Two climate-forward progressives won seats in a recent Vancouver byelection, while candidates from Mayor Ken Sim’s ABC party finished at the bottom—suggesting voters may be cooling on his crime and public-safety agenda.
Housing activist Sean Orr, representing the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), topped the April 5 vote with 34,448 ballots, The Tyee reports. He was followed by environmental lawyer Lucy Maloney of OneCity Vancouver, an advocate for road safety and bike infrastructure, who received 33,732 votes.
Orr, who campaigned on defending living wage policies, social housing, and climate action, is facing criticism from two Jewish groups over a resurfaced 2021 social media post. He defended himself in a statement to CTV News, saying he is “unequivocally opposed to antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all racism and discrimination.”
Candidates from the TEAM for a Livable Vancouver party came in third and fifth in the byelection vote, while municipal Green party candidate Annette Reilly took fourth spot. Bringing up a distant rear were the two ABC candidates: tech executive Jaime Stein with 9,267 votes, and “controversial police union head” Ralph Kaisers with 8,915, The Tyee says.
Orr and Maloney will fill the council seats vacated by former OneCity councillor Christine Boyle, who became a B.C. cabinet minister after winning a seat in provincial elections last October, and longtime Green Party councillor Adriane Carr, who resigned in January.
A city councillor for 14 years, Carr “said the work environment had become ‘toxic’ under Sim’s administration and said she no longer felt she could make any progress on issues like climate change,” The Tyee writes.
While A Better City (ABC) retains its majority on Vancouver’s 11-seat council, the recent removal of Councillor Rebecca Bligh from the party—she now sits as an independent—means that there are now four non-ABC councillors, including the Green Party’s Pete Fry.
Bligh was ejected from ABC after speaking out against Sim’s plan to freeze all new construction of supportive housing in the city’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
Two ABC councillors, Peter Meiszner and Lisa Dominato, are also seen as more progressive voices within the party. Along with Bligh, they joined Green Party councillors Carr and Fry in voting to reinstate a ban on gas in new buildings last December.
Orr and Mahoney also share some climate-related concerns, according to an all-candidates survey by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. Both signalled strong support for minimum cooling standards, for example.
Roughly 68,000 votes were cast in the byelection, an increase of 40% over the last byelection in 2017.
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
