell. As the figurehead “leader” of the Coalition of Progressive Electors, he and COPE’s Communist/NDP alliance trounced the formerly dominant, supposedly “right-wing” Non-Partisan Association.
Imagining junkies to be victims of oppression, Vancouver’s Enlightened Class took its moral preening to the polling stations. Some of Vancouver’s unenlightened might have also voted pimp, in desperate hope that the party’s Four Pillars program would mitigate the increasing disorder. By the early 2000s wide-open drug use, drug dealing and drug-related crime had spilled well beyond their Hastings-and-Main epicentre to other parts of the city. But only one pillar—harm reduction in the dubious guise of official injection sites—was ever implemented. So much for prevention, treatment and legal enforcement.
Repellent as it was, this laughing sneer gave Larry Campbell a
relatively flattering visage compared to his reputed behaviour.
Yet his media groupies were many.
Campbell, a big, fat, obnoxious ex-cop of a middle-aged white man who reportedly used his size and weight to intimidate others, should have been an irresistible target for what later became the Ford/Trump treatment. But journalists loved his ass, not to mention his professed concern for junkies. No one in media expressed that more fulsomely than Vancouver Sun staff, especially municipal correspondent Frances Bula.
Campbell’s recruitment by COPE and his ensuing media popularity seem inexplicable without considering Da Vinci’s Inquest, a TV drama that CBC had been dragging out since 1998. According to its hype, the series featured a sensitive coroner who fought injustice against the downtrodden. The scripts were supposedly based on Campbell’s time as a coroner but it’s just about impossible to reconcile the TV portrayal with such an obviously self-serving, badly behaved jackoff. No matter, journalists, like other really average people, often confuse TV with real life. As far as most of them were concerned, self-aggrandizing loudmouth Campbell was caring, compassionate Da Vinci.
Vancouver media mistook this over-torqued
Grade B persona for Larry Campbell.
Intensifying the impression was a spin-off series, Da Vinci’s City Hall. Concurrent with Campbell’s last months in office but probably with greater longevity assumed, CBC changed his TV alter-ego to a newly elected Vancouver mayor. A promo described him this way:
Da Vinci takes City Hall by storm, questioning the status quo and advocating change at every sensible turn. As a man of the people, by the people, he’s always looking out for his constituency, despite any road blocks the “old boys’ network” throws in his path.
That gushing Bula-ish blurb resembled Campbell’s media coverage.
The show even had Da Vinci advocating Campbell’s (actually his party’s) election platform. Another promo, indistinguishable from COPE campaign material, had the TV character pushing for “safe injection sites for the troubled drug dependent population in the Downtown Eastside.”
The show expired after just 13 episodes. But by that time Campbell had already moved onto bigger and better unearned glory. Just two and a half years after he became mayor, Ottawa granted him a Senate sinecure.
His superficiality might not have withstood electoral challenge but the NPA had resorted to me-too politics. Wannabe-mayor (and future premier) Christy Clark considered the faux Da Vinci unbeatable. So she and her brother Bruce used their federal Liberal connections to move Campbell into his pampered exile.