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<\/a><\/p>\nFemale filmmakers find big ideas in even the smallest subjects in documentaries at VIFF Centre this month.<\/p>\n
A crowded field of opponents<\/a> splitting the vote among Vancouverites opposed to Ken Sim partially explains this contradiction. But beneath that arithmetic is a deliberate political strategy that inverts the big-tent approach that first swept Sim and his ABC Vancouver party into office in 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n Instead of preserving that original, broad coalition, Sim and ABC have consolidated a smaller, more durable and distinctly conservative electoral fortress.<\/p>\n The strategy becomes clearer in recent polling<\/a>.<\/p>\n An August Research Co. survey<\/a> found that 39 per cent of Vancouverites view Sim favourably, while 52 per cent view him unfavourably. <\/p>\n Thus, Sim\u2019s net favourability sits at minus 13, the worst of any mayoral candidate tested.<\/p>\n The Vancouver Greens\u2019 mayoral candidate, Pete Fry, enjoys the strongest net favourability at plus 12, followed by the Vancouver Liberals\u2019 mayoral candidate, Kareem Allam, at plus 10. <\/p>\n Yet among decided voters, Sim leads the mayoral race with 30 per cent of support, a staggering 11 points ahead of both Fry and Allam, who are tied for second at 19 per cent each.<\/p>\n Somehow, currently, the candidate Vancouverites view least favourably is the candidate they are most likely to elect.<\/p>\n The paradox can be explained by parsing through Sim\u2019s support by demographic.<\/p>\n Among decided voters who own their home, Sim has 36 per cent support, nearly double that of the next closest mayoral candidate. Among renters, however, Sim falls to 22 per cent, in a virtual dead heat with both Allam and Fry.<\/p>\n
In terms of voting intention, Sim leads across genders, every age bracket and primary residence status. But his electoral advantage is, by far, the largest among Vancouverites who own their home.<\/p>\n That contrast reveals the foundation of Sim and ABC Vancouver\u2019s fortified castle of support: homeowners.<\/p>\n That fortress is considerably smaller than the coalition that elected Sim as mayor and ABC to a supermajority on city council four years ago. <\/p>\n In the same survey, nearly 40 per cent of decided voters who backed Sim in 2022 now intend to support someone else for mayor. Much to Sim\u2019s electoral benefit, however, those voters have scattered in different directions, as no other mayoral candidate has captured more than 16 per cent of Sim\u2019s 2022 voters.<\/p>\n So while Sim has lost a substantial portion of the coalition that delivered ABC\u2019s landslide win four years ago, remarkably, he may not need them this October.<\/p>\n The polling reveals who forms the strongest part of Sim\u2019s electoral fortress. But ABC Vancouver\u2019s deliberate policy and ideological choices reveal what is holding that support base together.<\/p>\n The pillars of ABC Vancouver\u2019s stronghold<\/p>\n Homeowners are the foundation of Sim\u2019s support, especially after ABC Vancouver already delivered its most potent pitch: the \u201czero means zero<\/a>\u201d budget.<\/p>\n Despite three consecutive years of property tax hikes (10.7 per cent in 2023, 7.28 per cent in 2024 and 3.9 per cent in 2025), ABC Vancouver eventually fulfilled its 2022 election promise of a zero per cent property tax increase in 2026. More importantly for the coming election, ABC appears to be the only major party promising a property tax freeze for 2027.<\/p>\n It should be no surprise then that homeowners form Sim\u2019s strongest base of support.<\/p>\n But tax restraint is only one pillar of Sim\u2019s smaller, yet more durable, coalition.<\/p>\n An unwavering commitment to public safety has defined Ken Sim\u2019s identity for years.<\/p>\n In 2022, Sim campaigned heavily on reducing crime and social disorder, most notably promising to hire 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health nurses. Public safety was so central to the campaign that the Vancouver Police Union endorsed Sim for mayor<\/a>, marking the first time in its history that the union made a mayoral endorsement.<\/p>\n Within a year of becoming mayor, Sim fulfilled his pledge to hire 100 cops<\/a>, without hiring even a tenth of the nurses he had promised. By 2025, the ABC-majority council\u2019s track record of providing any requested resources to the Vancouver Police Department was so consistemt that \u2014 off the top of his head \u2014 Sim struggled<\/a> to identify a single example of his administration denying a VPD request.<\/p>\n Whatever nuance may have existed in ABC\u2019s original \u201c100 cops, 100 nurses\u201d sloganeering, Sim\u2019s record in office leaves little ambiguity about which side of that equation he prioritizes.<\/p>\n Ahead of October\u2019s election, public safety remains central<\/a> to Sim and ABC Vancouver\u2019s political message. Only now, ABC Vancouver\u2019s vision of public safety extends beyond simply putting more police officers on city streets. It includes blocking<\/a> overdose prevention sites, freezing<\/a> the construction of new social housing and amplifying<\/a> the idea of a two-pillar (instead of a four-pillar) drug strategy that largely rejects harm reduction services such as safe drug consumption sites.<\/p>\n Together, property tax freezes and public safety give Sim and ABC a clearly defined political lane that no serious challenger has managed to crowd, let alone disrupt. Their electoral base may be smaller than it was in 2022, perhaps even less enthusiastic, but it is consolidated. ABC Vancouver has effectively narrowed its political appeal toward a more conservative electorate, which the other municipal parties have largely ignored.<\/p>\n For voters who believe Vancouver property taxes are too high or that the city\u2019s response to public disorder has been too permissive, there is little ambiguity about which mayoral candidate is speaking to them.<\/p>\n And increasingly, Sim has set his focus past his opponents on the ballot and onto a bigger target that conservatives of all types can rally against.<\/p>\n
Sim\u2019s main opponent isn\u2019t running for mayor<\/p>\n Sim has effectively cast himself as the only mayoral candidate in Vancouver willing to take the fight to the politician his conservative base despises most: B.C. Premier David Eby.<\/p>\n After Eby indefinitely delayed Sim\u2019s commitment to abolish the Vancouver Park Board<\/a>, Sim became an increasingly outspoken critic of the NDP-led provincial government. For over a year, Sim has repeatedly blamed the province for failures<\/a> in the mental health-care system, street disorder<\/a> and its response<\/a> to the toxic drug crisis. Sim has also demanded the province fund and operate more involuntary care beds<\/a> in Vancouver, even while his ABC majority on council moved to pause the construction of new social housing units<\/a>.<\/p>\n Public safety is no longer just a policing issue for Sim. It is the frame through which he wages his broader political fight against Eby and the province.<\/p>\n <\/a> <\/p>\n Where Do Vancouver Parties Stand on AI?<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tread more <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Sim has positioned himself as both a governing incumbent at Vancouver City Hall and an opposition politician holding Victoria accountable. He takes credit for the choices his party makes at city hall. At the same time, he\u2019s deflected blame for the city\u2019s most persistent, structural challenges toward a premier whose popularity has plummeted to new lows<\/a>.<\/p>\n Eby has even helped validate these criticisms. The province\u2019s retreat from decriminalization lent credibility to conservative critiques linking harm reduction to public disorder and to the portrayal of B.C.\u2019s response to the toxic drug crisis as a failed experiment. Eby, for his part, caved to the narrative<\/a> that the very premise of decriminalization was a mistake, rather than limiting his criticism to his government\u2019s design and implementation of the policy.<\/p>\n This backpedalling from Eby allows Sim to claim vindication. It gives the mayor legitimacy when he speaks directly to a Vancouver voter who believes that the city\u2019s problems are principally the product not of city hall, but of provincial policy and mismanagement, particularly under Eby.<\/p>\n No other major mayoral candidate in Vancouver has made this case, allowing Sim to monopolize this political lane and build higher walls around his electoral fortress.<\/p>\n This makes Eby an unusually useful political foil for Sim. For the voters inside ABC Vancouver\u2019s base of support, every fight Sim picks with Eby reinforces the idea that Sim is not just sympathetic to their grievances, but willing to directly confront the government they blame.<\/p>\n The obvious vulnerability to ABC Vancouver\u2019s strategy is that most voters remain outside its walls.<\/p>\n <\/a> <\/p>\n From Hotel Halls to City Hall: A Union\u2019s Disputed Tactics<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim is not popular. And yet, he is the current front-runner to win the city\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[52493,8288,39075,3204,8255,53906,95,39078,3982,53907,53908,53909],"class_list":["post-168011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-vancouver","tag-abc-vancouver","tag-david-eby","tag-kareem-allam","tag-ken-sim","tag-pete-fry","tag-research-co","tag-vancouver","tag-vancouver-election","tag-vancouver-police-department","tag-vancouver-police-union","tag-vancouver-property-taxes","tag-zero-means-zero-budget"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}