Occupy Vancouver began on October 15, which means election day marks its 5-week anniversary. But when Vancouver voters go to the polls tomorrow, the contentious demonstration will have been in play as a campaign issue, hotly contested between the two leading mayoral candidates, for almost exactly one month. The politics of Occupy Vancouver have shifted dramatically in that month, with the demonstration ultimately evolving into the surprise dominant issue of the campaign's final weeks. This is how it happened.

Week 1: October 21 – October 27

Robertson's initial position was that the demonstrators should be left alone as long as there is no violence or public health concern. Indeed, at the time he had no political incentive to take any other position. A Nanos poll conducted between October 20th and October 24th found that more than 60 per cent of British Columbians had a favourable or somewhat favourable opinion of the OWS movement. And a Justason survey of Vancouver residents conducted the week before Occupy kicked off showed Mayor Gregor Robertson with a seemingly insurmountable 36-point lead (68 per cent to her 32 per cent) over his NPA challenger, Suzanne Anton. So both the mayor and the movement were popular—it was hard to imagine how the challenger could gain a significant political advantage out of it.

But Anton astutely started testing angles of attack anyway, bringing the demonstration into the campaign. A week after Occupy began, she hadn't yet settled into her demand that the tents be immediately removed; instead she focused on the money with a press release demanding that "Gregor Robertson needs to tell taxpayers what this tent city is costing us" and an accompanying video. Her campaign had been employing a scattershot strategy, searching for any possible issue with which to gain some traction against her popular opponent. But instead of landing a significant blow against Robertson, she may have  gotten something better: a way to elevate herself into the same category in voters' minds as the mayor.

As Francis Bula pointed out in her October 26th Globe and Mail column, the Occupy protests and the candidates' responses to it give voters "the chance to consider leadership that transcends the typical minute drudgery of municipal election campaigns." Not only is it rare to see two candidates both responding to an evolving issue in real time within the final month of the campaign, it's rare for a challenger to have the opportunity to advance an alternative policy alongside the city's official policy. And more importantly, it's for it to be taken seriously when they do.

By mid-week Anton was calling for the protesters to be forcibly removed and Robertson was hedging. On Wednesday the 26th he said "we need a sensible resolution to this. We need it to end." But the "sensible resolution" he advocated didn't involve a timetable or police intervention.

As an issue on which to level the playing field, the Occupy demonstration appeared to be gift-wrapped for Anton. The organized, well-funded incumbent's campaign would inevitably be disrupted as he juggled politics and policy: the more punches Anton landed, the more he would have to respond, despite having no good options for physically removing the protesters. (Remember, it was on Tuesday the 24th that police efforts to forcibly remove Oakland Occupy–ers turned violent—Robertson had a fine line to walk.)

Anton was pulling Robertson toward her position on Occupy, but the real benefit to the challenger's campaign was that she found herself on even footing with the sitting mayor. On this issue she was able to lead the narrative and give voters a one-to-one choice between her hard-nosed kick-'em-out-today  approach and Robertson's more nuanced strategy as equally viable alternatives. Where on most issues it's to the incumbent's advantage that he still has to govern every day, on this one being the person responsible for actually making the important decisions was rapidly turning into a significant liability.

Week 2: October 28 – November 3

On October 28th Daniel Fontaine, Citycaucus.com blogger and chief of staff to former NPA mayor Sam Sullivan, noticed that Occupy was turning into an issue that could take his party all the way to election day. In a Vancouver Sun interview he said "we're just seeing the emergence of what could be THE issue of the campaign." That he turned out to be right has since surprised many close observers of the campaign.

An online Ipsos Reid poll of 760 adult Metro Vancouver residents conducted between November 1st and 3rd showed support for the demonstration at 44 per cent and opposition at 48 per cent. The political weathervane had turned 90 degrees, but not yet the full 180.

By this stage both candidates were advocating an end to the demonstration, and in a statement made to the Globe and Mail, Anton specifically rejected the idea of sending in police, leaving very little daylight between herself and Robertson. The differences weren't in substance; they were in tone and posture. Because he was being forced to defend a strategy of doing nothing at all against her tough rhetoric, a political gap between the candidates appeared to widen, despite the lack of a significant policy gap.

The end of this week, however, marked the beginning of a new phase in the politics of Occupy Vancovuer, one in which the candidates were forced to respond to a torrent of news from the VAG, ranging from the bizarre to the tragic. November 3rd brought three significant developments at the site: a protester was treated for an overdose; Vancouver Fire Chief John McKearney, visiting the site following the overdose, said he was concerned about the combination of propane tanks and flammable camping gear; and Occupy-ers confronted reporters who were on-site to report on the overdose.

Week 3: November 4 – November 10

On November 5th around 5pm 23-year-old Ashlie Gough was found unresponsive in her tent, the victim of an apparent overdose. She was pronounced dead shortly thereafter, marking the darkest moment in the three-week-old movement. The political significance of this event was evident to anyone watching the #occupyvancouver hashtag in the days that followed: the city turned on the demonstration in dramatic fashion. The combination of a shocking tragedy and a fire chief declaring the site unsafe suddenly made any position other than the hard line politically untenable.

But Robertson did not take the hard-line position. Or at least he didn't appear to: "The Occupy Vancouver protest can continue. The tent encampment, as it stands now, cannot," Robertson said. Unfortunately for the mayor, that was the most hard-line position the Charter of Rights and Freedoms allowed him to take. He might (if the courts go along with it) have the power to prevent people from camping on public property, but violating protesters' rights to freedom of expression and assembly would have been an even worse political move. And Anton benefited, once again, from a freedom that was even more valuable to a candidate two weeks from election day: freedom from responsibility to do anything.

Anton released a statement again saying almost exactly the same thing ("it is time for the tents to be taken down") as Robertson on the 5th, and wisely avoided campaigning on the issue over the weekend.

On Monday the 7th the City announced that it would seek a court injunction to clear the tents at Occupy and that night angry demonstrators shouted down the candidates at the St. Andrew’s–Wesley church housing debate. It could have been a metaphor for the final month of the campaign: calls of "mic check!" interrupted both candidates, leaving neither much chance to talk about housing affordability. (Incidentally, housing is an issue Occupy-ers in Vancouver had claimed to be particularly concerned about.) The following day, the story most Vancouverites  read in the dailies told of demonstrators' incoherence and belligerence. Whatever residual support for the movement remained was waning.

Week 4: November 11 – November 17

On Monday the 14th Angus Reid released a poll showing that public support for Occupy Vancouver had sunk to 29 per cent. Only 15 per cent of Vancouverites would allow the protest to continue indefinitely, and three quarters of the 402 respondents said they would support either a firm deadline or immediate legal action to remove the demonstrators.

That same day an NPA internal poll by Abingdon Research showed that 42.8 per cent of decided voters would choose Anton on election day and 48.7 per cent would choose Robertson. The same poll showed that 53 per cent believed Robertson has done a "poor job" handling Occupy Vancouver. The NPA's efforts to turn consistently small substantive differences between the candidates on Occupy policy and persistent posturing on Occupy politics into a gap-closing campaign issue had evidently worked. 

Reporting on the poll in the Sun, Jeff Lee observed that Robertson's support has "has stayed relatively solid," but Anton has managed to turn many undecided voters or those leaning toward second-tier candidates into decided NPA voters for a 10% bump. She did it at least partially by anticipating the Occupy movement's decline in popularity and deploying rhetoric that would make Robertson appear excessively sympathetic with the Occupy-ers.

Anton revealed the core idea behind her strategy when, in a meeting with the Province editorial board, she said the real problem with Robertson's approach to the demonstration was that he "liked the protest."

Occupy Vancouver, in this sense, has worked for the NPA as an election issue in the same way that bike lanes have worked: most of the political advantage is derived from associating Robertson with the far left, people whose values are perceived to be outside the mainstream. What's surprising is that on this issue, his position has matched that of the mainstream, even as that position has changed week by week. But it worked, demonstrating once again that politics and policy are not the same thing.