Pete Fry Is Mayor, But COPE Is Powerful

Vancouver’s main progressive parties ultimately proved that they could unite just enough to crush Ken Sim’s ABC Vancouver. But while the Vancouver Greens’ Pete Fry won the mayoralty, it was the decidedly more radical COPE that flexed its political muscle.

The Vancouver Greens, COPE, and, to a lesser extent, OneCity dismantled Ken Sim’s political machine. In 2022, ABC swept 19 of the 27 elected positions: the mayoralty, seven city council seats, six park board seats, and five school board seats. Four years later, despite running a multi-million-dollar election campaign, ABC had been reduced to just a single seat on city council.

The electoral cooperation between the Greens, COPE, and OneCity meant that each party ran fewer candidates and eventually, even if somewhat reluctantly, rallied behind Pete Fry for mayor at the expense of OneCity’s and COPE’s mayoral candidates. But that was an election strategy to defeat Ken Sim and ABC, not a power-sharing agreement on which party sets the political agenda once in office.

That is where the political arithmetic gets awkward. Fry may have won the mayor’s chair, but the Greens hold just four of ten council seats, matched by four from COPE. With OneCity’s Lucy Maloney, Fry could assemble a six-vote majority on council without COPE’s support. But if Pete Fry and the Greens routinely govern around COPE, they risk turning a crucial political ally into a formidable, well-organized opposition from the left.

COPE may not have the votes on council to directly dictate Mayor Pete Fry’s agenda, but COPE clearly has the political muscle to make governing without its support a costly proposition.

COPE flattened ABC

It cannot be overstated how thoroughly COPE steamrolled ABC Vancouver.

The humiliation began in the 2025 city council by-election: COPE’s Sean Orr topped the ballot with over 34,000 votes while ABC’s two candidates limped into sixth and seventh place, receiving barely half as many votes as Orr combined.

In the aftermath of that defeat, ABC obsessively spent political capital to portray Orr as a dangerous radical. From unfounded accusations of antisemitism to falsely claiming Orr was handing out illicit drugs on Christmas Day, Ken Sim and ABC seemed hellbent on destroying Orr’s reputation.

At the same time, ABC made public safety the centrepiece of its re-election campaign. Much of the media, for its part, also framed public safety as a defining issue of the election.

ABC even used its majority on city council to put a non-binding public safety plebiscite on the ballot. Supposedly designed to pressure the provincial government, ABC used the plebiscite to draw a sharp contrast between its own tough-on-crime positioning and what it portrayed as the soft-on-crime, ideological politics of COPE and, by extension, Pete Fry.

But whatever Vancouver voters thought about public safety, ABC’s attempts to smear Sean Orr and frame public safety as a winning electoral issue failed at the ballot box.

Instead, COPE elected all 12 of its candidates across city council, park board, and school board, while the Vancouver Greens elected all ten of its candidates. But COPE secured the highest average vote total per city council candidate of any party – nearly 3,500 votes per candidate more than the Vancouver Greens – as Sean Orr topped the council ballot with 83,038 votes.

Most remarkably, COPE did so without making policing or public safety central to its campaign. Instead, the party ran an unapologetically left-wing platform that emphasized housing affordability, tenants’ rights, and expanded public services.

Spreading the ‘Evict Ken Sim’ mantra

COPE’s formidable ground-game reportedly knocked on 10,000 doors on election day alone, helping mobilize the progressive vote that carried Pete Fry into the mayor’s office.

It was a get-out-the-vote operation culminating from COPE’s cheeky and profoundly effective “Evict Ken Sim” campaign: a damning political rallying cry, complete with t-shirts, red buttons, and an extensive grassroots organizing network.

The “Evict Ken Sim” campaign got so deep under ABC Vancouver’s skin that Sim himself addressed it in a September 23 campaign video. Pensively staring at an “Evict Ken Sim” button, Sim invoked his family’s own experiences with eviction to argue that the slogan amounted to a hateful, personal attack.

In doing so, however, ABC had gift-wrapped a Streisand effect for COPE, amplifying the very slogan it was trying to discredit. COPE even repurposed ABC’s campaign video for a fundraising appeal. 

Given the limited capacity of the Vancouver Greens’ party apparatus, COPE has a strong claim to being the engine of Vancouver’s progressive movement. The Greens won the mayoralty, but COPE proved it could devastatingly message and mobilize against a multimillion-dollar political machine.

For all its offensive firepower against ABC, COPE also made a major concession to the Greens in order to help elect Fry. COPE cleared the way for Fry’s mayoral victory when its own mayoral candidate, Stephanie Allen, suspended her campaign to avoid splitting the progressive vote.

COPE was willing to compromise on who should be mayor, but the party may be far less willing to compromise on what the new mayor it helped elect actually prioritizes in office. Stepping aside in the mayoral race does not mean the party intends to step aside at City Hall.

An eventual battle of priorities 

For now, Mayor Pete Fry, the Vancouver Greens, and COPE can enjoy a political honeymoon, rolling back ABC Vancouver’s legacy, including reversing the ban on new supportive housing investments and resurrecting the city’s Renters’ Office.  But once that low-hanging fruit is picked, the parties will have to decide how to compromise on their competing political priorities and ideological differences.

In its outsized role in laying ABC Vancouver to waste, COPE demonstrated, even if inadvertently, just how much political power it can wield. It would be naive to assume that a party with such a formidable grassroots organization, four city councillors, and an ambitious agenda of its own would simply (and always) defer to the under-resourced Greens it helped usher into the mayor’s office.

The political price of COPE’s support may force Mayor Fry to accommodate a policy agenda considerably further to the left than the platform on which he campaigned.

For example, COPE pledged to triple Vancouver’s Empty Home Tax to nine per cent while closing developer loopholes, even as the city grapples with a glut of newly completed but unsold homes. COPE also campaigned on a new “mansion tax”, which would impose an additional one per cent tax on property values exceeding $5 million to help fund public housing.

While Fry’s Greens also favour closing Empty Homes Tax loopholes, their approach exhibits greater sensitivity to the economic pressures facing Vancouver’s housing development industry. Where COPE proposes higher taxes to address housing affordability, the Greens are focused on reducing development costs, streamlining approvals, and removing red tape to construction.

Policing could be even more politically uncomfortable for Mayor Fry. COPE has advocated prioritizing social infrastructure and peer-assisted crisis response over policing. While Fry’s Greens also support expanding non-police crisis response and scrutinizing Vancouver Police Department spending, Fry has not committed to any police budget cuts or reallocation of funds without an independent audit. Both parties agree on reform but seem to diverge on how aggressively public safety resources should be reallocated.

These are not irreconcilable differences. But eventually, COPE’s political priorities will collide with the Greens’ political priorities.

Therein lies an imbalance of power. COPE can pick its battles, supporting the Mayor when their priorities align and returning to opposition when they do not. Pete Fry, meanwhile, is in charge of governing Vancouver, with or without COPE’s cooperation.

As mayor, Fry will have to decide how much of COPE’s agenda he is willing to accommodate at the expense of his own party’s priorities. Otherwise, he risks turning Vancouver’s most effective grassroots political organization – the very one that helped elect him, no less – against him.

Pete Fry has already seen what happens when COPE turns its political machinery against a sitting mayor: COPE “evicted” Ken Sim. 

And COPE did not do all that hard work just to hand Fry the keys to City Hall and walk away.