• Warning: Video contains profanity
Port Moody mayoral candidate Rob Vagramov is apologizing after a video he filmed of himself shotgunning a beer with a homeless person in exchange for a sandwich surfaced earlier this week.
But his apology Thursday was a change from his comments Wednesday, the day after the video began circulating on social media.
The profanity-laden clip was recorded in 2014 — the year Vagramov was elected a city councillor — and shows the then-22-year-old with a man identified as Bob outside the Granville Street SkyTrain station in downtown Vancouver. Vagramov says to the camera that he was making the video after being nominated by another person on social media to conduct a “random act of kindness.”
“I was pretty excited to get f---ed up, to be honest with you, until I realized it was a random act of kindness nomination,” he said into the camera. “So let’s see if we can’t do both and make somebody’s day.”
In the video, Vagramov asks a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk if he is hungry and the man responds, “Always.”
Vagramov then says: “On one condition, though. Do you know how to shotgun a beer?”
The two are then seen drinking beer together before Vagramov hands him some food.
In a statement released yesterday, Vagramov stated he was disappointed in his actions, which he said “lacked empathy.”
“While I might not like that this video is being unearthed now by political opponents to hurt my campaign, I am far more disappointed in my actions back then,” he said in an email to The Tri-City News.
He also apologized to Bob, the homeless man who appears in the video. “Again, this is something that I would never even consider doing again, to anyone. Coming from a place of such privilege, I really do feel horrible about filming our meeting.”
Thursday’s statement was a departure from comments he made to The Tri-City News Wednesday, when he said, without offering evidence, that the video was being used by his political opponents because “there is big money and development to be lost” if he is elected.
He initially said he was young at the time he filmed the video and that the homeless person in the clip was happy to participate.
“Do you think this was Bob’s first beer in his life?” Vagramov asked during a 25-minute interview Wednesday.
He also changed his story on an another video.
On Monday, the day before the YouTube video surfaced, Vagramov posted a 13-minute video on Facebook of himself speaking with homeless advocate Christina Gower. At close to the three-minute mark of the video, Vagramov plays an edited version of his random acts of kindness video and talks about how his perspective has changed since the clip was filmed.
Speaking to The Tri-City News Wednesday, he denied producing the video to preemptively deal with potential fallout from the original clip, which he said he had only known about since Tuesday when it began circulating on Facebook.
But Thursday, he acknowledged that he had known “some weeks ago” that opponents had “somehow gotten ahold of this video and might make it public to hurt my campaign.”
“Since I was developing a series of interview-based campaign videos on various locally topical subjects and affordability/homelessness was one of the topics, I made a point of working the old clip into the Gower interview to stress how differently I perceive homelessness today,” he said in his email yesterday. “So while the decision to add the five-year-old clip was preemptive, the video about affordability/homelessness was not.”
The four-year-old video was posted to YouTube Sept. 5 and a link was posted to a Port Moody Facebook group Tuesday. As of Thursday afternoon, the clip had been viewed more than 4,000 times.
@gmckennaTC
