In 2018, Ken Sim ran for Mayor under the NPA (Non-Partisan Association) banner, securing 48,748 votes, or 28.16% of the vote, barely losing his bid to become Vancouver’s political leader to former Burnaby South NDP MP, Kennedy Stewart, who won his first bid for civic office with 28.71% of the vote, with 49,705 ballots cast in his favour, achieving a winning status with only a bare 975 vote plurality.
As is often said, every vote counts.
Ken Sim is back again to run for the Mayor’s office in 2022, this time as the Mayoralty candidate for ABC (A Better City), a political party created a year ago, just in time for 2022’s Vancouver civic election. VanRamblings will write later about ABC, and the shenanigans that went into cause Mr. Sim to “switch” parties.
VanRamblings will make two statements at the outset of today’s post …
- The election of Ken Sim as Vancouver’s next Mayor, supported by a majority ABC Council contingent would result in an unrecoverable nightmare scenario for Vancouverites that would destroy our beloved hometown, once and for all;
- It is probable that Ken Sim believes he means well for our city. What we write today should not be seen as a personal “attack” on Mr. Sim, but rather a recording of why we believe he is unfit to become Vancouver’s next Mayor..
Next month, when we write about ABC, VanRamblings will explain our nightmare scenario comment, made directly above.
Last month, there was a secret meeting held at the Terminal City Club, Vancouver’s première downtown business club, or as Vancouver Magazine describes it …
“Like a pedigreed version of Snoopy’s doghouse: miraculously bigger on the inside than the out, with a fitness centre and a 25-metre mountain-gazing pool, boutique hotel, billiards room, 9 banquet rooms, 3 restaurants, the place where the hoi polloi go to dine and schmooze with their other rich folks contemporaries. The meet and greet club, where decisions that impact on the lives of all Vancouverites take place, hidden behind closed doors.”
… wherein our city’s wealthy elite had asked ABC founder and funder Peter Armstrong (former, longtime President of the NPA, and owner of the Rocky Mountaineer railroad company) to bring Ken Sim along in order that they might “interview / vet” him respecting his adequacy, or lack thereof, to become Vancouver’s next Mayor. At this point in time, these wealthy Vancouverites had “parked” their campaign-supporting monies. Peter Armstrong hoped that the meeting would result in them both opening their hearts and their pocket books.
Alas, it was simply not meant to be.
After the hour long meeting, Ken Sim was dismissed from the room where he’d been vetted, with Peter Armstrong staying behind to hear the reply of the “club”.
Here’s what the Terminal City power brokers had to say to Mr. Armstrong …
“Let’s get straight to the point, Peter. Where’d you find this guy? Yes, yes, we know that he ran for office in 2018, but did he learn nothing from his campaign in 2018? This guy couldn’t manage a popsicle stand, never mind a city with more than a half million people. Rarely has it been our displeasure to interview a candidate for office who is as inept, and clearly unqualified, as Mr. Sim. Suffice to say, there’ll be no money from us. We know that we’re not going to support that anti-development cretin, Colleen Hardwick. I suppose we’ll now have to turn our attention to Kennedy Stewart, who would seem the best bet, or perhaps the NPA’s John Coupar, or that Mark Marissen guy. You may leave now, Peter. You’ve wasted enough of our time.”
Peter Armstrong has more than enough wealth to fund Ken Sim’s bid to become Mayor of our city, and get a good number of ABC candidates elected to office.
Even so.
In May of this year, at a rally held at Vancouver City Hall to oppose implementation of the Broadway Plan, long the political eminence gris of right-of-centre politics in our city, Jolene came up to us and grabbed our right arm to pull us away from the crowd, because she had “things” she wanted to tell VanRamblings. To wit …
“Recently, I had a meeting with Ken Sim who, as you know, is running as ABC’s Mayoral candidate. Given the disarray the NPA currently finds itself in, despite how much I like John Coupar, I’ve set about to meet with each of the five Mayoral candidates, to determine which campaign I’ll support with my time and money.
I came out of that meeting disillusioned.
All Ken could talk about was how he wanted to ‘run the city like a business’. He had no conception of what would be required of him as Mayor, knew the names of none of the city’s senior staff, nor the various departments within City Hall, had nothing to say about the arts, homelessness, affordable housing, crime and public safety, or any other issue of importance to voters. All he kept harping on was, ‘I’m going to run this city like a business’. Not without my support, he won’t.”
In the interest of fairness, perhaps now is the time for VanRamblings to write …
In the 2018 election, we attended the S.U.C.C.E.S.S all candidates meeting in Chinatown, where then NPA (Non Partisan Association) Mayoral candidate Ken Sim was a featured speaker. When Mr. Sim got up to speak, he spoke extemporaneously and told the one hundred and fifty or so that had gathered, about his experience as an Asian man living in the City of Vancouver, the number of times he’d had racist epithets hurled at him, and how that had influenced him and how it has affected the conduct of his life, and as a citizen and husband and father. Ken Sim’s speech was humane, authentic and moving, his words landing with a troubled fidelity.
VanRamblings recorded that speech as a Facebook Live video, and had intended on returning home to convert the video for upload to YouTube, and placement on VanRamblings — but, alas, the video disappeared into the ether, seconds after we attempted to publish the video on our Facebook page. There are very few days that go by when we fail to remember the tragedy of how much the loss of that video has meant to us. We would have loved to share that video in 2022.
None of what is written on VanRamblings today is meant as a personal attack on Mr. Sim’s character or integrity. Rather, it is to express VanRamblings’ concern that Ken Sim is unfit to become Vancouver’s next Mayor, that he lacks a fundamental understanding of civic governance and how the city operates, and although it might be said the he “could learn on the job,” we’ve had enough of that this term.
In 2022, and in this election cycle, we despair for our city, for the homeless that have taken shelter along East Hastings street, for all the renters and condo owners who have been denied ready access to our parks system because they’ve been turned over by our current Park Board to house those same homeless persons, we despair as to what will be wrought should the egregiously soul-and-city destroying Broadway Plan or the neighbourhood-destroying Vancouver Plan be implemented post the October 15th election.
We despair for those who cannot find affordable housing in our city, we despair for those who have been the victims of an ever burgeoning crime wave that has come to the fore in this post pandemic time — as if those who would mean us harm are trying to make up for lost time — and for all of those beleaguered citizens who have been victim to one of the hundreds of unprovoked attacks on their persons, we despair for all those who have had to leave Vancouver because it simply too damned expensive to maintain any kind of reasonable life in our city.
VanRamblings does not believe that Ken Sim has the answers to the the myriad issues that plague our city, nor even knows what those issues are, or that he has the tools and the skills to make the kinds of changes we need to make our city a more livable city for all. We would have much preferred that sitting ABC City Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung was the competent, hard-working, skilled, innovative, convention-destroying Mayoral champion our city so desperately needs in 2022.
