Marking a massive shift in local governance, voters in Vancouver, Canada, have elected center-right candidate Ken Sim mayor with an impressive margin of more than 36,000 votes (out of about 135,000 votes cast) over the incumbent, progressive mayor Kennedy Stewart. Sim’s new ABC party also won seven out of ten city council seats and a majority of the school board and park board seats. His crime-focused platform echoes those of other public-order-focused local candidates in U.S. communities. …
Sim’s campaign offered a rational response to the surging violence. He promised to expand public-safety resources by hiring 100 new police officers and 100 mental-health workers. Moreover, he pledged to restore the School Liaison Officer program, which the progressive school board had voted to end amid anti-police sentiment following the death of George Floyd in 2020. “We knocked on over 78,000 doors in Vancouver, and we spoke to tens of thousands of residents, and a big concern from the majority of parents who had kids in the school system was they were concerned about safety,” Sim told Global News.
Meantime, the incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart has been hostile to the police department, calling for it to be investigated in 2020 for institutional racism: “I believe [the province] will take up this call to ensure this review includes an investigation of systemic racism and disproportional violence experienced by Black and Indigenous community members,” he said.
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