On Oct. 17, billionaire-backed mayor Ken Sim and his A Better City (ABC) party are facing off against democratic socialists in Vancouver’s municipal election.
Sim and ABC have held majority control over city council for exactly four years. In that time, they violently removed homeless people from the Downtown Eastside, gave $3.8 million of taxes back to condo developers, abandoned the city’s “living wage” policy, and shuttered the renter’s office, which led Vancouver to become the “eviction capital of Canada.”
Behind ABC are billionaires like Chip Wilson, one of the richest men in the province and the owner of the most expensive house in the city. Wilson is the founder of Lululemon—a company name he picked to make fun of Japanese accents: “It’s funny to watch them try and say it.” Beyond being a racist billionaire, he loves sweatshops, and proudly defends the use of child labour. But to Ken Sim, he’s a mentor and friend, worthy of being honoured with his own official holiday. Not surprising, given that Wilson hand-picked him to run for mayor.
To Sim and his billionaire backers, the city is “open for business.” To everyone else, Vancouver has become “impossibly unaffordable.”
Vancouverites want a ‘Mamdani-style’ city council
With someone like Sim leading the city while youth unemployment surges to recession levels and rents are higher than anywhere else in the country, it’s no surprise why nearly 60 per cent of Vancouverites support a “Mamdani-style” mayor and council. They’re tired of the billionaires lining their pockets by making life miserable for everyone else.
Trying to connect with this mood are members of The Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), a municipal party founded by socialists and unions in the 1960s.
Walking around Vancouver, you will quickly spot bright red “Evict Ken Sim” pins and tees. This is COPE’s main slogan, and given that Ken Sim has overseen a renoviction and demoviction crisis, it’s clear why it resonantes.
COPE’s program takes aim at billionaire landlords by proposing a mansion tax as well as tripling the empty homes tax. They want to roll back rents to 2017 levels (an 80 per cent reduction) and use the city-owned affordable housing company to build 20,000 publicly-owned or tenant-owned co-op housing units. In addition to this, they want to create more public child care spaces, make transit free, and create two public grocery stores.
To evict Ken Sim, evict capitalism
Communists support these policies. But we have to be clear: if we want to evict Ken Sim and the capitalists behind him, we have to be ready to go all the way. When COPE’s mayoral candidate (who has since dropped out in order to not “split the progressive vote”) was asked if their policies might drive investment from the city, she called capital-flight a “fallacy.”
But in Washington and California, billionaires have moved both their residences and their corporate headquarters in retaliation to “tax the rich” initiatives. The reality is that taxing their empty units, forcing an 80 per cent reduction in rent, and building affordable housing and cheap public grocery stores is a massive threat to the capitalists who benefit from keeping prices high and their own taxes low.
If a capitalist tries to dodge a wealth tax by taking their capital out of the city, they should have their wealth expropriated. This isn’t a policy that’s alien to COPE. Their mayoral candidate’s platform includes a proposal to expropriate the property of the worst landlords and turn their buildings into affordable housing units.
But why stop at just the slumlords? Thousands of condo units in Vancouver sit empty simply because they’re too expensive for working people to afford. By expropriating the condo developers and the real estate investment trusts the city could solve homelessness overnight, and use their assets to start building thousands of affordable public housing units right away.
Then, there’s the question of groceries. In Vancouver, the number one reason for credit card debt is the rising cost of living, primarily groceries. To fix this, we agree with COPE that the city should create public grocery stores with lower food prices—but to be frank, limiting ourselves to only two stores simply won’t produce the hoped for results. According to a recent study by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, public grocery stores are only really feasible when they are done at a large scale.
There are over 600 grocery stores in Vancouver, 47 per cent of which are owned by brands like Loblaws, Pattison Group, and Sobey’s. These corporations have been squeezing working people for decades—and their existing infrastructure would provide a great basis for a public grocery store system in Vancouver.
Politicians like Ken Sim are propped up by the capitalists through massive lobbying groups, funded by the extreme profits they make by gouging working people through overpriced housing and groceries. Even when their chosen candidate loses, the capitalists can still override the votes of working-class people with the threat of capital flight. By expropriating them, the capitalists lose the thing that gives them power in the first place: their control over the economy. This is what socialism is really about.
The election of self-described socialists to the city council would be a step in the right direction. But only if we are prepared to challenge the capitalist’s right to own the economy can we not only evict Ken Sim, but defeat his billionaire backers and their agenda, once and for all.
