Higher turnout than usual creates long lineups, frustration in Vancouver by-election

It was supposed to be a relatively low-key by-election for two seats on Vancouver City Council a little more than two years after Mayor Ken Sim and his new centre-right ABC party were swept into power after 14 years of left-leaning regimes.

Instead, voters lined up to vote and deliver a message of dissatisfaction with the mayor.

Almost 70,000 voters – about 40 per cent of the turnout of a general election and 20,000 more than in the past civic by-election in 2017 – showed up, electing two left-wing candidates, Sean Orr from the Coalition of Progressive Electors and Lucy Maloney from OneCity Vancouver.

Mr. Orr and Ms. Maloney each got about 34,000 votes, almost four times the number of votes of candidates put up by Mr. Sim’s party – Ralph Kaisers and Jaime Stein.

Mr. Orr, who emphasized the need to stop running the city for billionaires, and Ms. Maloney, who focused on renter protections and more bike and pedestrian safety, also easily outpaced candidates from the other two non-ABC parties.

TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, whose main candidate was former city councillor Colleen Hardwick, came in third and the Green Party, whose candidate was filmmaker Annette Reilly, was fourth.

Even though the by-election, which will see two left-wing councillors replace two former left-wing councillors, means the balance of council remains unchanged from its previous makeup, the results have lessons for all the parties, particularly ABC.

“It’s hard to look at sixth- and seventh-place finishes and not be concerned what this would mean for the party,” said Taylor Verrall, who was a senior member of the ABC campaign in 2022 and is now an independent political strategist. He said the mayor and ABC were elected with a very broad coalition of voters.

“While the results didn’t go the way we had hoped, I want to be absolutely clear: we’re all on Team Vancouver,” Mr. Sim said on Sunday.

While some voters have appreciated Mr. Sim’s efforts to tackle public disorder in downtown districts and to remove red tape and bureaucracy for businesses and housing developers, he has experienced many bumps.

He’s been criticized for high tax increases. And he’s lost five people elected on his slate – one councillor, one school-board trustee and three park-board commissioners – after various disputes.

He’s alienated others with his unilateral moves to abolish the elected park board, halt supportive-housing approvals, and reverse the city’s policy of banning natural gas for heating in new homes. (That last one was unsuccessful, after even some of his own councillors voted against it.)

ABC Councillor Lisa Dominato, who voted against the natural-gas initiative, said the party needs to pay attention to what voters told them. “They really sent a message that we need to do a better job of bringing people together,” she said.

Ms. Hardwick was very disappointed in the results for her party, which had attracted a strong and very motivated group of voters who don’t like how much density they believe that this city council, as well as previous ones, have foisted onto the city with little thought for how neighbourhoods are supposed to work.

Social media filled up during the day with photos and videos of lineups that went for blocks, along with angry comments from people who had waited up to three hours or spent half the day driving around to different polling stations to try to find a shorter lineup.

There were signs from the advance voting and mail-in ballot requests that turnout was going to be higher than the typical low-interest civic elections.

But there was no obvious move to boost the number of polling stations or staffing.

Many complained they had to leave without voting. The last voter wasn’t able to cast a ballot until almost 11 p.m.

City manager Paul Mochrie issued a lengthy statement Sunday promising improvements.

“We owe voters and the parties and the candidates an apology,” he said in an interview. He said staff’s assumptions about how many people would turn out were “clearly flawed” and that, once lineups started getting long, it was hard to bring them back down even though extra staff were deployed throughout the day.

He said city staff will be reconsidering plans for the 2026 election.