On Halloween night when no one could see, a coward, and maybe more than one, sprayed graffiti on the garage doors of Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s house. In English and Chinese, it was coarse and any reasonable person would feel threatened.
I know Sim is a hardboiled businessman, but I also know he has a legitimate personal vulnerability as a man of colour and an entrepreneur who has had to compete in commerce as few of us have. The climb up the ladder came with detractors he had to face down. And now, as opposed to earlier, he has a family to protect from what he has to face frequently in the office he won two years ago. It deserves nothing of this garbage.
And let’s remind ourselves: he won in a landslide. The party he led took every seat it contested on council, park board and school board. He bested candidates with political experience. There was no division in the city. He was and is the legitimate choice of the citizens of Vancouver to serve this term, and if you don’t like it, lump it. Try harder in 2026, live with 2022, and mind your manners meantime.
The spray painter or painters ought to suffer every available consequence. Problem is, this isn’t taken seriously in society for several reasons. We treat our politicians as piñatas. We show up at their homes to rage. We find their phone numbers to bombard. We stop them in the streets, or stalk them, and vent like children who need their naps. We have cultivated a society that feels it owns a politician like a puppy it can kick. And then we wonder why so few of the best and brightest won’t run, why we at times attract peripheral people to public office when so many significant community members won’t come within a country mile of the pursuit.
Lawyers I’ve asked said the graffiti likely does not constitute a hate crime — more like mischief under the Criminal Code — but I’d argue we need to fix the law if lawmakers cannot be insulated from this growing cesspool of citizens who need to learn a lesson.
It is obvious that today’s conditions offer few guardrails on what is an acceptable critique of an elected official. It is time we recognize that democracy is only upheld when we uphold the safety of those who are elected democratically and conduct their work without fear. We need an amendment to the law to signal to the idiots of the world that their day is done.
My first stop today would be to ban any social media platform in this country that permits anonymous accounts. How we let this poisonous genie from the bottle nearly two decades ago defies logic, but it changed the game and enabled anyone, anywhere, anytime to pour toxins into civil society with no legal response. It permitted cowards a free shot, as if the targets were assailed while blindfolded, without serious consequences.
The absolute spinelessness of those accounts ought to be a crime, nearly as seriously as stalking and child pornography online are.
My second stop would be to make some public examples of the offenders. Subject them to defamation laws, make them pay tens of thousands of dollars and tie up their businesses as they appear in court to defend their 280-character or other post, and make them lose and pay much, much more than they ever anticipated. Make this a legal mission. Show their faces as they face justice. Let’s know in the community who these people are. Take their assets away as if they were drug dealers or money launderers.
Maybe then, they’d recognize that the vast, broad, absurdly open social platforms – as opposed to the teensy dark web – are off-limits to their juvenility and vulgarity. The message would be: if you want to criticize, stand up and be counted and be civil; otherwise, we’ll treat and penalize you as the loser you are. Maybe then, we could start to reset the relationship with our institutions to better and more safely balance critique with accountability. Maybe then, the people our communities have elected wouldn’t face nearly as much debasement, and we could chart a path back to a time when we could have respectful disagreements.
The graffiti on Sim’s garage doors are a metaphor for an enabled society that does not fear more than a tiny slap on the wrist in exchange for publicity (mine included here, I suppose). It’s a symptom of a system that shrugs at personal responsibility and views an attack on an elected official as part of a game.
It’s not a game. It’s our democracy.
I’ve had enough.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive history in journalism.
