This week, Frances Bula, a good friend and former colleague, took a brave step and announced she plans to run for Vancouver city council in the upcoming October election. With that announcement, she traded a 40-plus-year journalism career for the snake pit of politics.

She’s seeking office for all the right reasons. Bula loves cities and has been thinking and writing about best and worst practices for running them for decades. She knows what makes them work, understands what makes them slide. 

She loved journalism as much as the cities she wrote about, believing in its power to inform and influence politicians to do better. Now, she is hoping to have a more direct level of impact. 

I think and hope her chances of a win are strong. But if, for some strange reason, the odds don’t go her way, she will have given up a lot. It’s hard — if not impossible — to go back to the world of reporting, where most media outlets demand a level of objectivity from their writers. So, apart from the odd opinion piece, Bula’s decision really does spell the end of her journalism career. 

Cynics will disagree, but I think the vast majority of politicians, especially those like Bula at the municipal level, enter politics because they have ideas about how to make our lives better. It’s certainly not to get rich — city councillors in Vancouver earn about $100,000 a year. It’s more than the average person makes, but nonetheless doesn’t go too far in a city so expensive.

To get........

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