Vancouver Green Mayor Pete Fry Ousts Ken Sim

Vancouver has its first Vancouver Green mayor, and the margin was not close. Pete Fry, a two-term city councillor, beat incumbent Ken Sim of the ABC party on Saturday night in a municipal election that swung city hall hard to the left, according to CBC News.

A decisive win

Preliminary results show Fry took more than ninety-eight thousand votes, about thirty-one thousand ahead of Sim, according to The Canadian Press. Turnout reached about two hundred and nine thousand ballots, up thirty-six per cent from four years ago.

Fry defeated eight other candidates and becomes the forty-second mayor of Vancouver, CBC News reports. He is the son of Liberal MP Hedy Fry, and he hugged her on stage at his election-night party before telling supporters the Greens would fight for the city.

The Globe and Mail reports that Fry is the first Green candidate elected to lead a major Canadian city. That makes the Vancouver Green mayor result a national story, not just a local one.

ABC gets wiped out

Four years ago, Sim swept to power when the business-friendly ABC party won seven of ten council seats. This time ABC was decimated, with only one councillor elected, the Canadian Press says.

Fry will work with an overwhelmingly progressive council. The Greens and the Coalition of Progressive Electors, known as COPE, each took four of ten seats, and OneCity Vancouver claimed a ninth seat for the left-of-centre camp.

The sweep went further than city hall. Green and COPE candidates won all seven Park Board seats, and Green, COPE and OneCity candidates won all nine school trustee positions, according to the Canadian Press.

Sim, a businessman, was first elected in 2022 after beating then-mayor Kennedy Stewart. He conceded shortly after Fry took the stage, once about seventy-five of the one hundred and forty-nine polling locations had reported. Early counts showed Fry well ahead and the gap only grew as the night went on.

Business in Vancouver described Fry as an underdog heading into the night, which makes the scale of the result even more striking. The Vancouver Green mayor victory is a rebuke of a slate that had held a firm grip on city hall for a full term.

What Fry says he will do first

The Globe and Mail reports that Fry says his top priority is community safety and a thoughtful approach to getting people off the streets. He plans an office of community safety to co-ordinate police, fire and other services.

For young renters in a city with some of the priciest housing in the country, the election was also about affordability. Voters clearly wanted change, and the Vancouver Green mayor now has a mandate to show what that change looks like.

Other results around British Columbia pointed the same way. In Surrey, the incumbent mayor Brenda Locke lost to Doug McCallum, who is eighty-two, in a rematch of the 2022 race with the opposite result, according to CTV News.

Expect early fights over policing budgets, development rules and how the city handles encampments, all areas where the old council and the new one see things very differently. Fry has also leaned on the idea of a city that works for regular people, and that pitch clearly landed with a large share of voters.

Council still has to be sworn in, and the first budget will be the real test of whether big promises turn into funded programs. Watch for how Fry balances bold plans against the money the city actually has.

Why Gen Z should care

Municipal elections decide bus routes, bike lanes, rents near campus and how cities treat people without homes. A turnout jump of more than a third suggests more people showed up this time, and younger voters often drive that kind of surge.

Fry will lead a council where no single party holds a majority by itself, so deal-making between the Greens, COPE and OneCity will shape what gets done. Watch how quickly the new team moves on housing and safety once it is sworn in.

Read more on our politics desk and our Canada coverage as the new council takes shape.