Vancouver voters elected Sean Orr of COPE and Lucy Maloney of OneCity in the April 5 byelection, with both candidates beating all other challengers by a large margin in a race seen by many as a referendum on Mayor Ken Sim’s administration.
Orr topped the polls with 34,448 votes and Maloney collected 33,732, while former city councillor Colleen Hardwick of TEAM for a Livable Vancouver finished third with 17,352 votes, according to unofficial results.
Jaime Stein (9,267) and Ralph Kaisers (8,915), who represented the mayor’s A小蓝视频 Vancouver party, placed a distant sixth and seventh — a poor showing for a party that won a landslide victory in the October 2022 general election.
What did Sim make of the results?
“Obviously, regardless of how we feel or the accomplishments that we've made, there are people in this city that don't feel that way, and that's definitely not the intent,” the mayor told reporters Monday.
“So, we're taking a really hard look as to why people feel that way and what we can do to be better.”
A小蓝视频 Vancouver continues to hold seven of the 11 seats on a council that is also represented by the Greens’ Pete Fry and Rebecca Bligh, who was elected in 2022 with A小蓝视频 but was recently expelled from the party.
Bligh now serves as an independent.
For Fry, the election of Orr and Maloney translates to more allies, but no more than he had before Christine Boyle (OneCity) and Adriane Carr (Greens) resigned; Boyle was elected as an NDP MLA in the fall provincial election and Carr retired in January.
The trio of Fry, Carr and Boyle often voted together and fought back against Sim’s proposal to abolish the elected board of park commissioners. The trio also pushed back against an A小蓝视频-led move to reverse a policy that bans natural gas for heating and hot water in construction of new detached homes.
Pausing the integrity commissioner’s work, Sim’s pause on the construction of net new supportive housing also met with controversy and saw more than 300 people protest on the city hall plaza.
Fry said Monday from his office that he considers Orr and Maloney allies.
“I mean, we're not going to agree on everything,” he added, suggesting that COPE’s calls to defund the police during the 2018-2022 term helped lead to A小蓝视频 Vancouver’s victory at the polls in the 2022 election.
“This kind of stuff obviously did not land very well and created a perfect storm for A小蓝视频 to exploit. So I worry about those kind of scenarios.”
'It's going to be tough'
BIV spoke to Orr and Maloney Monday about the challenge ahead and how they expect to implement their agendas on a council dominated by Sim and his team of Lisa Dominato, Brian Montague, Peter Meiszner, Sarah Kirby-Yung, Mike Klassen and Lenny Zhou.
Orr was candid: “It’s going to be tough.”
At the same time, Orr said, he believes he can work with Fry, Maloney and Bligh to push back on A小蓝视频 Vancouver’s agenda. He said fighting to reverse the Sim-led move to pause the construction of supportive housing will be his top issue.
“We've got four opposition councillors now, and I think by sticking to our principles that we can pull more support — because they saw what happened on Saturday,” he said, referring to the results.
He attributed his victory to a well-run campaign, and voters not interested in a mayor who talks about bringing back “swagger” to Vancouver and setting up a gym adjacent to his city hall office.
“Wanting to scrap the park board, pause the work of the integrity commissioner — that’s not what Vancouverites want,” said Orr, a longtime activist and writer who has been a regular at various protests around the city, including the massive April 2023 city-led effort to remove tents and people from East Hastings sidewalks.
Maloney is a road safety advocate who was also chair of her children’s elementary school parent advisory council. Her victory ensured OneCity still holds a seat on council that was won by Boyle in 2018.
Maloney referred to Boyle’s approach as a councillor when asked how she could possibly implement any planks of her platform on a council controlled by Sim and his A小蓝视频 Vancouver colleagues.
“I expect to keep doing exactly what [she did] so well during her period on this council, which is work with whoever shares her values and priorities to get the work done,” Maloney said.
“You persist. Even if things don't go your way on some votes, you just move on to the next thing and try to get that through and work with staff and other councillors to get as much work done as possible.”
'Affordable for everybody'
Maloney is originally from Australia, where she earned a law degree and an MBA. She pursued a career in environmental law with her Australian state’s environmental regulator, and then in business.
In Vancouver, she was the chair of the Lord Roberts elementary school parent advisory council, where she fought successfully to have the streets near the school traffic-calmed so students could walk, ride and roll to school safely.
Maloney cited her top issues as housing affordability and tenant protections for renters.
“OneCity has, for its whole existence, prioritized making Vancouver welcoming and affordable for everybody,” she said.
“We want to see affordable housing and accessible housing options in every neighbourhood of the city, and we want to make sure that people can live and work near their family, near their workplaces, and that hasn't changed.”
Maloney and Orr both acknowledged their work over the next year-and-a-half will give voters in the October 2026 general election a real sense of their politics and approach to acting on behalf of constituents before they seek re-election.
What concerned both councillors-elect Monday was the long lineups at the polls Saturday, which left many voters waiting several hours to vote. They said the lineups dissuaded many people from casting a ballot.
Long lineups 'unacceptable'
Vancouver city manager Paul Mochrie issued a statement Sunday and apologized for the long wait times, saying they were unacceptable.
“The extended wait times at many voting places reflected flawed planning assumptions for this byelection that informed staff decisions and the plan presented to council,” Mochrie said.
“Recognizing the effort by the city’s elections team to promote and execute this plan, it was clearly insufficient to accommodate the electorate in accessing an efficient voting process.”
Added Mochrie: “Our role is to provide a voting process that is efficient, accessible and reflective of the trust that voters and elected officials place in the civil service to support the electoral process. We will do better moving forward.”
The mayor, meanwhile, said the A小蓝视频 Vancouver party had no regrets about running Stein and Kaisers as the party’s candidates, saying they “were of high character and quality, and would have served the residents of Vancouver well.”
He then looked to the back of the media room at city hall, where Orr and Maloney were present to observe a news conference unrelated to the byelection results, which Sim had called to announce members of a business task force.
“We have two elected councillors sitting in the back of the room, and I know they’re going to represent the city well,” he said.
A total of 15 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots in the byelection. No date has been set yet for Orr and Maloney to be sworn in as councillors.
X/@Howellings
