Tag Archives: abc vancouver. city council

Ken Sim’s Vancouver:
$13.4 Million in FIFA Tickets for ‘Friends’, Rather Than Installing Barriers on the Granville Street Bridge

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There are moments in public life when a government decision tells you almost everything you need to know about its priorities.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s ABC Vancouver has provided one of those moments.

For years, the City has known that the Granville Street Bridge is a suicide hotspot.

For years, health professionals, suicide-prevention advocates, first responders and community members have urged Vancouver City Hall to install barriers that could prevent people in moments of acute crisis from making an irreversible decision.

And for years, Vancouver City Hall has delayed, deferred, postponed.

In March of this year, ABC Vancouver Councillors voted to remove funding for Granville Bridge suicide-prevention barriers from the 2027–2030 Capital Plan. The decision prompted the Crisis Centre of BC to accuse Council of failing to act on an established, evidence-based method of saving lives.

That is an astonishing decision when placed beside the City’s enthusiasm for FIFA World Cup hospitality.

Vancouver set aside $13.4 million for FIFA tickets, suites and lounges, purchased through FIFA contractor On Location. The City says the packages were intended to be resold through a commercial sponsorship programme to help offset World Cup costs.

So, to be fair, this is not literally a case of Ken Sim handing $13.4 million worth of tickets to his friends.

But the contrast is nevertheless devastating.

Ken SIm can find millions for hospitality packages whose resale prospects remain commercially confidential. Yet when the subject is installing physical barriers on a bridge where people have repeatedly died, ABC Vancouver’s City Hall answer is delay, cost-sharing and another study.

What kind of municipal government does that, makes those choices?

The health community across Metro Vancouver has been remarkably blunt.

Dr. Brandon Yau, Medical Health Officer with Vancouver Coastal Health, told Vancouver City Council that “suicide deaths from this bridge are preventable tragedies.” He described means prevention as an “established, evidence-based approach” and called the barriers “critical, life-saving infrastructure.”

The statistics are chilling.

The Crisis Centre says Granville Bridge has averaged approximately 2.6 suicide deaths a year. Since 2019, there have been more than 20 incidents involving people in distress on the bridge.

And there is something else City Hall cannot plausibly claim it does not know.

Suicide prevention barriers were installed on the Burrard Street Bridge in 2017. There have been no known deaths on the Burrard Street Bridge since the barriers were erected.

Since barriers were installed on the Burrard Street Bridge in 2017, there have been no known suicide deaths. Similar means-prevention fencing was installed on the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in 2015, with the same striking result.

Suicide prevention barriers were installed on the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, by the province, in 2015. There have been no deaths on the bridge since the barriers were erected.

Vancouver’s own 2024 Council documentation cited research finding that physical barriers at bridges are associated with a 93% reduction in suicide deaths.

Do the arithmetic.

If Granville Bridge continues to average roughly 2.6 suicide deaths annually, a reduction of that magnitude would translate into the potential prevention of approximately 2.4 deaths per year. Over a decade, that is roughly 24 lives.

Nobody can honestly promise that exactly 24 people would be saved.

Suicide prevention statistics do not work that way. But neither can anyone honestly pretend that the potential lifesaving effect is trivial.

This is not theoretical.

In May, a woman died after a 9-hour standoff on the Granville Bridge.

Police told media at the time, officers spent several hours trying to communicate with the woman after reports she was standing outside the bridge railing Tuesday afternoon, May 14th. She later fell from the bridge just after midnight.

Mental health advocates say the death was preventable, stepping up their campaign to have governments fund safety barriers for the bridge.

According to Vancouver Police, there were 21 incidents involving people at risk of jumping from the bridge in 2024, followed by 25 more in 2025.

Advocates also point out there have reportedly been no deaths by suicide from Burrard Street Bridge since protective fencing was installed there in 2017.

The Independent Investigations Office launched an incident investigation.

The Crisis Centre subsequently wrote to Mayor Sim and Vancouver Council that the death was preventable — and that the suffering endured by her family, first responders, nearby residents and witnesses was preventable as well.

Stacy Ashton, executive director of the Crisis Centre, has repeatedly emphasized the fundamental principle behind bridge barriers: they create time.

A person in suicidal crisis may not be making a settled, rational decision about the rest of their life. A barrier interrupts the crisis. It creates an opportunity for intervention. It gives police, firefighters, paramedics, crisis workers or members of the public time to reach the person.

Ashton put the issue bluntly:

“The importance of a suicide bridge barrier is that we know that they work and that they save lives.”

That should have been enough.

Apparently, it wasn’t.

The argument from Ken Sim’s City Hall is that the project needs more design work, that the total construction cost has not yet been confirmed and that senior governments should contribute. Those are legitimate administrative considerations.

In June, Council voted unanimously, reaffirming its commitment to barriers, asking staff to accelerate design, costing and discussions with Ottawa and Victoria.

But that only makes the March decision all that more difficult to understand.

The City of Vancouver has already spent $300,000 on conceptual design and costing. Council itself had acknowledged the urgency. The health community had supplied the evidence. The Burrard Street Bridge had supplied the real-world proof.

And still, actual construction funding was removed.

Meanwhile, Vancouver’s FIFA operation paid millions for hospitality packages.

This is where the issue ceases to be merely about infrastructure.

It becomes a question of what Ken Sims’ City Hall considers essential.

A barrier that may prevent a Vancouver resident from dying is not a luxury.

It is not an amenity.

It is not an optional beautification project.

It is public safety.

The Crisis Centre has described suicide-prevention barriers as “lifesaving.”

That is precisely what they are.

Mayor Ken Sim’s ABC administration has spent much of its political life talking about public safety. It has made public safety a central theme of its political messaging. Public safety must mean more than policing, bylaws and political slogans.

It must also mean protecting people at their most vulnerable.

A Vancouver municipal government that can find millions for the World Cup but cannot immediately find the money necessary to protect people at a known suicide hotspot has a serious problem with priorities.

This is not an argument against FIFA.

It is an argument against an inhumane municipal government with skewed priorities that appears to understand urgency when the subject is a global sporting spectacle, but discovers fiscal caution when the subject is preventing suicide.

The people contemplating suicide on Granville Bridge do not have corporate sponsors. They do not sit in hospitality suites. They do not buy VIP packages.

They are human beings in crisis.

Their families are human beings.

The firefighters and police officers rescuing vulnerable lives are human beings.

The residents watching these tragedies unfold nearby are human beings.

And they, we all, deserve a government that understands that saving even one life is worth more than any hospitality package, and any political spectacle.

Mayor Ken Sim likes to talk about Vancouver becoming a world-class city.

A world-class city is not measured by how many FIFA suites it can afford.

It is measured by how it treats people when they are most vulnerable.

On the Granville Street Bridge, Vancouver has known what needs to be done.

The evidence is overwhelming.

The health professionals have spoken.

The Crisis Centre has spoken.

The families have spoken.

The bridge itself has spoken, through the lives already lost.

Vancouver City Hall needs to listen. But will City Hall listen if Ken Sim is re-elected with a majority ABC Vancouver administration?

The question is no longer whether barriers can save lives.

The question is how many more Vancouverites must die before Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver administration decide that saving them is an urgent enough priority for them to act?

Perhaps the answer is to …

#VanPoli | The Villages Plan | An Open Letter to Vancouver City Council

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Open letter to Vancouver City Council on the “Villages Plan”
Patrick Condon, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia
UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan

Dear Mayor and Council,

I write to challenge key elements of Vancouver’s Villages Plan Programme.

Together with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City is now granting private owners of more than 80,000 parcels the right to build roughly 700,000 new housing units.

This represents enough capacity to house an extra 1.4 million people — more than double Vancouver’s current population of 670,000.

At today’s 1% annual population growth rate, this single decision delivers over 100 years of future housing supply. Yet even the projects already in the approval pipeline (roughly 78,000 units) would satisfy 30 years of trend growth.

Contrary to this city’s long standing policies for new density approvals, this massive landowner entitlement is being provided free of charge, with no expectation of payment for these new land rights.

These land rights are worth many billions of dollars.

The City is giving them away for free in the hope that this will somehow make housing more affordable.

This is an odd notion for our planners to hold. If adding hundreds of thousands of new units to existing neighbourhoods truly lowered prices, Vancouver would have North America’s cheapest housing.

It has North America’s most expensive housing. (charts below)

It defies logic to expect an “unleashing of the housing market” — the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan — to produce affordable housing when we have spent decades trying to do just that. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock since the 1960s, all within a city where virtually every private parcel was in urban use. This is a higher percentage increase of infill development than that of any other North American centre city. If adding housing to existing city districts was the sure fire path to affordability we would have seen positive results by now.

Based on this evidence, it is clear: if affordability is the main justification for this plan, it obviously fails the test.

Massively over-zoning a city above reasonable expectations for population growth serves little purpose. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that only “restrictive zoning” stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t.

The claim is false.

On the contrary, if any city proves that it is possible to use zoning as a positive public policy tool, it is the City of Vancouver. We tripled housing units city-wide. No other centre city did that — an unheard-of achievement.

While this sadly did not make the city more affordable, as we had hoped, it did make the city better. Much better.

How was this 200 percent growth accomplished? By working with residents, not against them. Community planning with local communities was the means to this achievement. Planning with communities was not an impediment, as some now claim. It was the democratic path to a better city.

But sadly it is now obvious that our decades-long effort to encourage the housing market, in the hope that housing would stay affordable, has failed us. Given this evidence, it seems foolish to upzone so aggressively, hoping against hope that, in 30 or 40 years, housing will be more affordable.

Achieving durable affordability much sooner than this requires a major change in direction. We don’t lack housing; we lack affordable housing. Given this fact, we should follow a path that other similar cities have charted — one where the bulk of new housing built is affordable to average wage earners. This can be done by reviving the Vancouver tradition of building non-market housing at scale, largely financed through “land lift” taxes as applied in Yaletown.

Our own internationally famous False Creek South serves as a storied precedent. Service workers to business owners have found homes in that lovely, self-sustaining community.

The pattern is obvious. Reuse it.

Unfortunately, the Villages Plan moves us in exactly the wrong direction. It virtually rules out any form of land value capture tax, based on the mistaken fear that it would raise home prices. It won’t — and it can’t.

A properly designed land-lift tax simply reduces the inflated “land price residual” that now funnels unearned speculative windfalls into private pockets. A properly designed “land lift” tax channels those gains into public benefit — without increasing the price buyers ultimately pay.

I urge you to revise these plans by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in a highly collaborative, bottom-up, neighbourhood-focused planning process. One that might arrive at much stronger inclusionary zoning requirements.

The people of Vancouver would rally behind such plans — plans that ensure that their sons and daughters, and the workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home.

Do not pass this plan.

Let us turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here.

Yours truly,

Professor Emeritus Patrick M. Condon
University of British Columbia

More voices weigh in on ABC Vancouver’s Villages Plan development proposal

Steve Jedreicich — principal of Vancouver’s SJ Development Ltd., brings over 30 years of local urban planning and real estate consulting experience to the housing discussion —  weighs in on ABC Vancouver’s contentious Villages Plan proposal.

WBN News Vancouver publisher Karalee Greer’s published article on the impact of the Villages Plan development proposal currently before Vancouver City Council, in particular its impact on Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. At present, well more than 1000 speakers are set to address the controversial Villages Plan proposal, in meetings that thus far have lasted well into the night at Council.

Randy Helten and Steve Bohus, the good, hard working, dedicated folks behind the informative CityHallWatch website offer a backgrounder on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal, suggesting the plan “was born in the USA.” CityHallWatch offers six more Villages Plan articles the site published in the months of June and July. Click on the multi-coloured links below to access the articles.

Yes, there are even more Villages Plan articles available to you.

As is his wont — and thank goodness for that — The Daily Hive’s well-respected, incredibly hard working urban affairs reporter Kenneth Chan, early in July, published a thorough and well-researched article on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal.

Well worth a read.

#SaveOurParkBoard | Ken Sim / ABC Vancouver Lies

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The quite barking mad Dr. Penny Janet Drury Ballem, Vancouver City Manager, 2008 – 2015

In 2014, Dr. Penny Ballem, the power mad, often disagreeable and fiscally irresponsible City Manager — moving her office from City Hall’s 3rd floor, in favour of a multi-million dollar renovation of the “closed” 5th & 6th floors at The Hall, giving her mightily expanded staff a new home — Dr. Ballem, hired by the Vision Vancouver administration in 2008 to impose their political and administrative agenda, found herself “fed up” with the operation of the Vancouver Park Board, had enough with what she termed their “tomfoolery”, their inefficiency and “spendthrift ways”.

All this after Vision Vancouver slashed $30 million from the Park Board budget.

Dr. Ballem’s choleric rage about Park Board occurred even in spite of the fact that, in 2010, she had installed Malcolm Bromley as her Park Board General Manager, in unprecedented fashion making Bromley a “city employee”, with direct reporting responsibility to the Office of the City Manager. Read, to her: Dr. Penny Ballem.

Less than a year into her tenure, it was not enough that Dr. Ballem “retired” well-respected, longtime Park Board General Manager Susan Mundick, Dr. Ballem also “relieved” the employment of several other invaluable, longtime, senior city staff.

Dr. Ballem, however, wanted more, much more.

Dr. Ballem wanted  complete and utter control of the Vancouver Park Board.

In late 2014, Dr. Ballem had the Park Board led by Chairperson Aaron Jasper move a motion at the Park Board table that would turn over operational responsibility for Park Board to the City, as a “necessary cost-saving measure and rationalization” of the operation of Park Board. From that day forward the City would be responsible for all Park Board facility maintenance, garbage collection and recycling.

“When I was first elected as a Park Board Commissioner in 2011,” John Coupar recently told VanRamblings, “if there was a maintenance issue that needed tending to, through the Chair I could have her or him raise the issue that needed remedy, which “repair” was always responded to quickly and efficiently.


John Coupar, former Vancouver Park Board Chairperson, and Park Board Commissioner

When I became Chairperson in late 2014, I was disappointed to learn that when requests for maintenance made through Board General Manager Malcolm Bromley were forwarded to the City, the City maintenance department often took weeks or months to remediate an issue, if that concern was ever remediated at all.”


Mayor Ken Sim announces pending elimination of an elected Vancouver Park Board (Ben Nelms/CBC)

Since it was created in 1889, the Vancouver Park Board has been a source of discussion and division. But the decision by Mayor Ken Sim to try and abolish the 133-year-old elected body could make its final chapter its most dramatic.

“We are going to take the long overdue step that will ensure our parks and recreation facilities will serve our communities to their fullest potential, in the process saving taxpayers millions of dollars in Park Board operation costs” Sim told those gathered for a press conference Wednesday morning, December 6, 2023.

“I’m a lean-certified black belt, I understand workflow,” said Sim in response to a question about how much the city would save in costs, in a reference that left the media who’d gathered for the announcement flummoxed.

Mayor Ken Sim has yet to explain where the “millions of dollars in savings” by eliminating an elected Park Board will be derived.

In point of fact, top-voted ABC Vancouver City Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung — a former Park Board Chairperson — could easily have informed the Mayor that his statement was so much codswallop, that the City had long ago assumed fiscal responsibility for the operation and maintenance of the Vancouver Park Board.

“Bad enough that the Mayor misled the public when, at his announcement proposing to abolish the elected Park Board, he stated that there would be millions in savings to be had. Clearly, an untruth,” former Vancouver City Councillor and Park Board Commissioner Michael Wiebe recently told VanRamblings.


Michael Wiebe, former Vancouver City Councillor, and Vancouver Park Board Commissioner

“When I met with Mayor-elect Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver founder Peter Armstrong in the Mayor’s office soon after the 2022 election, I was assured by both of their full and unadulterated support for an independent Park Board. Clearly, the commitment they made to me the day we met, and to a public who voted for them, was a lie.”


Ken Sim. “So yeah, whaddya want to make of it, eh? Don’t like what I’m doin’? Too effin bad.“

On the day Mayor Ken Sim made the announcement that it was his intention to eliminate an elected Park Board in the City of Vancouver, he was clear that amid concerns being voiced that getting rid of the Vancouver Park Board could mean a loss of prized park land in the city, on his watch that was not going to happen.

“I want to be very clear: as long as I’m mayor, parks will always be parks in the City of Vancouver,” Mayor Sim told CityNews in an interview on Friday, December 15, 2023.

Of course, Mayor Sim made no mention that of Vancouver’s 242 parks, only 142 are designated as parks, leaving the remaining “green space” open for development.

Under the current system, a two-thirds majority vote on Council and Park Board is required to remove any parks from the city’s inventory.

Sim told CityNews that he’s going to bring in new protections for green spaces.

“We’re going to change it so it has to be unanimous in the chamber, so all 10 Councillors and mayor of the day have to be in favour, plus it would go to referendum,” Sim said.

All of which begs several questions.

Given that ABC Vancouver candidate for office Ken Sim misled the voting public on a commitment he made during the 2022 Vancouver municipal election that …

  • A Ken Sim-led civic administration would strengthen and support an independent, elected Park Board;
  • Given that a newly-elected Mayor Sim employed as partial rationale for the 10.7% property tax increase he announced in December 2022, in stating that “we felt we had to restore funding to and support our Vancouver Park Board;”
  • Given that Mayor Sim misled the public when he stated that there were “millions to be saved” in eliminating an independent, elected Park Board, when such is clearly not the case; and …
  • Given that Ken Sim boldfacedly misled former Vancouver Park Board Commissioner and City Councillor Michael Wiebe —  not to mention current Park Board Commissioners Scott Jensen, Brennan Bastyovanszky and Laura Christensen when they ran under the ABC Vancouver banner as Park Board candidates —  when he stated to Mr. Wiebe and his own party’s candidates for Park Board his unvarnished and ongoing support for an independent, elected Vancouver Park Board …

Can Mayor Ken Sim be believed when he makes the pronouncement that park land will not be sold off on his watch?

And, further, that any talk of development of green spaces should such come to pass would require the unanimous consent of all 10 Vancouver City Councillors?