A recap of the weekend's most meaningful (and interesting) BC civic election results

VANCOUVER — Voters across British Columbia delivered mixed verdicts on Saturday as municipal ballots were counted, unseating the mayors of the province’s two largest cities while returning familiar faces elsewhere and keeping some incumbents in place by narrow margins.In Vancouver, Green Party candidate Pete Fry defeated incumbent Ken Sim of ABC Vancouver to become the city’s first Green mayor. Unofficial city results show Fry with 98,494 votes to Sim’s 67,467. Turnout topped 43%, with 209,214 ballots cast. Progressive candidates took nine of the 10 council seats. Park Board and School Board seats went largely to COPE and Green candidates.This result amounted to a far-left supermajority in terms of Vancouver's mayor and council.Fry’s platform treated street disorder as a problem best met with more services and fewer police responses. He promised a 24/7 Community Response Outreach Workers team, non-police and non-medical, for non-emergency calls involving homelessness, street-level addiction, public intoxication and mental-health crises..He called it "help, not handcuffs."Fry also promised an "Office of Community Safety" to coordinate departments, a lift on the pause for new supportive housing, and continued operation of overdose prevention sites under new licence conditions for cleanliness and neighbourhood impacts rather than the bans Sim had pursued. He preferred the phrase community safety over public safety and opposed the ballot questions that asked voters whether to ban open-air hard-drug use or to push for more involuntary care beds..Victoria voters witnessed a similar result, at least politically speaking, with incumbent progressive mayor Marianne Alto holding her seat. Preliminary figures show her with 13,505 votes, about 44.2%, to Bruce McGuigan’s 10,531. Alto’s platform, like Fry's, emphasized prevention and services over pure enforcement: a renter’s advisory group, improved tenant protections, more shelter and supportive-housing spaces, day-use facilities for unhoused people, investment in non-profit supports, and body cameras for the Victoria Police Department.Council saw some turnover, with a mix of returning incumbents and newcomers who campaigned on safer streets and enforcement of the law.A voting bloc of five councillors sometimes referred to as the "gang of five" — Matt Dell, Jeremy Caradonna, Krista Loughton, Susan Kim and Dave Thompson — usually joined by Alto for a 6-3 majority on major items including the Official Community Plan and budget increases, took a bit of a hit over the weekend demonstrating at least some dissatisfaction in Victoria over Alto's direction in city hall.Only Dell, Caradonna and Thompson were re-elected. Kim, who said she couldn't make the last council meeting prior to the election due to her dog's diarrhea, finished outside the top eight with 9,890 votes and was not re-elected. .Loughton also fell short. Newcomers Melissa Cseszko and Wendy Bowkett, along with re-elected Stephen Hammond and Marg Gardiner, had been endorsed by Victoria Firefighters IAFF Local 730 on a safer-streets and lower-taxes platform. .In Surrey, it was a remarkable comeback for former mayor Doug McCallum, who served from 1996 to 2005 and again from 2018 to 2022 and who, just days earlier, had been accused of potentially suffering from dementia..On October 12, the Conservative Electors Association had demanded that he release a current physician’s assessment and any cognitive or dementia test results, arguing a candidate seeking support must be able to perform the job.McCallum of the Safe Surrey Coalition defeated incumbent Brenda Locke, 42,741 votes to 30,886. That amounted to a vote share of only 31.9% in a crowded field. His slate still won seven of eight council seats despite the questions surrounding a potential cognitive impairment.McCallum, 81, campaigned on a four-year property-tax freeze, a SkyTrain extension to Newton, a police helicopter and drone fleet for the Surrey Police Service within 90 days, zero tolerance on crime and extortion, a partial withdrawal from the Metro Vancouver Regional District, a ward system, an independent forensic audit of city land deals, and a new hospital in Newton on city-owned land. In 2021 he claimed a political opponent ran over his foot in a Southpoint Save-On-Foods parking lot. He was charged with public mischief and found not guilty in 2022. A judge concluded the foot had in fact been run over..Even with McCallum’s return and the baggage that travels with it, the controversies pale next to the four years of open dysfunction that turned Kamloops into a provincial case study in municipal chaos. Code-of-conduct investigations, lawsuits, a municipal adviser, and repeated provincial interest consumed city hall over the last four years. Voters chose two-term councillor Mike O’Reilly with 13,235 votes, about 44%. Incumbent Reid Hamer-Jackson finished fourth. O’Reilly told supporters the city had chosen to "end the chaos at city hall."To give readers a sense of the "chaos," one of the losing slate’s council candidates, Dennis Giesbrecht of Pivot Kamloops, had posted a July lawn video of himself kneeling while a masked man with a bat stood behind him, delivering a forced endorsement of the previous council in what looked to many like an ISIS-inspired satire. The video shows Giesbrecht kneeling on a lawn with his hands behind his back as a masked man wearing a tactical vest stands behind him holding a baseball bat."I am Dennis Giesbrecht of Pivot Kamloops — I'm doing this of my own free will," he says, before delivering an apparently coerced endorsement of the current city council."Kamloops has never been better run. We've got a city council that's amazing. Every dollar is well spent and no one should even run against them. They should all win in a landslide." Giesbrecht took the video down after criticism. Mayoral candidate Nelly Dever called it poor taste. Giesbrecht said it was meant to be funny. Only one Pivot candidate made council..Kelowna’s Tom Dyas held on narrowly as mayor, 19,451 votes to Ron Cannan’s 18,482 — one of the few major-city incumbents to keep the chair on a night when voters unseated the mayors of Vancouver, Surrey, and several other large municipalities. The race was tight. Cannan, a former councillor and area MP, called a recount request a strong possibility..On council the real entertainment arrived with newcomer Brady Rogers, who finished fourth with 12,635 votes and won a seat. The 33-year-old entrepreneur had gone viral for deadpan campaign signs that read “I barely want to do this,” “Fine. I’ll do it,” and “How hard could it be?” One US influencer, Mandi Jung, called the approach, "the most millennial thing she had seen." Rogers later told reporters the humour was deliberate and that funny is different from unserious. Voters apparently agreed..In Penticton, Dan Ashton returned as mayor, 4,477 votes to Julius Bloomfield’s 2,457. The undoubted top-line issue in that municipality’s civic election was the same one as in many other communities, both big and small, throughout the country: bike lanes. Bike lanes had become such a recurring local argument, in fact, that council voted 4-3 in favour of directing staff to cease all work on the design or construction of any new separated bike lanes — and with that, any meaningful council discussion on the topic — until the end of the current term..Ashton told reporters the lanes were “a little bit overblown” and could have been done a better way, though the decision would rest with the new council..The same friction showed up in New Westminster, where Daniel Fontaine of the New Westminster Progressives defeated incumbent Patrick Johnstone of Community First, 12,361 votes to 10,128. The Progressives took five of six council seats and most of the school board. Fontaine, first elected as a councillor in 2022, campaigned on lower tax increases, a core service review, and safer streets. Bike lanes had been a running sore under the previous council. Residents packed chambers over a London Street redesign that would have removed substantial parking and altered the street’s layout. Even post-election, bike lanes remained a significant pain-point for voters according to social media activity centred around New Westminster politics, as reported by National post columnist and resident Amy Hamm..Fontaine and fellow Progressive Paul Minhas opposed the scale of the project and pushed to redirect the money toward sidewalks and transit shelters. Similar complaints about lost loading zones, access for seniors, and under-use had surfaced on Seventh Street and uptown corridors. The new majority arrives with a clear mandate to slow the pace of the bike lane projects..In nearby Burnaby and Richmond the results split. Burnaby’s Mike Hurley won a third term with 28,946 votes, about 58%, well ahead of Heymann Yip’s 9,250 — another rare exception to the trend of municipalities choosing new mayors over running incumbents. The Burnaby Citizens Association kept a strong majority on council. Turnout was about 29%, the highest number of ballots in the city’s history. Richmond elected Rob Howard, its first new mayor in 25 years following the retirement of the city's longtime mayor Malcolm Brodie.Farther north, Prince George voters replaced incumbent Simon Yu with long-time councillor Garth Frizzell, who finished first in a nine-candidate field with 5,310 votes to Yu’s 4,569. Kyle Sampson finished third with 4,432. Turnout was about 29%. Five newcomers joined council. The race drew the largest mayoral field in the city’s history and produced another clear change at the top.Northern Beat’s Fran Yanor noted the highest vote shares among re-elected or returning mayors: Brad West in Port Coquitlam at 91%, Jason Lum in Chilliwack at 82%, Stew Young in Langford and Sean Bujtas in Terrace at 64% each, and Ross Siemens in Abbotsford at 62%..The immediate takeaway from the civic results is generally higher-than-normal turnouts, a clear desire for change, and a surprising appetite for highly progressive positions in the province’s main urban centres. Vancouver elected its first Green mayor and a progressive council majority. Victoria re-elected a progressive mayor. Those outcomes can be read several ways. Some have suggested the major municipalities opting for progressivism amount to a forward-looking hedge against a Conservative Party of BC majority in the legislature..Others have taken the results as a signal that progressivism remains alive and well in places like Vancouver and Victoria.At the same time, the return of Doug McCallum to the mayor’s chair in Surrey and Dan Ashton in Penticton points the other direction. Both are familiar faces who have held the office before. Their wins suggest voters in those cities are seeking stability and experience as the province continues to face serious financial difficulties, a large deficit, and the uncertainties of a snap provincial election one week later. The municipal map does not map cleanly onto the provincial parties that will face voters on October 24. The anti-incumbent pattern and the progressive holds in the largest cities sit may prove a negative harbinger against an NDP government seeking re-election. Whether that mood travels to the provincial election results, however, remains to be seen.

A recap of the weekend's most meaningful (and interesting) BC civic election results

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