Saturday, enough of the city said enough was enough.
Over nearly 15 years, too many had come to feel Vancouver’s plot was lost, slowly and steadily, and more and more people at both ends of the advantage spectrum housed grievance. A pricey place became utterly unaffordable, an orderly place became unusually unruly, the social fabric stretched too far, the political covenant produced divisiveness.
Big-city problems, the products of socio-economic systems beyond a community’s control, were amplified when the small city overreached on climate action and attended inadequately to what mattered locally: safe and clean streets, abundant opportunities to earn a good living and find a good home.
If Vancouver offered its business card to the world at Expo 86 and again at the 2010 Winter Olympics to come visit and stay, the last decade was evidence that you have to be careful what you wish for. You have to offer an environment of more than mountains, ocean and clean air.
Saturday’s stunning electoral change of the guard at Vancouver city hall – a majority slate by a nascent municipal party – had its seeds in this unremitting political rhythm of decline but its inflection point in mayor-elect Ken Sim’s narrow 2018 defeat fronting another party.
To get here from there in four short years, many opportunities were offered along the way.
Sim squandered none of them.
In conversation a few months after he lost by 957 votes four years ago, it was clear that he would try again. Brought into the race late, he saw opportunity if only he could apply his systems knowledge and facility with process properly and with time.
A few months hence, it was also clear he could not remain with the Non-Partisan Association (NPA) that had first nominated him after its new board steered hard-right from its traditional small-c conservatism. (Disclosure: I had been his predecessor as its mayoralty candidate.)
The NPA’s takeover was a major opportunity Sim needed, an opening to create his own, more centrist party to maneuver more closely than the NPA now would to those he needed to unseat. The city was voting progressively at all levels of government and there weren’t enough large-c Conservatives to elect anyone.
If building his own party would be difficult, another opportunity emerged: the reigning Vision Vancouver party had collapsed in 2018, no municipal party had control of the splintered council, and first-term mayor Kennedy Stewart was elected as an independent.
For the time being, policies and a purpose of his candidacy would wait as Sim worked with a small team to shape ABC (A Better City), an organization that would fit his image and fill the opening. His network and its money went with him, or perhaps he went with his network and its money, but in either case Sim worked diligently and largely out of the limelight. (Even though he professed to merely be a candidate for this new party, not the coronated nominee for mayor, it wouldn’t have launched or sustained if he weren’t leading it.)
Long-lasting administrations typically wear out their welcome when the whines turn into wails. If the first wave of this public pushback came with Vision’s 2018 obliteration, a fuller effect came in large measure because Stewart could not credibly reinvent progressive politics in the opportunity he was handed. He struggled in the pandemic to assure an uncertain city, spoke complacently about random violence and casual vandalism, and focused on down-the-road climate change measures instead of down-the-street safety. The city only became more unaffordable, housing more unattainable, renting more unbearable, inertia to address these matters more unendurable.
The mayor further distanced the administration from the business community at its most vulnerable moment and, with the NPA in rapid decline, ABC usurped its role as its avatar and absorbed its donors and many of its volunteers.
As Sim worked his process, he quietly arranged some of his holdings to take fuller control of the Nurse Next Door business he had helped found. He had years ago participated in the Landmark personal development program. One of its central tenets – with confidence there are no barriers – guided him, along with its dedication to relational mastery.
As these opportunities emerged, Sim drew upon those tenets to enlarge a phone list and ceaselessly tap it, went to endless small meetings, and even in the least visible of political times in the early stages of the pandemic just stuck at it.
It turned out the seeming inconspicuousness for a declared candidate, the appearance of an absence of purpose, were really just the stealth politics of process.
Another opportunity arose: the NPA’s new governance and its surprising choice to anoint a mayoralty nominee rather than run an internal race convinced three sitting councilors to leave, like Sim had, and they would fortify him for his second run. (Another, Colleen Hardwick, moved on to create her own TEAM for a Livable Vancouver party and finished a distant third Saturday.)
Sim settled after some growing pains on a campaign manager who had guided Kevin Falcon to the BC Liberal leadership and its themes quickly congealed: efficiency in government, safety on the streets and an end to overreach.
For a long time, it appeared that the four challengers to the mayor – Sim, Hardwick, Progress Vancouver’s Mark Marissen and a late-arriving NPA Fred Harding (after its initial choice, John Coupar, resigned) – would slice and dice the anti-Stewart vote. Many of us were wrong about the true depth of Stewart’s troubles, but no one predicted the depth of the ABC win Saturday – a full slate of his seven councillors with him among the 10, the top-ranked seven in fact, among all 19 of his Park Board and School Board candidates, none of them topped by rivals. It was as if the city agreed change was necessary and arrived at the same decision on who should be the change agent.
Incumbents have an advantage in most elections. Stewart was the first mayor to lose his title in 42 years. Sim showed that running a second time obviously doesn’t hurt, either.
He doesn’t have the dilemma of newbie Robert Redford in The Candidate, who asks in the aftermath of victory, “So, what do we do now?” But he does have the dilemma of what to do first.
His promises to hire 100 new police officers and 100 mental health workers are symbolic stopgaps for systems requiring at least a generation of ministering and more substantial senior government assistance. If there is hope, it is that Sim will be more aligned if the walls keep closing in on the post-John Horgan BC NDP and any change in Ottawa.
His plan to speed business licences and development permitting will be tests of his council’s mettle with city staff in a labyrinthian administration mainly populated by political opponents. His council has significant swathes of the city under proposal to develop and intelligently densify and a large ship to turn around to create a shrewd supply of diverse housing stock without alienating neighbourhoods.
And where his two predecessors made choices to tune out the privileged – although they were happy to court developers – he has this new opportunity to reach more widely from his own values and be a mayor for a fuller community. This will be a time to see if those with above-average advantage actually have the answers.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
