Ken Sim Has a Shedding Problem

Kareem Allam used to believe in Ken Sim.

The veteran political strategist managed the first-term Vancouver mayor’s ABC party campaign. Remember the 100 cops, 100 nurses pledge? That was Allam’s idea. When it worked like gangbusters and Sim became the first Vancouver mayoral candidate in more than 40 years to unseat the incumbent, Allam stayed on as his first chief of staff.

Less than four months later, Allam left the job — abruptly fired, he said, when public allegations of a coverup involving his boss were sourced back to him. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this public divorce, which is headed to court. Sim has since filed a defamation suit against not only Allam, but Vancouver real estate investor Alex G. Tsakumis.

Allam, meanwhile, has become one of Mayor Sim’s most outspoken critics.

“I've probably done somewhere in the neighbourhood of 150 interviews, 200 in the last 2 1/2 years,” Allam told the Tyee. “I've been very critical. I was opposed to the decampment [on East Hastings]. I've been opposed to getting rid of the renters’ office. I was opposed to him getting rid of the integrity commissioner while he was under investigation from the integrity commissioner.”

“I don't believe that he's taking the city in the right direction,” Allam said, “and I don't think that the things that he's delivering on are what Vancouverites wanted in 2022 when they cast their ballots for him.”

Allam believed in Ken Sim back then, spearheading Sim’s historic campaign. It was a landslide, with Sim winning 50 per cent of the vote and delivering ABC supermajorities to council, the park board and even the Vancouver School Board.

“But that's not the Ken that's shown up,” he said. “I don't know what happened, but the person that I was working for and the person who's governing the city are two very different people.”

Now Allam is out to unseat Sim himself.

“I've never really had the ambition to run for office. I spent the bulk of my career in public service,” Allam said. “I see this as a different kind of public service. In a nutshell: I want the job. I think I can do a better job.”

Last month, the former chief of staff filed with Elections BC, becoming Sim’s first official challenger. The early start should give him time to build name recognition among those who aren’t as plugged in to municipal politics and, hopefully, further unravel his personal brand from the mayor he regrets having worked to elect.

This may prove difficult. Allam is anti-Sim, clearly, but otherwise hard to define. His resumé suggests a lifelong Conservative — prior to Sim, Allam worked for Erin O’Toole’s federal Tory leadership campaign and managed Kevin Falcon’s successful leadership bid for the BC Liberal Party — but he voted for the BC NDP in 2024, troubled, he told The Tyee in October, by the Conservative Party of BC’s embrace of “Trump politics.”

“Kareem has an interesting track record, politically,” said former Vancouver councillor Geoff Meggs, “and he’s got a lot of success in that track record.... He's not to be trifled with.”

But is he to be trusted?

“Well, he will never be trusted again on the right side of the spectrum, and even New Democrats who know that he endorsed David Eby last fall may distrust him because of his past,” Meggs said. “So it's a bit of a double whammy.”

Allam floated a run with OneCity, Vancouver’s left-leaning party. That never seemed likely. He isn’t a leftist. The veteran campaign strategist has since launched a brand new political party, the Vancouver Liberals, telling the Vancouver Sun that he hopes to build a coalition consisting of “pure centre, pure left and even centre right” figures, including former ABC elected officials.

The cull is coming from inside the house

There are, in fact, quite a few ex-Sim allies available to recruit.

Of the six park board commissioners elected under the ABC banner, three have left the party, choosing to sit as Independents in the aftermath of Sim’s unexpected attempt to abolish the board. Last summer, Vancouver School Board chair Victoria Jung resigned from the ABC party amid Sim’s attempt to suspend the integrity commissioner.

"Recent events questioning the office of the Vancouver Integrity Commissioner have given me pause to reflect on my core values," she said in a statement.

In January, the Green Party of Vancouver’s Adriane Carr resigned from her seat on council after 14 years, citing general disillusionment not only with civic politics but with Sim himself.

“I’ve come to the conclusion on the issues that really drive me, that drove me to run for office and have been predominant issues in my life,” Carr said, “I can’t make much progress.”

“In addition, I have lost trust and confidence in the mayor, in my opinion. Some of his actions do not genuinely mesh with his mantra that we are all one team.”

One month later, Coun. Rebecca Bligh was kicked out of ABC’s caucus. The party said she was no longer a core fit. Bligh all but confirmed this herself, saying Sim had “abandoned the core principles” that drew her to the party in the first place. In two years under Sim, the council’s ABC supermajority has dwindled to one measly vote.

It’s poor team management, said Mo Amir, political pundit and host of CHEK TV’s This Is Vancolour.

“This is a party that has created a lot of bad taste in their own supporters. I would actually wonder who supports Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver at this point,” he said.

“I don't think the business community does. I think they have their frustrations. Certainly, the activists in Vancouver — whether that's transit activists, environmental activists, Downtown Eastside activists — are not happy with him. I don't think property owners are particularly happy, given that their property taxes have gone up and yet services still seem to be struggling, garbage isn't being picked up.

“There's still a lot of issues in the city that I don't think have been addressed as promised by Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim.”

The Tyee reached out to the mayor’s office and invited response to such criticisms but did not hear back by deadline.

A cartoon mayor?

On their own, interpersonal issues are easy enough to explain away or even reframe as a plus. Maybe the mayor is too committed to fixing Vancouver. Too principled. Too dedicated. Too focused on the job at hand to mollycoddle city hall’s progressive wing, or something. But a steady stream of memes on social media undercut those interpretations.

“It's one thing to be disliked as a politician,” said Amir. “Every politician is going to be disliked by, you know, half the population. But it’s another thing to be seen as a joke.”

A joke? Amir said Sim invited ridicule, for example, the time he took his pants off in front of a reporter there to interview him. Or when he had himself photographed hoisting a WWE Championship belt over his head. Or when Sim’s idea of swagger was to shotgun beer — er, actually it was vodka cream soda — with ABC Coun. Mike Klassen at a neighbourhood festival. The zingers reached a crescendo when he showed up to represent the city on Remembrance Day wearing white sneakers and a puffy coat.

“Vancouverites elected a mayor, not Jay-Z,” is the punchline offered by Allam.

“There's a lot of things where he comes off as kind of a joke,” giving people “good reason” to scoff at him, said Amir. “And if there isn't good reason, I would ask the mayor what he thinks he's actually accomplished in [2 1/2] years of being in office.”

People might cut Sim slack, even find some of his odd moments funny or charming, Amir said, if Sim was perceived to be doing the things he said he would do.

“There was a lot of enthusiasm when he was swept into office, and there just has been virtually no delivery on any of those promises, or not even a sign that progress is being made on any of those promises, aside from increasing funding to the Vancouver Police Department.”

Meggs echoed this assessment.

Sim “promised a new and more quiet way to get the city back on track, even give it some swagger,” he said, “and we don't see any of that.... He's not been able to convince people of his ability to do much of anything to put things in a positive direction.”

So far, said Meggs, Sim has seemed like “somebody who was not having fun at the job and didn't care if people knew it. So why would they rally behind him?”

In other words, it’s hard to take Sim seriously when he hasn’t seemed to take the job all that seriously. According to a Postmedia review, since being elected in October 2022, Sim has missed 36 per cent of council votes, more than double the rate of his two predecessors. He’s missed 75 per cent of Metro Vancouver board and committee meetings, and five of the six meetings of his own park board transition team.

“Where is our mayor on these issues?” Allam asked. “Maybe he's just doing pull-ups, I don't know.”

“I've worked for ministers. I've worked for MPs. I've worked for all three levels of government, worked on Parliament Hill. I've never [seen] a politician put a chin-up bar or a Peloton bike or any kind of exercise equipment in their office,” he said. “The job of mayor is actually real work, and Vancouverites deserve a mayor that's going to walk into city hall every morning and ask one simple question: How am I going to make things better? Not: How can I make my biceps stronger?”

‘Batten down the hatches’

For what it’s worth, Mayor Sim’s controversial city hall gym has been dismantled, per a recent CBC report. But so has his once formidable centre-right coalition. His former campaign manager is after his job. Bligh, his ex-ABC party colleague, may be too.

“Nothing’s off the table,” Bligh said last month when asked about a run for mayor, adding that Vancouverites “want to feel confident in their government” and “proud of the leadership in the city.” Current ABC member Sarah Kirby-Yung has shown signs of dissatisfaction, and notable centre-right figures Sim failed to win over like Colleen Hardwick and George Affleck have been rumoured, at times, to be mulling a challenge.

Even Kennedy Stewart, the man Sim unseated in 2022, is a source of speculation. There’s blood in the water.

All told, Mayor Sim may still win re-election. A lot could change in the next 18 months, especially as Sim appears more self-aware these days. Not only has he put the boardroom back the way it was, he’s started dressing for the job he has.

“It looks to me like, since the byelection, he's been trying to batten down the hatches and get better prepared for the battle ahead, right down to things like wearing much more tailored clothes to many more serious occasions than he was before,” Meggs said.

“He's giving every sign of someone who's decided to bear down on the job and win re-election. That's a problem for people who think that the door is wide open. The door is cracked open. I don't think it's wide open yet.”

Furthermore, Vancouver progressives always run the risk of splitting the vote several ways, leaving space for an under-supported incumbent to sneak up the middle.

That said, the recent Vancouver byelection suggests progressives are beginning to figure things out for themselves by strategizing across party lines to avoid crowding the field too much.

Sim is clearly gearing up for a fight. Too bad elections aren’t decided by arm-wrestling matches. If they were, you’d think Sim and his biceps would have the edge there, at least.

Allam disagrees, throwing one more punch of his own. “He's losing every arm wrestle because he refuses to show up.”