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| Duane Nickull, BC Conservative Party candidate for Vancouver-Point Grey, leader John Cummins & Vancouver campaign chair Rick Peterson speak to media in Kitsilano Thursday - Bill Tieleman photos |
Duane Nickull, a high-tech guru who has worked with Adobe Systems and represented Canada at the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, was introduced today to media at Minerva's Mediterranean Deli in Kitsilano.
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| Duane Nickull - Bill Tieleman photo |
Nickull was introduced by BC Conservative Party leader John Cummins and Vancouver campaign chair Rick Peterson, a former BC Liberal who sought a nomination in 2008 but has left the party since Clark became leader.
Nickull stressed his local roots - unlike Clark he lives in the riding - and local issues such as seismic upgrading of public schools and saving the Kitsilano Coast Guard Station.
The BC Conservatives issued this information about Nickull:
BC Conservatives nominate software entrepreneur to run
against Premier
Duane Nickull, a
computer/programmer architect and former ‘senior technical evangelist’ at Adobe
Systems Incorporated, will represent the BC Conservatives in Vancouver-Point
Grey.
“It’s a very exciting time
for our party,” said John Cummins, leader of the BC Conservatives, speaking at
a news conference in Kitsilano. “And I expect that Duane will cause a lot of
excitement for Point Grey voters in the campaign leading up to election-day on
May 14.”
Duane was co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Yellow Dragon Software Inc., which he sold to Adobe Systems in 2003. He continued working for Adobe until 2011, when he launched a new venture, Technoracle Advanced Systems Inc.
Duane has been a
guest-lecturer at Stanford University in California, the Technical University
of Vienna in Austria, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, as well
as SFU and BCIT. He also is an accomplished technical writer, publishing books
with O’Reilly and WROX.
He’s assisted in the
development of many of the modern computer sciences standards and protocols in
use today, including Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services and
ebXML.
Between 2003 and 2006, Duane
represented Canada at the United Nations in the CEFACT Plenary Bureau in
Geneva, and won election as vice-chair.
Duane is very active in the
Point Grey community, supporting causes such as the Rotary Club’s Bike-a-Thon,
the Pacific Midwifery Practice Association and the Red Cross.
In his spare time, he plays
bass guitar and vocals in an indie-rock band called 22nd Century.
Duane is married to Bettina,
and has three children.
2 comments:
Safe to say that the Conservatives are not a complete dead force. That riding will be very interesting
Life's a stage, spotlight's on Christy's riding. David Ebby, who was the NDP challenger to Christy's successful by-election bid, probably still wonders if it was his impromptu singing at the concurrent NDP leadership convention that denied him the win by a narrow margin (his off-script rendition of "We're Halfway There" was that horrible.) Hopefully he'll think better of trying to pull off another stupid stunt like that. It will be tempting, though, because now BC Conservative candidate What's-his-face "Chaos" threatens to steal the show (don't even think about it, David; you just can't compete with a real musician.)
This is the part to die for: the disgraced and banished Gordon Campbell's old seat, retained for the BC Liberals by the skin of Christy's teeth in a down to the wire race the NDP actually led for most of that suspenseful night, a powerful legitimacy at stake. No crisis was better set for a Princess Warrior to prevail, no second-act better preluded than by the nether-breathed cursing of her caucus. The BC Conservatives cast their part carefully for one of the most breathlessly attended contests in BC political history. After many disappointments, this could be their big chance to finally make it. Could also be their last one.
Conservative leader John Cummins could never have plausibly played the part of spoiler in Act II of Vancouver-Point Grey; he's too old, too fuddy-duddy, too many antiquated notions--a perfect representative of at least half his supporters--to square off with a slate of younger candidates. In his stead is cast a candidate without any of the qualities BC Liberal shills pelted with tomatoes from the audience in Act I: metal rocker, bosenkool hair cut but more edge, coloured glasses and, most of all, young (John was probably impressed with his entrepreneurial acumen --something to do with that computer stuff) --a perfect representative for the demographic being wooed by the NDP.
Christy has to be concerned about vote-splitting now the alt-Conservative avatar has arrived and that will probably be her main plea whenever she gets around to defending her own seat between stopping leaks whack-a-mole around the province. Always supremely self-confident, she probably analyses her win over Ebby teleologically, that the margin of her victory predicating the upcoming showdown. Not so fast, Christy, the government wasn't going to fall on the by-election, people were still protest-voting mad at the HST in the riding of its author and some, at least, still held out hope you could lead the government to retribution. Now it's for all the marbles, there's no guarantee the Conservatives won't split the vote and default the riding to the NDP or win it in their own right (they could do so if they grab a substantial chunk of the non-progressive vote and the remainder is split between the Greens and the NDP--don't forget, in West Vancouver the right defaulted substantially to the Greens, presumably to spoil the NDP opportunity; same thing happened in the recent Victoria federal by-election.)
Christy's quandary now is optics: she never wants her opponents to see her sweat so she can't stump in her own riding too soon or too much. On the other hand waiting too late will make her look as insincere as her plan to apologize to the descendants of ethnic victims of race discrimination in return for desperately needed votes.
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