Why Three Parties Cut a Deal Before Vancouver’s Byelection

Two councillors are out, leaving two seats up for grabs.

Vancouver city council has said an early goodbye to Christine Boyle of the OneCity party, who left for a new post as an NDP MLA last fall, and Adriane Carr of the Greens, who called it quits in January after she “lost trust” in Mayor Ken Sim.

Both are rare progressives on a council dominated by Mayor Sim and his pro-business, pro-policing ABC Vancouver party, which currently enjoys a majority with eight out of 11 seats.

The departures have triggered a byelection to fill those two empty council seats on April 5. In Vancouver’s first-past-the-post system, the two seats will go to the two candidates who win the most votes.

The byelection comes in the middle of the term, with progressive parties hoping it will be a chance to elect new opposition to hold ABC to account. ABC’s strong governing style — with moves such as abolishing the city’s 137-year-old park board — has alienated some members of its own caucus.

ABC actions such as cutting the city’s renter office, offering a rebate to property developers, rejecting a “Sue Big Oil” lawsuit and reintroducing police officers into schools have put the party at odds with the politics of progressive opponents.

The problem: Vancouver’s landscape of political parties has been incredibly crowded in recent years.

“I think we were obviously running too many progressives,” said Pete Fry of the Greens. With the two vacant seats, he is currently the only non-ABC politician on city council.

In the 2017 byelection, Fry was one of four progressive candidates running, with Hector Bremner, a pro-development candidate from the Non-Partisan Association or NPA party, taking the single seat. In the 2022 general election, voters overwhelmingly chose ABC politicians, sidelining the six smaller progressive parties that ran candidates.

To avoid splitting progressives’ chances, three parties vying for votes — the Greens, OneCity and the Coalition of Progressive Electors, or COPE — have decided to each run a single candidate. That means three progressive candidates will be competing for the two seats.

Does that still introduce some risk of a vote split?

“It would have been better if we kept it to just two,” said Fry. “Obviously, that’s not how it’s going to shake out.”

Reps from the other parties are aware that it would have been safer to run two candidates for the two seats, but the arrangement they’ve arrived at allows them all to participate in the byelection.

It’s not the “perfect formula,” said a OneCity spokesperson. A rep from COPE agreed but added that three candidates means progressive voters still have a “choice.”

Whittling down the candidates

The three progressive parties shared their frustrations with losing what they saw as a winnable byelection in 2017.

That year, Shawn Vulliez was helping out with the independent campaign to elect anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson, who came in second.

“We thought with her reputation that she’d be a great independent unity candidate,” said Vulliez. “We were kind of rebuffed by every party except COPE. People point to [2017] as an example of vote splitting, but we actually tried to get something that everyone could buy into. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out.”

Swanson and many of her supporters, including Vulliez, eventually joined COPE, the long-standing party of tenants, environmentalists and the labour movement.

Progressive parties did gather to talk about limiting candidates in 2018, which worked well, and in 2022, which did not, according to Vulliez.

“Lots of parties... just ran way too many candidates. They blew up the whole team, in my opinion. I think everyone could have done work to maybe limit a little further.”

In the coming byelection, Vision Vancouver, former mayor Gregor Robertson’s party, and Forward Together, former mayor Kennedy Stewart’s party, appear to be out of the picture, giving progressives more room.

Vulliez, now a co-chair of COPE, said his party and Vote Socialist entered talks about six months ago on how to avoid vote splitting. The result is that COPE will be running Vote Socialist’s former candidate Sean Orr, a political columnist who has written for publications such as Scout Magazine.

“Everyone was really excited about that. On the left, we’re really proud of the fact that we brought the party together, with Vote Socialist not running this time, and a lot of them coming to support Sean.”

With the agreement between the three progressive parties to each run a single candidate, OneCity has put forward Lucy Maloney, an environmental lawyer and road safety activist, and the Vancouver Greens have put forward Annette Reilly, an actor and health advocate.

Vulliez says this makes voters’ options “much, much better” than if the six progressive parties active in 2022 were running a total of 12 candidates this time around.

“That’s better than where we were in the 2017 byelection,” said Cara Ng, co-chair of OneCity. “That’s also better than if each of the [three active] parties ran two candidates each, making it six total.”

Byelection battle fronts

The parameters of this particular byelection mean that progressive candidates know exactly what they’re getting into if they win: a seat in opposition as part of a council dominated by a single party.

“There’s a lot at stake,” said Ng. “It’s the perfect opportunity for voters to send a message to Ken Sim and ABC that they’re just not working for the people of Vancouver, and that the lives of Vancouver residents are worse, not better. People don’t feel safer, and the cost of living remains too high. I think this is a really significant moment in municipal politics and we’re really prepared to rise to the occasion and make sure that we elect a representative to city hall.”

Coun. Fry says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about progressives’ chances this time around.

Having run in a byelection before, he knows they’re tricky because turnout is low. In the 2022 general election, 36 per cent of the electorate voted. In the 2017 byelection, only 11 per cent did.

“If I was to poll people on the street right now, I would say the majority of people I talk to probably don’t like what Ken Sim is doing,” said Fry. “They don’t like ABC... they are generally disgruntled. That being said, will they go to the polls this byelection and exercise their democratic vote? Will they line up behind and select two candidates to teach ABC a lesson?”

Despite these sentiments, Fry knows there is still an appetite for the values that ABC stands for.

“They have a base I think many progressives don’t understand is still very strong,” he said. “The tough-on-crime, conservative stuff... I think the real threat is of course that ABC still has a sizable get-out-to-vote machine that taps into a very conservative mindset that we don’t have access to — and they do.”

Fry brought up another front that the three parties, along with TEAM, a fourth, have united on: calling on Elections BC to conclude an investigation into ABC’s finances before the byelection.

Elections BC did not specifically say what a group of 12 political parties, including ABC, were each being investigated for. It noted only that potential contraventions by the group are related to prohibited contributions and unauthorized advertising. ABC has said it would comply with campaign financing laws and investigation requests.

ABC is planning to run two candidates to fend off the opposition. And Colleen Hardwick, a former city councillor, hopes to return to office with another candidate from her TEAM party.

The fading of the Vision Vancouver party, which won multiple elections on its “greenest city” platforms, had resulted in a competitive crowd of multiple progressive parties from the 2017 byelection on.

They are by no means the same. The Greens might be considered progressive, but they are “neither left nor right,” said former councillor Adriane Carr. On housing, OneCity has wanted to see more types of homes in all neighbourhoods, while COPE has tended to approve non-market projects while voting down large projects without some affordability baked in.

Despite their varying politics, the three progressive parties are pleased to have this byelection chance to work together.

“I think it’s really important to state that there are shared values,” said Ng of OneCity, who added that the collaboration “paves the way for more progressive unity in 2026,” the year of the next municipal election.

“There are really meaningful differences here, but there are places we can work together,” said COPE’s Vulliez. “From our perspective, in 2026 we want to continue conversations to make sure that [even if it’s] not a totally united front, we can prevent blowing up the whole ballot with everyone vying for a big majority. I think a collaborative council is actually really good.”