Pete Fry is a welcome change to many of us.
He ran a respectable and charming campaign, the Green’s platform was extensive, clear and well thought out and their candidates were pretty solid.
Stephanie Smith in particular is very strong on tenant protections and has sensible views about development and resident input. It was a good, electable package fronted by a guy who had name recognition, humour, style and decency. No attack ads, just guerrilla style videos of things like Fry appealing to the little man — literally, a little man.
I like a mayor with a sense of humour, but moreover, I like a mayor who is passionate and genuine, and I feel Pete Fry is. Fry will be less dogmatic, less morally questionable and I expect he will wear a tie on Remembrance Day. There were some solid candidates who did not place, but I’m happier for Vancouver than I was yesterday. A lot happier.
Most opinion polls suggested that Fry would win. Interestingly though, like the 2022 election, they said it would be much closer than it ended up being, but Sim’s 67,467 is still a hefty vote total, so it’s not fair to see he was totally rejected by the public. He was beaten soundly, but clearly still has a lot of support.
Where the polls got it right was with the other candidates. Colleen Hardwick was shown to be at about 10% support and that’s almost what she got. Kareem Allam and Rebecca Bligh were also around what the polling seemed to be saying, which was single digits. How did candidates as credible as these come in so far behind? Voters clearly chose the parties they felt were the best antidotes to ABC.
Bligh was a two term councillor who had profile and experience. Her policies were thoughtful and sensible. She felt like a real centre candidate who had credible social values, so it surprised me that she did not do better than distant fifth place. Vote Vancouver had some solid candidates who also did not place close to winning. Maybe having once been an ABC councillor didn’t help the brand.
Speaking of the ABC bug, Kareem Allam might have suffered from his association with Sim and ABC as well, despite his repudiation of Sim. He helped Sim get elected and then bolted, and that might have been something many voters could not reconcile. Kareem had some good ideas and he assembled some pretty solid candidates. It truly felt like a big tent and Moira Stillwell was considered a star get. The Vancouver Liberal team was a pretty solid collection and yet all the Van Lib candidates were well out of contention.
Colleen Hardwick came in third place, but it has to be said, it was a distant third place with only 18,105 votes. TEAM had backing from some of this city’s most respected city planners and housing academics, but the best any TEAM council candidate could do was 24th place. Hardwick has a strong fan base who believe she is unique in understanding the issues around housing and development, and her views are distinct.
She makes a point of asserting that she is the only candidate who would have repealed the Broadway Plan, the ODP and the Jericho Plan and so she is polarizing in a way other candidates are not, and that is likely what holds her at the level she got in three elections running for TEAM.
TEAM signs were all over the west side, but given the results for a third election, TEAM clearly needs to do some self reflection to see why the greater voting public do not want what TEAM is selling.
Council is an even more intriguing story than mayor. We get the first ever council dominated by Greens and COPE with just a single OneCity candidate in the form of the returning Lucy Maloney. Mike Klassen is now the lone ABC councillor.
That will surely be a big adjustment for Councillor Klassen after enjoying a super majority last term. This is where the repudiation of ABC is strongest and it shows in the much higher vote count in this election which was 209,214 compared to 171,494 in 2022. That’s a big increase, which usually signals change, and it did, big time.
Interesting to see also that OneCity could once again only muster a single councillor and all their other candidates ran behind other losing ABC councillors. OneCity’s total vote count was higher than TEAM’s, but like TEAM, they have to ask themselves why the voting public keeps rejecting their brand, unlike the Greens and COPE, who swept the board.
The three-way “progressive coalition” in reality, is clearly a two party team which voters bought into in the same way ABC ran the slate four years ago. The strategy of not running a full slate for each was clearly a smart move.
Surprising also that OneCity fielded some credible candidates, notably another star candidate, Frances Bula, who took leave of her high profile job at the Globe to run. Many thought she was a shoe in for council, but she placed well out of contention and behind many ABC candidates. Well, perhaps city council’s loss is the Globe and Mail’s gain.
I note also that on housing, OneCity and TEAM are probably the most polar opposite with OneCity’s base rife with Abundant Housing supporters and TEAM being the antithesis of all that represents. Perhaps voters see Greens and COPE as a less divisive option in that way, rejecting both One City’s aggressive development support and TEAM’s decidedly anti-development positions.
Things are going to look very different in Vancouver. A different style at council, less shot gunning and less divisive, I believe. COPE and Greens are not the same party and they will not agree on everything, but they certainly have a lot more in common then either did with ABC, so we are going to see changes.
There are some new councillors who have a whole lot more respect for tenants than ABC did and I know Pete Fry called for a pace of change policy on the Broadway Plan, so I hope there will be more considered development and more protection for tenants than the flawed TRPP was supposed to provide. I expect the renters office will be back at city hall, and that’s a good thing. We won’t get a zero tax increase, but hopefully it will be sensible and predictable and we will see more funding for arts and culture, which is great.
And finally, Sean Orr’s achievement coming in first place on council has to be recognized. I wrote about him and the ABC attack ads recently. He has come a long way to where he is now, also a polarizing candidate, but one for whom over 83,000 voters chose to support.
That’s huge! Vancouver has really rejected ABC in the biggest way possible, not only with electing Fry as mayor, but the whole council slate with Orr at the top and now in a position to table motions which will likely be passed by council. That will be very interesting.
It's a new day in Vancouver, and I hope for the best.
David Fine is an award winning Vancouver filmmaker who is also very interested in Vancouver civic politics. He manages the VanPoli Facebook group which has over 10,000 members, and has written op-eds for various publications on a range of issues.
