VANCOUVER — Ken Sim lost the mayor’s chair after a single term on Saturday night, and the council he leaves behind may have no majority party. Green Party councillor Pete Fry won, CTV News reported, though the full makeup of council had not been declared by midnight and the CTV reports TEH reviewed give no vote totals for the mayor’s race.
“We’re not going to let you down,” Fry told cheering supporters, adding that “we love this city a lot.” Sim conceded with the words “When I’m on my deathbed, I’ll look back at this,” adding “It’s probably the most meaningful thing I’ve been involved with.”
In Surrey, Doug McCallum, 82, beat Mayor Brenda Locke in a rematch of the 2022 race, with the result reversed. CTV News said incumbents were ousted in the two largest cities in British Columbia.
Fry’s win followed a deal among progressive parties, CTV News reported. Stephanie Allen of COPE and William Azaroff of OneCity both withdrew from the mayoral race over the summer so the left-wing vote would not split. Days before the election, Sim declined a challenge from Fry to debate him one-on-one.
Sim’s party, A Better City, dominated council, the school board and the park board after 2022. Late Saturday it had only one candidate poised to be elected, incumbent Mike Klassen. COPE’s Sean Orr, a frequent target of Sim’s attacks, was the first winning councillor declared and drew the most votes of any non-mayoral candidate.
Two plebiscite questions that A Better City put on the ballot remain unanswered. One asked about tougher laws against open-air hard drug use, which the party’s own proposal would enforce with $0 tickets and brief detention. The other asked whether the city should ask the province for involuntary care beds. Vancouver did not share results Saturday.
Surrey’s count was not final either. As of 9:45 p.m., McCallum had more than 27,000 votes to Locke’s 18,400, CTV News Vancouver reported. He returns to an office he held from 2018 through 2022. Locke beat him by fewer than 1,000 votes in 2022.
McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition promised “zero tolerance” for extortion, no tax increases over four years, and a helicopter and drone fleet for the Surrey Police Service within 90 days. “Everything we promised, we will approve it in the first council meeting, in a motion,” he said. Locke called the tax increases under her council a byproduct of the move to municipal policing. “I hate to say, ‘I told you so,’ but I did,” she said.
Extortion is the pressure point: CTV News Vancouver had reported more than 145 cases this year in a city of roughly 734,000. The election-night reports do not say how a zero-increase pledge would pay for a helicopter and a drone fleet.
