Geoff Russ: Ken Sim squandered his time as Vancouver mayor

VANCOUVER  — There are many hot takes regarding the political tsunami that swept Vancouver, electing a progressive mayor, and one of the most left-wing councils in living memory.

The cause of this was not a leftist political beast, reawakened in the largest city on the “Left Coast.” Simply put, Vancouver had a moderate, centre-right government that made itself very unpopular and, on the whole, wasted their opportunity.

People tend to vote out ineffective governments, especially ones that seem listless and chaotic.

Vancouver enjoyed a fantastic summer of football as the World Cup came to town. Overseeing this was Mayor Ken Sim, who ensured he was publicly front and centre for the whole spectacle.

With an election looming in the fall, Sim had an excited, hopeful electorate to win over. Rather than running as the mayor of FIFA and fun, Sim headed a fearmongering campaign against a rival who did not fit the role of villain.

Pete Fry, the Green Party of Vancouver councillor who defeated Sim on Saturday, is hardly a bad or unpleasant fellow. By all accounts, he’s an affable moderate who is widely liked by his fellow councillors, and that was reflected in the positive campaign he ran. Fry’s fun and lively style was a far better fit for post-FIFA Vancouver.

Saturday’s municipal election left Sim and his young ABC Vancouver party devastated, with just a single councillor re-elected after four years of governance. Elected to get Vancouver back on track in 2022, ABC proved perhaps most effective at making enemies.

Sim lost more than 18,000 votes compared to 2022, despite the considerable rise in voter turnout. ABC came to power in 2022 by appealing to a broad cross-section of Vancouverites who were fatigued by urban disorder and an inept city hall led by then-mayor Kennedy Stewart, a former NDP MP.

ABC was hard to pigeonhole back then, and attracted support from both Conservatives and Liberals, the former wanting a return to law and order, while the latter sought managerial competence. Many other voters were hardly partisan and merely wanted faster permitting, a smoother process for doing business, and a crackdown on drug-fuelled crime.

However, ABC seemed to deliberatelynarrow its appeal to Vancouver’s smaller base of conservative and right-leaning voters.

Once upon a time, this did work. In the 20th century, a coalition of downtown businessmen, homeowners, and the city’s affluent West Side could easily deliver mayors and majorities on council, under the banner of the misleadingly named Non-Partisan Association (NPA).

The NPA has pulled that off just once in the 21st century and has otherwise faded into irrelevance. Failing to tend to ABC’s 2022 coalition was a major mistake.

Another failure was not following through on major decisions. The attempt to abolish Vancouver’s anachronistic Park Board was a disaster and fractured ABC itself.

Furthermore, the mayor’s office devoted considerable energy to eccentric pursuits, and not in a good way. There was an ongoing obsession with Bitcoin, the conversion of city hall offices into gyms, and proclamations honouring Lululemon founder Chip Wilson.

Suffice it to say, voters were left scratching their heads. Sim already had a reputation as an aloof man, and his choices only reinforced that perception. The timing was particularly poor, coinciding with a revival of class politics across North America following Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York City.

In this climate, Sim offered the perfect target. Credit is also due to the left in Vancouver. The Greens, the NDP-aligned OneCity Vancouver, and the hard-left Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) were very pragmatic and cooperative. Other mayoral candidates dropped out to rally behind the eminently electable Pete Fry and consolidate the vote.

ABC’s attempts to paint Fry as a sort of dangerous radical fell flat in the face of his moderate image. An August poll even found that a majority of respondents who voted for Sim in 2022 viewed Fry favourably.

In fact, the search for villains proved to be part of ABC’s downfall. Sean Orr is a highly controversial figure in Vancouver. He is an avowed communist and a hardline COPE partisan with a cult following in the city, and was elected to city council in a landslide in a 2025 by-election.

Rather than pretending Orr didn’t exist and starving him of oxygen, ABC tried to turn him into a bogeyman. Sim alleged that Orr had distributed illegal drugs, but withdrew the allegation after it was shown to be false. It was a brutal error of judgement that became a small scandal, vindicating and elevating Orr further, to Sim’s diminishment.

Orr went on to earn the highest share of the vote in Saturday’s council election, becoming one of four COPE members elected. Expect Orr to remain a high-profile figure in Vancouver politics, and he can thank Sim for much of that momentum.

It would be wrong to state that ABC accomplished absolutely nothing in its term. Permitting improved, and the city hosted major events without any real hitches. Public safety has improved somewhat but remains a major concern, as the Downtown Eastside serves as a seemingly eternal reminder. It is accurate to say that several of Vancouver’s longstanding problems were better managed under ABC rather than eliminated.

ABC’s term was also marked by property tax hikes that weakened its centre-right credentials. Furthermore, ABC failed to reduce the administrative bloat at city hall early or effectively. The city was already overstaffed at considerable expense when ABC arrived in 2022, but the party failed to make any significant cuts until the last calendar year.

The World Cup in Vancouver brought expanded patios, festivals, and a very fun atmosphere downtown that ABC could have taken better advantage of. Given everything that had transpired under their government, it might have been their last lifeline to run on good-feelings and a sense of competency from managing such a high-profile event.

Instead, they tried to make voters fear politicians that voters already liked. It helped the left outhustle and out-organize them.

Perhaps the best way to summarize ABC’s time in office is that they came in promising to deliver a better city, but spent most of their time convincing people that they preferred picking fights.

Reckless belligerence was not what Vancouver wanted, and they made that perfectly clear.

National Post