COPE is Back!

On Saturday April 5, 2025, Vancouver held a byelection to fill two vacancies on City Council. A total of 13 candidates were running.

COPE, OneCity, and the Vancouver Greens each decided to run only one candidate in order to reduce splitting of the vote among progressive supporters. Although it would have been even better if these three parties had managed to field a total of only two candidates, that proved to be impossible as it would have meant one of the parties would have had to sit out this byelection.

TEAM for a Liveable Vancouver ran two candidates.

ABC Vancouver ran two candidates.

There were six independents.

The Vancouver District Labour Council executive decided, behind closed doors, to endorse the Vancouver Green Party candidate and the OneCity candidate. The VDLC members were never permitted a vote on the endorsement.

OneCity opted not to hold a nomination meeting where its members could democratically choose who to run. Instead, like the VDLC, the OneCity executive decided behind closed doors that their candidate would be Lucy Maloney.

COPE, TEAM, and the Greens, on the other hand, held open nominations. COPE’s transparent membership meeting nominated activist Sean Orr. TEAM’s nominees were former Councillor Colleen Hardwick and Theodore Abbott, while the Greens nominated Annette Reilly.

ABC’s candidates were VPD Sergeant and President of the Vancouver Police Union, Ralph Kaisers, and Jaime Stein, who has a background in the tech industry.

COPE, initially operating on a shoestring budget, focused a lot of its resources on social media, and was soon the clear favourite on all social media platforms.

OneCity, on the other hand, faced the challenge that its candidate, Lucy Maloney, had spent much of her earlier legal career working for Australia’s largest mining companies.

The question also arose whether ABC’s campaign might be in trouble when they were criticized for deciding to boycott every all-candidates meeting.

As the campaign continued, momentum appeared to be shifting in favour of COPE. But would COPE be able to achieve the impossible and get Sean Orr elected on April 5^th?

On election night, COPE supporters in the hundreds packed the Wise Hall, waiting for voting results. You could feel the tension in the air, which increased as election results were delayed.

Voting throughout the day had been a story of long lineups — as long as three hours at some polling stations. The ABC majority on city council had chosen to support city staff’s plan to reduce the number of polling stations from the 51 deployed during the 2017 byelection to only 25, while reducing election staff from 631 to 264. The day after the vote, the city manager conceded that the wait had been “unacceptable.”

Although polls had closed at 8 p.m., results could not be released until all who were lined up to vote at that time had cast their ballots.

Finally, at 11 p.m. — at long last — the first batch of results came in. With one-third of the polling stations reporting, Sean Orr was unbelievably in first place. Utter pandemonium erupted as the room went wild beyond description. Not only was Sean in first place, but there was a very significant gap between second-place Lucy Maloney and TEAM’s Colleen Hardwick, who was third.

Sean Orr stayed in first place as the remaining polling stations reported, and his lead over Lucy Maloney continued to grow. In the end, the ABC candidates finished in very distant sixth and seventh places.

Sean Orr will bring a breath of fresh air to Vancouver City Council. Renters, the unemployed, the underemployed, minimum wage workers, and transit users are just some of the people who will finally have a voice at 12^th & Cambie.

Sean has already begun his term by calling on Ken Sim and City Council to reverse course and properly fund Vancouver’s public libraries, which are now having service hours reduced. As you may remember, I have written previously in opposition to ABC’s mercenary ideas about public libraries.

COPE has now launched a petition in support of increasing library hours. I encourage you to sign at https://www.votecope.ca/libraries.

I cannot wait for Vancouver’s next full municipal election on October 17, 2026.

The campaign to evict mayor Ken Sim and elect a COPE majority has now begun!

 

Daily atmospheric CO₂ [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]

Latest daily total (April 16, 2025): 430.07ppm

One year ago (April 15, 2024): 424.92ppm