People’s Voice Vancouver Bureau
For the first time in a quarter-century, a broad-based, labour-backed movement of diverse progressive forces has won a sweeping victory in Vancouver.
However, the BC-wide municipal elections held on October 17 saw a turn to the right in several other cities. And while it appears that various far-right groups did not elect many candidates, some did get significant support. In Surrey, for example, a deeply transphobic “BC Freedom Party” candidate received over 22,000 votes for school trustee.
In Vancouver, four years after gaining big majorities, right-wing Mayor Ken Sim and his corrupt, pro-developer, anti working class ABC party were wiped off the map. Only one ABC councillor narrowly survived the debacle.
The new Mayor will be Pete Fry, a Green Party two-term councillor who received 98,400 votes, more than 30,000 ahead of Sim’s 67,400. While electoral regulations prohibited an official coalition, Fry was also backed by the left-wing Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), and by One City, which has links to the NDP and strong support from the Vancouver & District Labour Council.
In total, the three-party alliance elected nine city councillors out of ten, plus all nine school trustees, and all seven parks commissioners. Topping the polls for city council was COPE’s Sean Orr, an outspoken socialist who was first elected in a byelection two years ago and became the target of Ken Sim’s slanderous personal attacks. Orr’s 83,000 votes trounced Sim’s total in the city’s at-large electoral system, giving him a decisive victory in the arena of public opinion.
Looking at the results by party, COPE elected its entire slate, with four candidates for each level (council, school board and park board). The Green Party’s nine candidates were also all successful, including four on council, three school trustees, and two parks commissioners. Despite being the VDLC’s favoured party in recent years, One City was less successful, electing just one city councillor and three parks commissioners, while nine other One City candidates won sizeable votes but fell short of victory.
Mayor-elect Fry will now head up a city council which includes five Greens out of eleven at City Hall, possibly the first
such outcome in Canadian political history. But there are different approaches on council on some key issues, such as how to tackle the desperate need for truly affordable housing in this very expensive city. It remains to be seen who will be the BC Premier after October 24. That could complicate matters for Vancouver, given that almost none of the new council members have a warm relationship with either the NDP or the BC Conservatives.
The next Vancouver School Board chair is expected to be COPE’s Suzie Mah, a highly-respected teachers’ union activist with considerable experience as an elected trustee. The new Board will include One City trustee Steve Cardwell, who was the VSB superintendent from 2010 to 2015, appointed by a majority of left-wing trustees during that time period. But the VSB faces serious provincial under-funding challenges, no matter who becomes the next Premier.
The results in Vancouver make it certain that many right-wing policy decisions of the last four years will be reversed or amended. One interesting example has wider implications – several of the new city councillors have strongly condemned Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. For perhaps the first time in Canada, a major city will have many local politicians who stand with Palestine, which is truly groundbreaking.
Other fascinating aspects of this political earthquake to be reported in the coming weeks and months.
Speaking to People’s Voice, BC Communist leader Robert Crooks saluted “all those who helped make this victory a reality, persevering through four difficult years to build enough unity to defeat Sim’s ABC.”
In 2022, years of divisions among the city’s left and centre parties had a devastating negative impact at the ballot box. Despite that hard lesson, it took until just a couple of months before October 17 for these parties to reach a partial agreement on numbers of candidates, and for COPE and One City to withdraw their mayoralty nominations in favour of Fry.
“The challenges ahead may be just as difficult, since this left-centre alliance is untested in office,” Crooks pointed out. “But today, our victory in Vancouver is sweet and well deserved. Congratulations to Mayor Pete Fry, and to all our COPE, Green and One City elected officials. Vancouver Communists will continue to do our best to build united struggles around the key priorities for working people over the next four years.”
The Communist strategy of calling for electoral cooperation against Sim’s ABC has its origins in the party’s long history of promoting unity of the organized labour movement and other grassroots forces opposed to big business domination of city council. During the long era of so-called “Non-Partisan Alliance” control of City Hall, the Communist Party was a major player in the creation of COPE to fight the NPA in elections and year-round. As Crooks points out, that strategy won some important gains in the past, and needs to be carried out again in today’s circumstances.