Longtime Vancouver Green Party councillor Adriane Carr, pictured in 2011, is retiring and departed council this week.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Vancouver’s mayor and his party are about to see a referendum on their job performance as they face a double by-election after the resignation of a second left-of-centre councillor.
The departure of longtime Green Party councillor Adriane Carr this week leaves council with a gaping hole on the left. Ms. Carr, who has been elected since 2011, is retiring months after Christine Boyle, the sole councillor for OneCity, won an NDP seat in the fall provincial election.
ABC Vancouver, which is led by Mayor Ken Sim, has had a majority on city council for two years. With two seats up for grabs, the by-election won’t change the balance of power but it will take the city’s pulse on the party midway through its mandate. While incumbent governments at any level rarely do well in by-elections, Vancouver’s once-powerful centre-left appears in disarray, city watchers say.
“I’m not sure this is the election where opposition will crystallize to the ABC council,” said Stewart Prest, a political science professor at the University of B.C. “It will be a referendum on ABC, but they (ABC) also clearly stand out as the most well- organized party by a comfortable margin.”
That’s in spite of grumbling from voters about high property-tax increases since the ABC council was elected in October, 2022, as well as dissatisfaction about how the city is dealing with homelessness, public disorder, development, climate change, and a host of other issues.
The two parties with departing councillors have agreed they will only run one candidate each.
But the Coalition of Progressive Electors, the city’s left-wing party of almost 60 years, has said it will also run a candidate. Vancouver does not have a ward system, so there are only two seats up for grabs. And they will be voted on by all residents.
“All parties have indicated to one another that we all intend to contest the by-election with one candidate each, but discussions are still ongoing for 2026,” the party said in a statement explaining its decision.
“We’re ready to win this seat, and fight for the working class against the billionaires and big business interests who want to sell out Vancouver.”
That has dismayed those hoping for the collaboration of the past. Vancouver council has typically only seen left-of-centre parties get major wins when there is only one of them or where there’s agreement among the group of them to co-ordinate in some way.
“It’s really dangerous to be vote-splitting in a by-election, but it appears that probably that’s where things are headed,” said Stephen von Sychowski, president of the Vancouver and District Labour Council.
The council has been mediating informal talks among OneCity, the Green Party, and COPE to try to come to an agreement for both the by-election and the future 2026 election but nothing official has been settled on.
In the 2022 election, the council candidates for the many left-of-centre parties actually got more votes in total than the ABC candidates. Although Mr. Sim clearly defeated incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart 86,000 votes to 50,000, voting for council candidates was more mixed.
Some 22 candidates among OneCity, Green, Forward with Kennedy Stewart, COPE, Vision and Socialist parties split the votes, meaning almost all of them lost. Only two Greens and one OneCity candidate were elected.
The by-election is seen by the non-ABC parties as a vital stepping stone to potential bigger wins in the 2026 election.
And, because civic by-elections typically have extremely low turnout – as low as 10 per cent – parties or candidates that have a core base of dedicated voters can sometimes win a seat even if they haven’t done that well in general elections.
At the moment, two of the previous left parties, Vision Vancouver and Forward, have deregistered, reducing some of the competition.
On the other end of the political spectrum, it’s unclear whether the once powerhouse right-of-centre party, the Non-Partisan Association, will resurrect itself for the by-elections. Its four candidates got a total of only 63,661 votes in the election. It doesn’t have a website and hasn’t posted on social media since 2022.
Another of the city’s new parties, TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, is planning to run two candidates in the by-election in hopes of being able to benefit by mobilizing its energetic group of supporters. The party and its supporters are generally opposed to both the current ABC council and previous left-of-centre ones because of their support for what they see as rampant and poorly planned redevelopment of many Vancouver neighbourhoods.
Former NPA councillor Colleen Hardwick, now president of TEAM, said she plans to run for one of the candidate spots in a nomination meeting in February. She believes the party has gained traction as more people have come to see what kind of out-of-scale development is coming to their neighbourhoods, especially those in the 500 blocks of the Broadway Plan.
In one of the most ambitious plans the city has ever developed in terms of adding housing units, it envisions 41,500 new apartments and potentially 100,000 more people to what are already relatively dense inner-city districts.
There are 139 projects in the development pipeline, most of them 18- or 19-storey concrete towers.
“There’s a lot of people in that 500 blocks who are going to be motivated to vote,” said Ms. Hardwick. “It’s been just ‘damn the torpedoes.’ It’s not good planning.
The city hasn’t yet set a date for the by-election.