Video provided courtesy of Bob Mackin / The Breaker News.
The information below is excerpted from an article by Nathan Caddell — son of Ian, one of VanRamblings’ best friends dating back to 1970, through until Ian’s untimely passing in 2012 at 63 years of age, far, far too young for him to leave the planet — the article published in 2023 in BC Business.
Kareem Allam was born in Vancouver to immigrants from Cairo in 1979. He spent a few years back and forth between Canada and Egypt before his family permanently moved to Richmond. After high school, he studied history at Simon Fraser University, where he found himself thrown into the political fray as a young man.
In 2005, Kareem played a pivotal role in helping Dianne Watts get elected as Mayor of Surrey, a popular and populist Mayor, and perhaps Surrey’s best Mayor ever. After that mayoral election win in 2005, Kareem worked for a number of organizations, including Terasen Gas (now FortisBC), the Vancouver Board of Trade and Fraser Health.
In 2011, Kareem took on the task of serving as Kevin Falcon’s deputy campaign manager for a BC Liberal leadership campaign in which Falcon narrowly lost to Christy Clark. “That was a bit gutting,” he recalls, noting that it was his first big loss.
About 10 years later — after Allam had spent some more years working at the aforementioned organizations as well as some time in Indigenous relations, Falcon called again. Andrew Wilkinson had just stepped down as leader of the BC Liberals after the party was trounced by the BC NDP.
“I think the party really didn’t do as well with Andrew as the leader — there was definitely a lot of intellectual capacity there, Andrew is brilliant,” says Allam. “But that ability to sort of connect was lost, which people in the party took for granted. That was what Christy [Clark] was really good at — one-on-one, she’ll make you feel like the most important person in the world.”
There was also what Allam refers to as a policy drift within the party, and he was worried that the caucus didn’t look or act like the rest of the province.
“The discussions I had with Kevin went right up the start of the race,” he remembers. “I’m like, Okay, if you run, we’ll put together a good team, we’ll win. The question is what’s going to happen next. Are you prepared for that with your family and everything?”
So, very quickly, I reached out and built the most diverse team I had ever been part of.
We wanted to signal where the party wanted to go. If you watch his campaign videos, he’s walking across rainbow crosswalks, talking about how his values haven’t changed, but his perspective has.
“It was the remaking of the image. I think it appealed to the party — let’s become younger, more urban, more progressive. It resonated in the Chinese and South Asian communities, too.”
Many Vancouverites only first heard of Kareem Allam’s name in the aftermath of the 2022 Vancouver municipal election, but current City of Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim had actually tried to recruit him for his first shot at the mayor’s chair in 2018.
“Ken asked me to run his campaign three times, I said no three times,” says Allam. “I was at a point in my career where I just wasn’t ready to take it on.” He also had his worries about the NPA: “The party had drifted to the right, and that’s just not where I or Vancouver voters were and will never be.”
In 2022, with three of the former NPA councillors joining Sim under a new party banner ABC, or A Better City — some of Sim’s closest friends, who had helped on the Falcon campaign, started calling Allam. “I was like, No guys, I’m really burnt out,” he says with what can only be described as a perpetually exhausted laugh.
Living downtown, the “sense of urban decay” encouraged Allam to eventually take on the job.
“Just starting to see people in mental health distress on the street,” says Allam. “A lot more needles, excrement, windows being shattered, all signs of a mental health crisis. Because of my time at Fraser Health, I recognized immediately what the solution was: Car 87, a mental health programme run by Coastal Health and the Vancouver Police Department that partners police officers with mental health nurses. These programmes work, there’s no doubt they work. So I went, Okay, I’m going to take this campaign on and this is what I’m going to bring to the city—100 cops, 100 mental health nurses.”
There were also key promises around housing permitting and child care.
“We played it dead centre in terms of ideology,” says Allam. “At least that’s what we tried to do. We acknowledged immediately that nine of the 11 Vancouver ridings are NDP ridings. If we didn’t get people who voted for John Horgan, no way were we going to win the election … We won almost the entire city, we won Oppenheimer Park, which nobody predicted.”
Asked whether there’s one thing that binds his campaigns together, Allam cites his status as a perceived outsider.
“This is a space that’s dominated by rich white people from the west side,” he says. “When I started in politics in the early 2000s, Arabs weren’t the most popular people. When some of the bigger campaigns were getting pulled together, they’d go, What are we going to do with Kareem, oh, you can manage the ethnics. I made the decision early on that, okay, I will do that. I built great relationships with the South Asian and Chinese communities… You want me to be in charge of the ethnics, okay great, now the ethnics are in charge of you.”
Vancouver Liberals, Kareem Allam have turned out a respectable crowd for his party/campaign announcement re running for mayor. Bill Reid gallery downtown pic.twitter.com/byzw0bZFax
— Frances Bula (@fabulavancouver) October 26, 2025
Vancouver Liberals Mayoral candidate Kareem Allam in his own words.
Kareem Allam is a typical Vancouver story. Parents who immigrated to Canada, a career in public service and policy, and a belief in our ability to make our communities better.
Watch part 1: pic.twitter.com/sLy1UpJIbb— Vancouver Liberals (@vanliberals) October 16, 2025
