Four years ago, Vancouver elected an independent mayor and a fractured city council, split between left and right.
The result was a sharp break from the city’s long political tradition, where a party on the centre-left or centre-right generally controls the mayor’s chair and 10-seat city council. Vancouver is unusual in Canada, with municipal parties and councillors that are elected on a citywide basis, rather than in wards.
Last Saturday’s election marked a return to how things have long been, where one party has a solid hand on the political wheel. The recently formed ABC Vancouver party, the city’s new force on centre-right, swept to power: Ken Sim became mayor with half the vote, after narrowly losing four years ago, and ABC’s seven council candidates were by far the top vote-getters.
The centre-right, formerly represented by the Non-Partisan Association, has held the mayor’s chair for half the time since the mid-1980s, but “centre-right” is a relative term in Vancouver. ABC’s top promise was to hire 100 new police officers and 100 mental health nurses, but the party’s platform also contained ideas that would fit comfortably on the centre-left, from reconciliation to climate initiatives. The party said more than half its support came from voters who cast federal ballots for the Liberals.
What Mr. Sim wants to get done in policing is clear, as is his vow to run civic services more efficiently. What’s unclear are his plans for housing – arguably the No. 1 issue in a city where stratospheric real estate prices mean more than half of households are renters, compared with about one-third countrywide.
During the campaign, Mr. Sim didn’t say much about housing – and during one debate he didn’t seem to know who the federal or provincial housing ministers are.
ABC does support the basics. The party and its incumbent councillors this year backed the new Vancouver Plan, whose main theme was housing density, and the Broadway Plan, centred on commercial and housing density along a new subway.
But ABC’s platform suggests it leans toward less rather than more when it comes to housing over its coming four-year term. This is despite a consensus among experts – starting with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. – that the country, led by the biggest cities, needs to rapidly build a lot more housing.
Instead, a Vancouver City Hall helmed by Mr. Sim looks like it will keep on inching ahead, much as it has the past four years. The last council, in between bouts of chaotic infighting, used its entire term to put together the Vancouver Plan, approved just this past summer.
It is a smart but broad blueprint – rather than the detailed zoning changes necessary to get vast amounts of housing built. In its platform, ABC pledged it would complete an official community plan by the end of its term in 2026.
For a party with full control of council, this sluggish pace is an abdication of responsibility. It means Vancouver will have spent eight years – from 2018 through 2026 – planning for changes to housing bylaws. That is the opposite of urgency.
The official community plan is supposed to lay out where new density can be built. The Vancouver Plan calls for density across the entire city, rather than the current strategy to consign it to busy streets, while detached houses dominate quiet areas near schools and parks. ABC talks about mid-rise apartment buildings throughout the city but is skeptical whether density is “appropriate in every single neighbourhood.”
B.C. voters choose change as new mayors elected across the province
Further, and also worrisome, ABC’s platform said it “will initiate a review” of Vancouver’s missing middle housing strategy. This was at the heart of four years of work on the Vancouver Plan. The city doesn’t need yet more drawn-out reviews of a problem whose answers are clear.
ABC does have some important goals, from doubling the number of co-op units to lobbying the provincial and federal governments to get more purpose-built rentals constructed. While those are both important, they are specific pillars rather than an ambitious overhaul of the restrictive city bylaws that prevent more housing from being built.
The time for pondering is over. What Vancouver needs, if the city is serious about affordability, is a flood of new housing, for years to come. Mr. Sim and ABC have the power to make it happen but do not seem ready to deliver.