Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, City Beat for January 10th. Vancouver politics were busy in 2025, and with an October municipal election this year, things won't be quieting down soon.
Speaker: Red Eye Collective member Ian Mass is here with his New Year's City Beat Report, and he was going to talk about what happened in 2025 and what's coming up in 2026. Hello, Ian. Happy New Year, Jane, and to our audience. Yeah, Happy New Year. It'll be an interesting year, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: In November, Vancouver Council had more than 600 speakers registered to speak on Ken Simms' budget for this year, and they almost unanimously opposed it. Why was it so unpopular?
Speaker: Well, for the first three years of Ken Sim and his ABC colleagues' term, they increased the city budget by over 21% in those last three years. And so they decided, just kind of out of the blue, that this 2026 upcoming election year, they were going to reverse course and cut $120 million dollars from the budget. which would freeze the property tax increases at 0%, which is their slogan, zero means zero.
Speaker: So after a grueling four-day public process, despite that opposition, the budget was passed with ABC using its seven to four majority. Do we know what's being cut? Well, that's the question the public and councillors just couldn't get any answers on.
Speaker: We don't have many specific, just some overall numbers. Most city departments are being cut by 10% or more with buzzwords like back to basics.
Speaker: Naturally, the police funding is not being cut. It's actually going up by close to 10% or $50 million. dollars And that's after ABC wrote off a $17 million dollars in police budget overages, most of which went to overtime and the task force barrage down in the downtown east side.
Speaker: So it means reducing the city's workforce by around 400 full-time jobs. Two-thirds of those are projected to be union jobs. And the plan now in 2026 is for Mayor Sim and ABC to come back with, I imagine, our virtually unalterable details about layoffs and service cuts. So stay tuned. We'll be hearing lots about this.
Speaker: A story that could have been a good news story for last year turned out to be quite divisive. And this concerns the Filipino community, which has been calling for a cultural center for more than 40 years. And Ken Sim thinks he has the answer to that. What's going on?
Speaker: Well, it's a rezoning proposal by a brand new nonprofit, of Filipino Legacy Society of Canada, as well as a developer called Port Living. And it's down at 3rd Main Street.
Speaker: It includes this Filipino cultural center, apparently with no cost to the city. And it's going to be integrated in one of the two proposed towers. They're 30-foot towers with 500 hotel rooms.
Speaker: The problem is that another Filipino group has been working on a proposal since 2021. And this new nonprofit Filipino Legacy Society of Canada came out of nowhere with this proposal.
Speaker: Now, you add to that this port living, the developers' multiple legal and financial disputes, which sound pretty substantial, including, interestingly enough, ongoing foreclosure court proceedings about the very piece of land that these hotels and cultural centers are proposed to be on.
Speaker: After seeing the difficult divides in the Filipino community becoming public, ABC support was still unanimous, and they ordered staff to give this proposal top priority and come back with something concrete in the first quarter of 2026. Now, recognizing that community division, Councillors Bly, Fry, Maloney, and Orr abstained from the vote entirely.
Speaker: The high cost and availability of decent housing has remained an issue. What should we expect this coming year? Well, cities across BC have been ordered by the provincial government to come up with their official what's called official development plans, which mandate increased housing across their municipalities. And that plan is to be done by June of this coming year. And although municipalities are not happy about what they call heavy handedness by the province, most are complying. Now, Vancouver's a little ahead of this. Back in 2024, they committed to a 10-year housing target of about 83,000 new housing units, 75% of those being rental. And so we're two years into that commitment, and the city's bit behind, but they've got big development plans that are just kicking in in 2026, including the massive rezoning, which we've talked a lot about along the Broadway corridor, from the west and central parts of the city, along with plans around the Renfrew and Rupert SkyTrain stations. They're also proposing 25 so-called village sites around the city, where they hope to promote walkable villages with densities big enough to support a full range of services.
Speaker: and much of the rest of the single family housing zones in the city have been up-zoned to allow everything from four to six-story apartments and were now called multiplexes.
Speaker: Much of the downtown east side, to the dismay of residents, has also been up-zoned, allowing high-rises and resultant speculators driving up land prices, as the city and province already struggle to inadequately buy and protect social housing there. So the other part of this, which really got a lot of opposition, is most of this development is now excluded from public hearings, with most of the decisions now being made by staff at City Hall, or will be in the future being made by staff at City Hall.
Speaker: But not everything went Ken Sims way in 2025. A for-profit housing corporation, which was designed to make the city money and be arm's length from the council, was voted down. And a proposal to allow six to 20-story social housing developments throughout much of the city was also sent back to the drawing board.
Speaker: Finally, it remains to be seen how the city is going to pay for the roads and the sewers and the community centers and all these infrastructure costs of these new developments when they're already facing an annual $500 million dollars deficit to pay for upgrading what we already have.
Speaker: So despite that deficit, next year, we're getting a new, at least the start of, a new but controversial aquatic center in the West End. and the completion of a new community center for Marpool, along with some level of rehab water and sewer services and bridges that don't fall down piece by piece.
Speaker: Vancouver voters will have a chance to determine in this upcoming civic election if they want to spend more on infrastructure, including somehow or another fixing the immensely popular but really expensive Kitts Pool.
Speaker: Well, let's move on to those elections. They're coming up on October 17th throughout the province. In Vancouver, what do we know so far? We know, at least through the April 25th by-election, that Ken Sim and his ruling ABC party were humiliated by Sean Orr of Cope and Lucy Maloney of One City, which, at least on the surface, wasn't good news for ABC.
Speaker: On top of that, there was a ah break in the ABC party. They expelled ABC counselor Rebecca Bly, along with resignations of three ABC Park Board commissioners and the chair of the Vancouver School Board.
Speaker: But still, Ken Sim and ABC think they have a winning hand with that zero means zero budget for 2026. And they've also said they'll do that in 2027. And they have claims of improved public safety that they're delivering on housing and supporting local businesses. So who's challenging Ken Sim and the ABC?
Speaker: Well, for fundraising purposes, lots of folks declared fairly early in 2025 that they were ready to take ABC on. Kareem Alam, the former chief of staff and campaign manager for Ken Sim, has created what he calls the Vancouver Liberal Party, and he plans to run for mayor. Colleen Hardwick and her team for a livable Vancouver plan plan on running yet again. And two-term Vancouver City Councillor Rebecca Bly, who I just talked about, has created a new party called Vote Vancouver and will run for mayor against her former party, Mayor Ken Sims, ABC Vancouver.
Speaker: One city has two candidates who want to be mayor, Amanda Burroughs and William Asanoff, and they'll decide which one of those two they want in February. And we're still waiting to see if Cope or Pete Fry of the Greens will declare, which will potentially, if they do, split the left's vote.
Speaker: And there's an interesting thing happening behind the scenes that we don't hear much about, but the Conservative Electors Association has registered as a political party, but we've yet to hear what they'd be doing. So expect a crowded field of candidates. There was 15 for mayor last time, and I think close to 60 for city council. And I suspect there'll be that many, if not more, this time. What else ah might we expect coming up this year?
Speaker: Well, let's stick with the election coming up. Ken Simms' bid to abolish the park board hit a brick wall. Christine Boyle, a former One City Councillor, and she's now the Minister of Municipal Affairs, sent back a request by Ken Simms to have the elimination of the park board become a referendum question. She said more work needs to be done, especially with the three Indigenous nations affected by it. So it's not clear if the Park Board referendum will even make it onto the ballot.
Speaker: Moving on, for those who care, World Cup soccer is coming to Vancouver in June at BC Place with a fan zone extravaganza apparently coming to the P&E grounds, marking the opening of a new and vastly over-budget 10,000-seat amphitheater.
Speaker: Sticking with Hastings Park, they've canceled horse racing there and opened up discussion of a stadium for soccer's Vancouver Whitecaps. And the purchase of the casino license by the Sueletooth First Nation just adds even more intrigue on what will become of Hastings Park, which is supposedly a park and sounding more like an amusement park than a park.
Speaker: Moving on to the park board, despite being opposed by Green Party's Tom Digby, the Harry Potter show in Stanley Park, which replaced the train, has apparently drawn record crowds and has been extended. So we'll see what happens in 2026 with that one, whether it becomes a issue for the election or for the new park board coming in.
Speaker: And finally, we have this week's depressing announcements that London Drugs is moving out of its Woodward site down there on East Hastings and the low cost Sunrise Market on Powell is being sold. Folks are waiting anxiously for former Mayor Larry Campbell's special report on the downtown east side because, you know, I suspect we don't seem to be moving forward with making the downtown east side a more livable community. Now, there's lots more, but Jane, that's all that fits today. We'll be back next week with a CityBeat report on what's upcoming in the next meeting.
Speaker: Yes, the council meeting, first council meeting is happening in about a week and a half, and I'll have a report next Saturday on that. Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Ian. Thanks, Jane. I've been speaking with Red Eye Collective member Ian Mass, and he's here with his CIDB report.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
