Does Vancouver Need a Fourth Left-Wing Party? Muhammad Ahmad Thinks So

Muhammad Ahmad started his campaign for mayor of Vancouver by leaping out of a plane, and he says he hasn’t stopped moving since.

“I have to manage my work, I have to manage my personal life, and I want to make sure that my kids don't feel ignored while I'm on this campaign trail,” says the 34-year-old father of three.

In an already crowded race, where no fewer than six other parties are going head-to-head to oppose the reigning ABC Vancouver, observers might wonder whether the city needs another party on the left side of the political spectrum. Voters who don’t want to vote for ABC have their choice of centrist parties Vancouver Liberals and Vote Vancouver; the centre-left Vancouver Greens or OneCity; left-wing COPE; or TEAM, a party that claims to be neither left nor right.

But Ahmad, a renter who lives in Vancouver’s Marpole neighbourhood, says voters need a party that will fight for the city’s working class who are struggling to get by and have bolder policies, like free transit and childcare for night-shift workers.

Ahmad is a member of the BC General Employees’ Union and a communications officer for the Ministry of Citizen Services. He says he was inspired to run for office after speaking to fellow workers on the picket line during the 2025 BCGEU strike.

So Ahmad started Bright Future Vancouver and is running alongside six council candidates: Andy Lin, Judith Kasiama, Ibrahima Cisse, Yadwinder Mangat, Mohadesah Gharib P. Arasi and Bilal Khan. In their bios, many of those candidates talk about growing up in immigrant and diaspora communities.

Bright Future has struggled to get media attention in the crowded Vancouver race. A recent poll showed the new party getting around three per cent support, behind Vote Vancouver’s seven per cent support.

The Tyee spoke with Ahmad about his political aspirations and the challenges of building a new political party. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Why did you want to run for mayor?

Muhammad Ahmad: City hall hasn't been working for the working-class people. I'm a working-class person myself. For far too long we have been giving opportunities to the billionaires and millionaires, and things haven't been working our way. I want to see that every single Vancouverite has the same dignity and respect and the same opportunities.

We are all sick and tired of city hall not listening to us — like what happened with Ken Sim’s zero means zero budget. I was one of the 600 people who spoke against it. But while Sim gave an opportunity to his cronies by giving a zero per cent property tax increase budget, it never trickled down to the renters.

Can you tell me why you felt like you had to start your own party?

Because we don't align with anybody. I did an interview for running with COPE as a mayoral candidate as well, but a couple of things that I just really didn't appreciate is that they wanted somebody that they can control. For me it was very important that I am answerable to only to the people of Vancouver, rather than answerable to a party. I'm using a party to get elected, but once I do get elected I'm only answerable to the people of Vancouver.

So you offered yourself to COPE as their mayoral candidate — and why was that? Why would you not start with city council?

Whatever the mayor does, it trickles down to everybody, even though in a city like Vancouver… the mayor does not have a lot of power over city council. But we need a leader with a vision. We need a leader coming up with bold ideas.

For example, we are working towards making transit 100 per cent free — initially in the first year, we're going be bringing in a pilot which is for transit riders aged 18 and under, and then we're going to go into negotiation with the province and TransLink. We're coming up with 30 to 40 per cent cheaper grocery stores, like city-run grocery stores on city-owned land. We're coming up with rent-to-own.

I did reach out to a lot of parties. I had conversations with Vancouver Liberals. I had conversations with the Green Party of Vancouver, I had conversations with other people. But their priorities are not the same as mine. Their priorities are not the same as the working-class people. They just want to talk about rats. They want to talk about bird poop. They want to talk about things that any mayor has to do anyway.

You’ve put together a pretty interesting group of council candidates. Most of them are quite young, I noticed, and they're all BIPOC people, it's a very diverse crew. Tell me about how you got them to join?

My goal was here to have all these people from different communities to represent Vancouver. That is the beauty of the fabric of Vancouver. So how did I do that? I just went down and I started having those conversations. I'm like, ‘OK, you know what? We're hurting here. We need people who have never run for politics, who never had political experience, but there are people who have experience, people who have the passion to serve the people.’

Once you put it that way, people were joining in in buckets. We had over 60 or 70 people that we interviewed, but one thing that we needed to be aligned on was public service. We're not greedy for money, we're not greedy for power. We're here to serve the people. I want to bring public service back to the city hall — right now the city is run by like a business. It has been run like a business for over 100 years, but what we need to do is we need to bring service back because we are answerable to the people.

You’ve talked about some of Bright Future’s policy ideas, like rent-to-own and free transit. What are some of your other key policies?

One of my favourite ones is 24-hour childcare, and this is something the nurses asked us to do. I want to make sure that nurses who work for us, who protect us, who take care of us when we are in dire need, they are respected, they're given the dignity, and we hear them out and we do things to make their life easier.

We're also working with something we’re calling safer streets, stronger communities. Every morning — like in Tokyo, what they do is they wash all the streets. We're going to make sure that we hire frontline workers and make sure that they come out every morning and they clean the streets for everyone. There is a poop problem, yes, but that is my job as a leader, as the mayor of the city to make sure that we provide opportunities for people to be able to live in a clean place.

Another thing is mental health and addiction. We are coming up with something called Aurora Skills Academy. So what we're going to be doing is, if voluntarily somebody wants to come up and get themselves clean — and this is an idea that is generated from talking to people who are homeless and who are going through crisis in the Downtown Eastside — the city is going to house them in one of the office buildings, not in SROs, which I call drug dens. We are already in talks with UBC and BCIT. We're going to house them for six months rent-free, UBC and BCIT are going to reskill them, and we're going to put them back to the workforce, we're going to give them back the dignity.

Another idea is, Vancouver Public Library — like you go to a church and there's a room that you can go and confess your sin, it's going be the same concept. You go in, you have a problem, you talk to people. Oftentimes we can catch people when they're having a mental crisis rather than when they're too far gone. My goal is to catch them in somewhere in the middle. So they go in to the library, they talk about their problems and they get results. Same with the community centres, same with the neighbourhood houses — we're going to fund them, we're going to make sure that they have enough places and enough money to be able to provide those services.

You started your campaign by jumping out of an airplane… why?

I am the kind of guy who loves extreme sports. I've done it all my life, right? What I'm trying to tell people is, sometimes we have to take a leap of faith. And we have to try something new. Like once you jump, you realize that life has a lot to offer.

So giving Bright Future Vancouver an opportunity, giving us a majority in city council, I guarantee that you will not find me in city hall. You're going to be finding me in the neighbourhood house, you're going be finding me on the streets, because that's the job.