The Oct. 17 Vancouver municipal election has completely turned the tables on the city’s political establishment.
The incumbent, billionaire-backed Ken Sim was booted out of office by Green Party candidate Pete Fry. Sim’s A Better City (ABC) Party, which once held seven of the ten city council seats, was almost wiped out and now holds only one.
The beneficiaries of this turn have been the left parties COPE and the Greens. All candidates for both parties won seats on the council, with COPE’s socialist candidate Sean Orr being elected with the most votes of any councillor in the history of Vancouver.
This was a complete rejection of Sim’s pro-billionaire program. In the four years since Sim was elected, the problems facing ordinary working-class people in the city have only gotten worse, with housing being a major flashpoint. Rentals remain the most expensive in Canada. When compounded with high inflation in food and fuel, the minimum wage is now close to $10 below what a living wage in the city should be, having declined a full dollar since Sim was elected.
While ordinary workers struggled to pay their rent, Sim ruled in the interests of the rich developers, giving them tax breaks and getting rid of the renters office, a body that provided resources to tenants—leading to the highest eviction rates in the country.
Vancouver often makes top ten lists of the best cities in the world to live in, but despite the scenic views, most Vancouverites are struggling to live here.They can no longer accept the capitalist program of Sim and ABC.
COPE successfully tapped into the desire to take the fight to the billionaires who have sucked the city dry. At a time when nearly half of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque, COPE proposes drastically lowering rents, making transit free, and building public grocery stores. Moreover, the left-wing party speaks openly about the fight between the “working class” and the “billionaire class,” while proudly describing itself as socialist. This gave struggling Vancouverites a platform to fight for.
Before the election, you could not leave your house without seeing someone sporting one of COPE’s “evict Ken Sim” pins. Despite folding their mayoral bid in favour of Pete Fry, COPE performed the best out of all parties in the vote for city council, garnering close to 17 per cent of the total vote.
This was a wake up call for the capitalist class in Vancouver. As the economic crisis in B.C. deepens, they are compelled to demand more cuts to social spending, while inflating the lucrative housing bubble at our expense. The measures that COPE proposes are an attack on their profits. The bosses, therefore, will not take these attacks lying down.
To replace Ken Sim’s program for the rich with a program for Vancouver’s working class and youth, COPE and the Greens will be forced to duke it out with the capitalist class. For them to achieve the demands that got them elected, they need to back them up with a combative movement of tens of thousands in the workplaces and in the streets. This would represent the first major step in wresting our city back from the parasites and finally providing for the majority.
