I don't think it means that in Chinese. However I agree it is not a decent name.
金 = gold/golden, 玉 = jade, 鹅 = goose
Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from. Basically it just shows your eagerness to become rich. Not to mention the last character, which is rarely used char in names, who wants to name their child "goose"?
金 and 玉 are actually common in names, but usually combined with other good words like 诺(promise), 心(heart),... something like that. Decent names are not that straightforward and I think it may be the same in the western world.
鹅 can refer to quite a few birds in Chinese[0], and in this case, since the article noted:
Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) [has a] beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name
鹅 is probably referring to 天鹅 ("swan")[1], which is part of Swanson's family name.
A bit of an explainer: In names, a word that's usually two characters long is often truncated. For example, the name of the kirin (麒麟) is often used in names, but is often truncated to 麟 (麒 is also possible) so that another character (e.g. a verb) can be introduced, e.g. Alan Tam's given name[2], 詠麟, means to rhapsodise about the kirin.
>Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from.
Swanson's an anti-poverty activist,[3] so perhaps that may explain something about why 金玉 might have been appealing as a reference to 金玉滿堂.
Her party "has traditionally been associated with tenants, environmentalists, and the labour movement"[4], so I imagine that perhaps she wanted something green in the name as well, and jade (玉) fits the bill.
She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan and call the thing sky goose instead, but most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
>She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan
I've never heard of or seen this character until today.
>most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
"Most people" usually mean "people around me", so it's not indicative.
There are plenty of ethnic Chinese people not living in China who might not have heard of this idiom -- in part because their knowledge of Chinese may not be as deep as people who've gone through the Chinese education system -- and one of them had probably advised Swanson on her name choice.
>> I’ve collected names from the sublime—Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name
>Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.
Probably not, although "beautifully phonetic [...] rendering" is a bit of a stretch: only her given name is phonetically rendered.
Whoever advised her on taking the name probably didn't know the Japanese colloquial meaning of 金玉, but was referencing the Chinese idiom 金玉滿堂[0]. It probably sounded good to Swanson because she's deeply concerned about poverty[1], but it feels like gilding the lily, because the whole name literally means "gold-and-jade goose/swan" (鹅 is probably referring to the "swan" in "Swanson", but "goose" seems to be what people landed upon in this thread).
In Chinese, 玉 refers to a jade gem. I think the Japanese meaning encompasses any kind of roundish object, so the semantic distance to testicles is smaller. For a Chinese speaker, using 金玉 (gold+jade/precious) to describe testicles probably wouldn't be too strange, but the association is not quite as obvious as in Japanese.
>I think the Japanese meaning encompasses any kind of roundish object
As in Chinese, 金玉 also means "gold and jewels" in Japanese, i.e. treasure, so the semantic distance to testicles is not any smaller. Presumably someone might have heard of "family jewels".
>For a Chinese speaker, using 金玉 (gold+jade/precious) to describe testicles probably wouldn't be too strange
金玉 is used in the idiom 金玉满堂, which can either mean full of riches or knowledge,[1][2] so it would be rather strange.
Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.