Ken Sim

Vancouver is still completely unaffordable under Ken Sim. I have family there who are seriously thinking about leaving because they can't make it work financially. The mayor talks about making Vancouver work for everyone but the actual affordability numbers don't lie. Average working people — nurses, teachers, tradespeople — cannot afford to live in the city where they work. That's a failure of city leadership.

Mayor Ken Sim came in with big promises about fixing Vancouver but the city remains one of the most unaffordable places to live in the world. Families who have been in Vancouver for generations are being priced out. The drug and housing crisis on the Downtown Eastside hasn't improved meaningfully. Public safety concerns are real. I give some credit for trying a different approach but results are what matter and Vancouverites are still struggling badly.

Ken Sim made history in 2022 as the first Chinese Canadian elected Mayor of Vancouver, defeating a sitting mayor for the first time in over four decades. His ABC Vancouver party swept into power with a majority on council, positioning his administration to govern effectively. The early results showed ambition: a commitment to 100 new police officers, a focus on public safety, and a stated orientation toward cutting through planning red tape to enable housing construction. The intervening years have been significantly more turbulent. By 2025, his ABC caucus had fractured significantly — multiple elected councillors either resigned from the party or were ejected. His former chief of staff and campaign manager left to form a competing political party. In Vancouver's 2025 council by-elections, ABC candidates placed sixth and seventh, drawing a fraction of the votes needed to be competitive. Whether this reflects policy failures, internal management problems, or simply the volatility of Vancouver municipal politics is a question worth asking. The coalition Sim assembled in 2022 was always ideologically diverse, and holding it together over a full term is genuinely difficult. That said, the scale of the internal breakup suggests something beyond ordinary political attrition. On substance, Vancouver's housing affordability crisis has not improved meaningfully under Sim's tenure, though the tools available to a municipal mayor on this issue are limited compared to provincial powers. Public safety conditions in the Downtown Eastside remain a persistent and deeply contested challenge. Sim will face voters again in 2026 in a field that is already shaping up to be crowded. Reviewed as a citizen who wanted to believe the 2022 result represented a new approach to running the city — and who has found the last three years more complicated than the promise suggested.