Three more candidates have joined the race to fill two vacant seats on Vancouver city council.
Sean Orr was nominated Sunday by COPE while former councillor Colleen Hardwick and community organizer Theodore Abbott got the nod Saturday from TEAM for a Livable Vancouver at the party’s nomination meeting.
The candidates join Lucy Maloney of OneCity of Vancouver, who was the first person to publicly declare she is campaigning to win one of the seats on the 11-member council. The byelection is April 5.
In a news release, COPE described Orr as a housing activist and writer.
“Billionaires around the world are buying politicians and elections to make the government work for them instead of us,” Orr said.
“Where billionaires have too much power, we have climate disasters, rising homelessness and housing gets more and more expensive. Vancouver doesn’t have to be this way.”
Orr ran as a Vote Socialist council candidate in the October 2022 general election, where he won 13,744 votes. The release said Orr has spent his life “in the trenches of the real world — scrubbing dishes, landscaping and working to pay the bills.”
“Ken Sim has shown us whose side he's on — the billionaires like Chip Wilson who fund his campaigns,” said COPE co-chair Shawn Vulliez. “We need someone to speak truth to power and expose them. Sean Orr is the person for the job.”
Theodore Abbott
Hardwick hopes to return to city hall after serving from 2018 to 2022 as a councillor. She was elected in 2018 with the NPA, but left the party late in the term to help found TEAM for a Livable Vancouver in 2021.
Hardwick was the party’s mayoral candidate in 2022, and finished third with 16,769 votes behind Kennedy Stewart and Sim, whose ABC Vancouver team won a majority on council. Hardwick is responsible for Vancouver having an independent auditor general.
Tenant protections
Abbott is described on TEAM’s website as a fourth-generation Vancouverite “with a deep commitment to the city and its people.” As a community organizer and urban researcher, he has extensive experience working alongside residents to push back against policies that reduce Vancouver’s livability, the website said.
“His academic work — focused on urbanization, housing policy, land use and social change — has been complemented by hands-on experience advocating for tenant protections, affordability and stronger neighbourhood representation,” said the website, noting Abbott is the host of a podcast called On Site Report, which explores urban issues in Vancouver.
Green Party nomination meeting Feb. 5
Meanwhile, the Green Party of Vancouver is scheduled to hold its nomination meeting Wednesday, two days before the party hosts an event to honour Adriane Carr, who resigned from council in January after serving 14 years.
A byelection has become necessary because OneCity’s Christine Boyle resigned in December after winning a seat in the fall provincial election with the NDP in Vancouver-Little Mountain.
Boyle is now the Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation. Carr’s resignation has opened up another vacant seat at city hall, which is dominated by Sim and his seven ABC Vancouver colleagues.
The Greens, COPE and OneCity have agreed to run one candidate each in the byelection so not to split votes among left-of-centre voters. ABC Vancouver has promised to run two candidates, but has yet to announce anyone.
Currently, Pete Fry, a Green Party member, is council’s only non-ABC Vancouver councillor.
