Vancouver Voters Send a Byelection Message to Ken Sim

Apr. 7, 2025

Two left-leaning candidates topped polls while ABC’s candidates fell far behind.

In a byelection to replace two empty council seats, Sim’s party picked tech executive Jaime Stein and Ralph Kaisers, a controversial police union head who allegedly counselled an officer not to follow police procedure after the brutal beating death of a man in custody.

On Saturday, voters appeared to send a message to Sim and his ABC party, lining up for hours to vote for two council candidates who had positioned themselves as everything Sim was not.

Sean Orr, a candidate with Vancouver’s traditional party of the left, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, topped the polls with support from 34,448 voters, while Lucy Maloney, with the centre-left OneCity party, came in second with 33,732. The ABC candidates finished sixth and seventh in the unofficial results, with Stein at 9,267 and Kaisers at 8,915.

Both Orr and Maloney are new to council, although Orr ran unsuccessfully in the 2022 civic election.

Carr, who had served as a councillor since 2011, 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.

ABC still holds a majority on Vancouver’s 11-member council, with six councillors and Sim as mayor.

But with Coun. Rebecca Bligh sitting as an independent, there are now four non-ABC councillors, including Green Coun. Pete Fry, Maloney and Orr.

Orr crafted his campaign around voters’ anger with ABC, promising to “grill Ken Sim” and use his position on council to undo previous ABC decisions to rescind a ban on gas heating in new construction and close a city office that helped renters, and to “reverse Ken Sim’s cruel ban on supportive housing.”

Maloney, an advocate for road safety and bike infrastructure, emphasized Sim’s frequent absences from council and promised to expand the protections that were put in place for renters affected by the Broadway plan to the entire city. She also promised to bring back the city’s renter office, shut down in 2023.

While door knocking during the campaign, Maloney told The Tyee that she and her team got “a really good reception, and it might be that people have seen the work and see the collaboration that I’ve done with local community groups.”

“But also I think that maybe ABC are vastly underestimating how widespread the deep dissatisfaction — with the mayor’s performance particularly — is amongst Vancouver residents.”

Maloney said it was clear whenever she talked to renters that fear of eviction was a top issue, while for young families, the cost and availability of child care was also a huge concern.

In 2022, Sim’s ABC party won majorities on city council, school board and park board. With residents and businesses shaken by crime and social disorder in the COVID-19 pandemic, Sim’s signature promise was to hire 100 more police officers and 100 mental health nurses. For the first time in the history of the city, the Vancouver Police Union chose to back a party, endorsing ABC, leading to concerns about the role of police in city politics.

While the Vancouver Police Department quickly hired 100 more officers, the promise on nurses was downgraded to 58 mental health specialists and, to date, just 35 mental health workers have been hired.

In December 2023, Sim also made an abrupt decision to eliminate the elected park board, saying it was inefficient to have a separate elected body. Getting rid of the park board hadn’t been part of his party’s platform, and it led to three ABC park board commissioners leaving the party and sitting as independents.

For the byelection, ABC once again concentrated on crime and public safety concerns, promising a strategy to help businesses that are affected by crime.

That message didn’t appear to connect with voters: Stein and Kaisers got fewer votes than Green candidate Annette Reilly (15,045 votes) and TEAM candidates Colleen Hardwick (17,352) and Theodore Abbott (11,581).

About 68,000 votes were cast for a voter turnout of 15 per cent. That’s an increase of 40 per cent from the last byelection in 2017. Voters complained of long waits at polling stations, while reporters drew attention to changes city staff recently made to reduce the number of election staff and polling locations.

[Top: OneCity’s Lucy Maloney and COPE’s Sean Orr won the two council seats available in a Vancouver byelection Saturday. Photos via X.]