Pete Fry elected mayor of Vancouver, defeating incumbent Ken Sim in Saturday municipal election

The Story

Pete Fry has defeated incumbent mayor Ken Sim in Saturday’s municipal election, winning a landslide victory to become Vancouver’s next mayor.

Fry, currently a city councillor, campaigned as the main progressive alternative to Sim and his administration and led the Vancouver Greens to an overwhelming election night result. As results came in, Fry jumped to an early lead and his party remained on track to win a large portion of its slate, including at least two city councillors and another two Park Board commissioners by the time roughly half of the polls had reported.

During the campaign, the Greens focused on promises including affordable homes and transportation, sustainable growth and building green, and community safety. On crime and public safety, the party said it would create a team of outreach workers to handle non-emergency calls for the city’s homeless or anyone suffering from addiction, and fund crisis intervention and de-escalation programs.

The Greens also committed to providing “safe and appropriate places” for the city’s homeless to gather and access support and health care, with drug use permitted in those designated spaces. Fry said the approach would prevent people from being “completely untethered or lost on our streets,” adding: “So the key is for us to find somewhere better for them to go and say, ‘you know what, you can’t do this here in the doorway of this person’s business, but you can go over there, which is a more appropriate space,’”

The Greens also called for using city land for affordable housing, completing the major bikeway network, renewing the Vancouver Aquatic Centre, and introducing ranked ballot voting for mayoral races instead of first-past-the-post.

Fry positioned himself as a unified choice among progressive candidates after Stephanie Allen of COPE quit the mayoral race, followed by OneCity’s William Azaroff, with both decisions made to unite behind a single candidate. Fry said voters viewed him as the “natural antidote” to Sim after Sim’s four years in office, and he described himself as “the only consistent opposition” to Sim on council during that time.

Fry first won a seat on Vancouver city council in 2018, receiving the second-highest vote count, and was narrowly re-elected to a second term in 2022. Before joining council, he worked as a graphic designer and communications consultant, and he came to Canada from Ireland as a child.

Fry’s election campaign was also tied to the non-binding plebiscite question asking Vancouverites whether they wanted to strengthen the city’s health bylaw to ban open-air hard drug use, such as fentanyl, methamphetamine, and heroin, in public spaces. The Green leader said the plebiscite idea was a “very bad idea.”