He’s probably a long-shot to win, but Vancouver mayoral candidate Jason Lamarche made one important move last week before an important meeting of the candidates — he shaved off his mustache.
It’s unclear whether the move will help his chances — Lamarche has garnered just 11 votes in a Vancouver Sun online poll so far, out of more than 3,600 votes cast. Male candidates generally like to keep a clean look, as reporting from The Conversation pointed out in 2015.
Lamarche’s decision to shave wouldn’t ordinarily be a big deal, except for the fact that he previously sported a mustachioed look that was made famous by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, according to reporting from Vice .
Lamarche trimmed the Hitler-esque mustache before last Friday, when the candidates gathered at City Hall in Vancouver to “draw” the order in which they’d be placed on the ballot. Lamarche drew an extremely fortunate position — he’ll be listed first on the ballot that residents receive.
Even so, Lamarche, who has ran for the office previously, will face difficulties defending his past — and not just because of his mustache.
The candidate made headlines back in 2011, for instance, when it was discovered that he had kept a detailed record of women he once dated, ranking them on metrics like how good their children would potentially look, as well as a judgment as to their performances in the bedroom.
He also allegedly posted offensive entries to Urban Dictionary. https://t.co/wZEtfNtNbH
— VICE (@VICE) September 25, 2018
His alleged misogynistic tendencies don’t stop there. Further reporting on the candidate from Vice exposed entries that he had made on the website Urban Dictionary. In one entry, Lamarche — posting under a name he used when he was a skateboarder — submitted the term “hoenut hole” to the website, describing it as “another term for a sl*t’s a******” within the posting.
Lamarche claimed that the submission was made by another individual posing as himself.
There are campaign platforms that Lamarche is pushing for during this year’s election season. As Vice reported, Lamarche is putting up posters promising rent control for 1-bedroom apartments, arguing that they should be no higher than $500 per month. The average rent in Vancouver is around $1,450 per month for a 1-bedroom, according to TaxBack.com .
Lamarche is proposing other reforms as well, and is pushing a strong anti-immigration platform within the city, according to his campaign website.
“A new illegal Immigration Control Enforcement unit will be created to manage the growing number of illegal migrants that live and work in Vancouver which drains our precious resources and harms legal immigrants who took the correct steps to live and work in Vancouver.”
As of press time, Lamarche’s campaign site has not been updated to reflect his new look, sans mustache.