Ken Sim and ABC vote to spend half a million on a hail mary ballot question, after four years of refusing to fund the answer

VANCOUVER, B.C., On the Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh – This morning, Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver majority voted down a fully funded alternative to their public safety plebiscite, then pushed through a measure that will cost Vancouver taxpayers up to $560,000 to ask voters a question in October, instead of spending that money to build solutions the city already knows work.

Councillor Lucy Maloney's amendment, defeated by the ABC majority, would have directed city staff to immediately begin funding and scaling programs with a proven track record in Vancouver: this amendment outlined how to proceed, today, on building out the Four Pillars in a real material way, with proven programs that have already worked in Vancouver, a real plan to deliver: 

• A peer support and community intervention
• A Crisis Response Systems Review
• Restorative Justice through the Restorative City Framework
• A Housing First framework integrated with community safety & recovery
• With cross community & sectoral engagement

Instead, ABC chose to spend up to half a million dollars, by the mayor's own estimate, to put two advisory, non-binding questions on the October ballot, sixty-three days before voters decide whether to give Mayor Sim a second term.

"Ken Sim has had four years and a council majority to fund what works," said William Azaroff, OneCity Vancouver's mayoral candidate. "Instead of doing that job, he spent this morning asking Vancouverites to pay half a million of their own tax dollars for the privilege of telling him what he already knows. This isn't leadership. It's an admission that his approach has failed, dressed up as a question for voters to answer for him. Vancouver doesn't need another plebiscite. It needs a mayor and a council willing to do the work and build our way out of this crisis."

Vancouver adopted its Four Pillars Drug Strategy made up of: prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and enforcement, more than twenty-five years ago, under NPA Mayor Philip Owen. Every Vancouver government since, across every party, has governed within that framework. Today, Ken Sim became the first mayor in a quarter century to walk away from it.

"Let the record show what just happened," said Councillor Lucy Maloney. "This council had a plan in front of it built on twenty-five years of Vancouver evidence to be funded, staffed, and ready to direct today. And it had a plebiscite that does none of that, that costs half a million dollars, and that changes nothing about what happens on our streets tomorrow morning. Given that choice, this mayor and this majority chose the plebiscite. That is the abdication of governing, dressed up as democracy."

Maloney's amendment would have cost the city nothing beyond redirecting funds already contemplated for public safety and crisis response. It required no new plebiscite, no provincial legislation, and no delay. It only required the council's willingness to act.

"On October 17th, this city gets to choose again," Azaroff said. "A new council will fund the Four Pillars together, the way that experts have shown works. We will fund a program that gets people off the street instead of in and out of jail. This vote does not end this fight. It starts the campaign to finish it."

Maloney added: "Vancouver has spent twenty-five years building the answer to this crisis. Ken Sim spent one morning walking away from it. Come October, Vancouver will choose to build again."

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