Making it work: How will Vancouver's new-look, no-majority, left-leaning council function?

After Vancouver’s left-leaning civic parties successfully co-operated to take control of the city’s mayor’s office, council, park board, and school board in last weekend’s election, the question is how they’ll work together over the next four years.

Vancouver’s three major left-of-centre parties — the Greens, COPE and OneCity — negotiated and struck a deal earlier this year to limit the number of candidates each ran for council, park and school board, to avoid splitting the progressive vote. They also agreed to work toward backing a single unity candidate for mayor, which ended up being the Green’s Pete Fry after COPE’s and OneCity’s candidates withdrew.

It worked: The three progressive parties trounced ABC Vancouver, the right-leaning party that dominated the 2022 municipal election before being almost completely wiped off the map on Saturday.

Mayor-elect Fry, a two-term Green councillor, has often spoken of his desire to move away from rigid partisan politics, and to bring a collaborative approach more focused on the public than party interests. He now faces a test to see how well he can pull it off.

Fry and his four fellow Green councillors will form council’s largest caucus, but are one vote shy of a majority on the 11-seat body. COPE’s four councillors will form the second-largest caucus. COPE also has the largest bloc on school board, and a majority on park board.

COPE, the Greens, and OneCity are likely to agree on a lot. Their platforms overlap on many broad points.

But COPE, as Vancouver’s most-socialist party, tends to push further. For example, the Green platform seeks to partner with senior governments to provide more-affordable transit access for low-income people. The COPE platform aims to expand free transit to youth between 13 and 18 (it’s currently free for children under 13), and remove fares altogether on some bus routes.

COPE wants to fund those kinds of expanded services by raising certain kinds of taxes, including a proposal to triple the empty home tax and start applying it, again, to unsold condos owned by developers.

Fry supports the empty homes tax, but has tried to strike a more-balanced approach with developers wile on council. In 2023, when the ABC-majority council considered exempting unsold condos from the empty homes tax because of challenging market conditions, Fry supported what he called a reasonable “compromise”: a time-limited exemption that recognized developers’ concerns, but still met the tax’s intention.

Fry strongly opposed ABC’s eventual decision, which not only created an unlimited-time exemption but also refunded millions in already-paid taxes.

When it comes to AI data centres, the digital infrastructure facilities that have become political flashpoints in several jurisdictions, COPE and the Greens want to regulate their development and operation — but COPE would prefer they were not built at all.

Re-elected COPE Coun. Sean Orr said his party, the Greens, and OneCity will not always agree, “and I don’t think we should.”

“There’s going to be divergences and there’s going to be disagreements. And that’s healthy,” said Orr, the council race’s top vote-winner.

The ninth and 10th councillors, OneCity Coun. Lucy Maloney and ABC Coun. Mike Klassen, undoubtedly wish their parties got more councillors elected, but both will play important roles.

As OneCity’s only councillor, Maloney will push her party’s agenda, including more housing and safes transportation infrastructure. On many issues, she’s likely to find allies among COPE and Greens.

Klassen’s role will be different from the four years he just spent with the ABC majority, as the only one of council’s 11 members not affiliated with the tripartite progressive coalition.

Orr believes Klassen will have an important role.

“He’s the most experienced councillor. … We want to use his experience, and I think it would be wise of Pete to not shut that door,” Orr said. Klassen “represents a lot of people who voted for him, and that’s democracy, and that’s a beautiful thing. That’s a huge mistake ABC made, I think, really shutting the door on the rest of council, and not working with them. I don’t want to do that.”

Klassen, for his part, said he plans to work hard to keep advancing his priorities, like economic development, senior’s issues and child care. He’s not going to sit back.

“I’m of the view that if this council does something right, I’ll be the first to cheer it on,” Klassen said. “And if I have concerns, then I have to do my job to try and hold them to account.”

For now, representatives of all four parties on council are expressing optimism about collaboration this council term. But past councils sang a similar tune before tensions eventually flared. In some cases, fractures emerged inside parties, as with ABC last term, or the COPE-majority council after the 2002 election.

Time will tell if Fry and the Green-COPE-OneCity alliance can keep things moving forward in a better way.