Maria J. Cruz is Seeking a Nomination with COPE.
✓ Make developers and multiple land-owners pay their fair share - it’s long overdue!
✓ Prioritize LOCAL festivals, affordable artist spaces, and establish an emergency municipal cultural fund
✓ Reinvest in neighborhoods by restoring and repurposing historic buildings
Candidate Statement
“We are losing our people, our arts, and our heritage to developer greed. This is a fight for Vancouver’s soul.”
- Maria J. Cruz
I’m running for COPE because we need to build an egalitarian sustainable, humane city. We need to support Arts, Culture and Heritage.
The “Housing Crisis” is a crisis of the powerful exploiting the powerless.
It’s not an accident that property owners build their portfolios and pay their mortgages with the labour of the working class. That’s how the housing market is designed.
We have to break from a system that is clearly failing.
We need to build affordable public housing, not Ken Sim’s plan to put for-profit market housing on public land. We need to protect renters from landlords who make breaking the law a business model. We need new tools to make sure that developers keep their end of the deal when they agree to terms with the city, not give them bailouts.
We have to make Vancouver open and transparent for regular people; open the doors of city hall for social movements, and make a city that works for the working class. That’s why I am a socialist.
And that’s why I am running for a nomination with COPE.
BIOGRAPHY
Her life as an artist and educator has always been a deliberate choice. The choice of giving back, of storytelling and of facilitating safety and opportunity for others.
She would love to tell the next chapter of the Vancouver story with you. A story of all of us - working, playing, creating - and not paying into the pockets of billionaires.
Maria is your advocate and ally in City Hall. Ken Sim hides behind closed doors, Maria will hold them open.
A born and bred GenX East-Van’er, Maria is the daughter of Portuguese immigrants and has degrees from UBC and the University of Toronto. She is a theatre and film professional and has had careers as a Culture and Heritage Planner and a Museum Collections Manager. She is currently an Outreach Educator with the Vancouver School Board’s Adult Education program and a member of two prominent unions in BC, the BCTF and UBCP/ACTRA.
She is “lucky” to live in her 3rd floor walk-up in the Fairview/Broadway Plan area where she has healthcare, groceries and other essential amenities such as parks and community centres steps away. That is, if she doesn’t get renovicted. Every day a new billboard goes up with plans to replace majority spacious affordable heritage buildings with cold cramped institutional market-inflated towers.
Vote for Maria and you will have an ally in City Hall that wants all Vancouverites to truly thrive - not just survive. She will fight to keep and create more walkable, creative, vibrant neighbourhoods, not just mega-mansion enclaves and those eerily empty towers along our arterials.