Are Too Many Vancouver Progressives Running for Mayor?

Recent public opinion polls show that as unpopular as Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and his A Better City Vancouver, or ABC, party are, they still have enough support to eke out a second term on council .

With three weeks to go before the Sept. 11 deadline for candidate registration, there are already eight mayoral candidates declared to run in the Oct. 17 municipal election.

The summer polls show that this leaves Vancouver’s left-, centre- and right-leaning parties in danger of splitting the vote and clearing the way for ABC to reclaim the mayor’s seat and at least some seats on council.

This past spring, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, or COPE, the Green Party of Vancouver and OneCity negotiated a self-imposed limit of 13 candidates each across city council, school board and park board. They also pledged to narrow down the mayor race to just one candidate among them before the end of summer.

“The progressive wing of politics in Vancouver, it’s a three-headed monster at the moment,” said Stewart Prest, a lecturer in the political science department at the University of British Columbia.

Having two of the three current progressive mayoral candidates step down would mean progressives would stop competing among themselves, Prest said. They could then start competing with the polls’ other front-runners: ABC and the Vancouver Liberals and mayoral candidate Kareem Allam.

It’s a good idea to take opinion polls on how people intend to vote with a grain of salt, said Prest. Especially as the results are from nearly three months before the election.

“But they definitely give us an indication of where people are thinking, and to what degree people are paying attention,” he said.

“We know that there is a certain amount of frustration with the incumbent, ABC. But that there is still a core constituency supporting them that more or less lines up with observations that we have outside the polling. So that’s another reason to accept that this is a valid result.”

Although the majority of the polls’ respondents were undecided voters, Green Party mayoral candidate Pete Fry and his fellow council candidates polled higher than their progressive peers in COPE and OneCity Vancouver.

For some poll questions, the Greens and Fry ranked even higher than all the other mayoral candidates and parties, Sim and the ABC council candidates included.

This speaks to Fry’s and the Green Party’s longevity in municipal politics, Prest said.

COPE is a much older municipal party than the Green Party of Vancouver. But unlike COPE, Fry and the Greens have consistently won council seats since 2017.

OneCity’s “confrontational” approach to the negotiations among the three parties earlier this year may have also affected how voters view mayoral candidate William Azaroff, Prest added.