Vancouver held its municipal election on October 15, 2022, with all four elected bodies on the ballot: one mayor, ten councillors, seven park board commissioners, and nine school trustees. Vancouver uses an at-large voting system with no wards — every registered voter casts ballots for all offices city-wide, with results aggregated across 22 neighbourhoods. A total of 171,494 ballots were cast from 472,665 registered voters, producing a turnout of 36.3 percent, down from roughly 39 percent in 2018. Advance voting reached a record 65,000 ballots across 22 locations over five days, and for the first time all eligible voters could cast a mail-in ballot.

Incumbent Mayor Kennedy Stewart, who had won office in 2018 as an independent by fewer than 1,000 votes over Ken Sim, was seeking a second term under his newly formed Forward Together party. The 2018–2022 council had earned a reputation for dysfunction, with no party holding a majority and marathon public hearings that stretched into the early hours. That gridlock, combined with rising public anxiety over street disorder and the opioid crisis, set the stage for a dramatic realignment.

Results

Ken Sim and his new party, ABC Vancouver, swept the election decisively. Sim won the mayoralty with 85,732 votes (about 50 percent), defeating Stewart's 49,593 (about 29 percent) by a margin of more than 36,000 votes. Colleen Hardwick of TEAM for a Livable Vancouver placed third with 16,769 votes (10 percent), followed by Mark Marissen of Progress Vancouver and Fred Harding of the NPA.

ABC Vancouver elected all seven of its council candidates: Sarah Kirby-Yung, Lisa Dominato, Brian Montague, Mike Klassen, Peter Meiszner, Rebecca Bligh, and Lenny Zhou. The three remaining seats went to incumbents from the left-of-centre opposition — Adriane Carr and Pete Fry of the Green Party and Christine Boyle of OneCity. On park board, ABC won six of seven seats, with Green candidate Tom Digby capturing the seventh. ABC took five of nine school trustee seats, with the remaining four split between OneCity (Jennifer Reddy), COPE (Suzie Mah), and the Greens (Lois Chan-Pedley and Janet Fraser).

Every single ABC candidate who ran was elected — a remarkable feat for a party founded just eighteen months earlier. The at-large system amplified the result: ABC won 70 percent of council seats with a majority but not an overwhelming share of the popular vote. The party dominated geographically as well, winning the mayoral vote in 18 of 22 neighbourhoods, with Stewart's Forward Together holding only Mount Pleasant, Grandview-Woodland, Strathcona, and Fairview.

Party Leaders

Ken Sim (ABC Vancouver) — Born in 1970 in Vancouver, Sim co-founded Nurse Next Door, a home health care franchise operating in over 180 cities, in 2001. He also co-founded the Rosemary Rocksalt bagel chain. Sim first ran for mayor in 2018 as the NPA candidate and lost to Kennedy Stewart by fewer than 1,000 votes — the closest mayoral race in Vancouver's history. He left the NPA in 2020 and launched A Better City (later rebranded ABC Vancouver) in April 2021, drawing several sitting NPA councillors to the new party. Running on a platform centred on public safety — including promises to hire 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health nurses — Sim won decisively across the city, carrying affluent west-side neighbourhoods like Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy as well as east-side areas such as Renfrew-Collingwood and Sunset.

Kennedy Stewart (Forward Together) — Born in 1966 in Halifax, Stewart earned a PhD in Government from the London School of Economics after completing degrees at Acadia University and Simon Fraser University. He served as NDP Member of Parliament for Burnaby—Douglas and later Burnaby South before resigning from the House of Commons in September 2018 to run for Vancouver mayor. He won that race as an unaffiliated independent — the first mayor outside a municipal party in over three decades. Facing a fragmented council with no majority, Stewart formed Forward Together in 2022 to field a full slate. His campaign emphasized housing supply, proposing 220,000 new homes over a decade, but struggled to counter the dominant public safety narrative. Stewart became the first sitting Vancouver mayor to lose re-election in 42 years, since Jack Volrich was defeated by Mike Harcourt in 1980.

Colleen Hardwick (TEAM for a Livable Vancouver) — A media executive and the daughter of former Vancouver alderman Walter Hardwick, Colleen Hardwick was elected to council in 2018 under the NPA banner. She resigned from the NPA in April 2021, citing concerns the party had become undemocratic, and joined TEAM for a Livable Vancouver later that year. Her campaign opposed the Broadway Plan densification and positioned TEAM as defenders of neighbourhood character. She finished third with about 10 percent of the mayoral vote.

Fred Harding (NPA) — A former West Vancouver police officer, Harding became the NPA's mayoral candidate roughly six weeks before the election after the party's previously nominated candidate, John Coupar, withdrew in August 2022. The NPA, founded in 1937 and once Vancouver's dominant centre-right party, had disintegrated over the preceding term as seven of ten elected NPA officials resigned from the party. Harding finished fifth with about 2 percent of the vote, and the NPA failed to elect a single candidate across all four bodies.

Campaign Issues

Public safety dominated the 2022 campaign to a degree unusual even for Vancouver politics. Residents expressed deep frustration with open drug use, random assaults, shoplifting, and visible street disorder, particularly in and around the Downtown Eastside. The release of the documentary Vancouver Is Dying on October 5 — just ten days before the election — amplified these anxieties. The film, which surpassed one million YouTube views within two weeks of its release, was sharply critical of the incumbent administration's approach to addiction and homelessness.

The opioid crisis formed the backdrop to the safety debate. Over 500 Vancouverites had died of overdoses in the preceding year, and the toxic drug supply showed no signs of abating. Left-of-centre parties favoured decriminalization and expanded harm reduction, while ABC and other centre-right candidates emphasized involuntary treatment options and increased policing.

Housing affordability remained a persistent concern, though it was overshadowed by safety issues. The recently approved Broadway Plan — a major densification framework along the Central Broadway corridor near future subway stations — divided candidates, with TEAM strongly opposed and ABC generally supportive. All parties acknowledged that the city's housing supply needed to grow dramatically.

Elected Councillors

ABC Vancouver's seven-seat council majority was built on a mix of three returning incumbents who had defected from the NPA and four first-time candidates. The party's lowest-polling councillor, Lenny Zhou, still finished more than 20,000 votes ahead of the highest-polling opposition councillor, illustrating the power of slate voting in Vancouver's at-large system.

Sarah Kirby-Yung (ABC Vancouver, 72,545 votes) — A marketing and communications executive who held senior roles at Destination Vancouver and the Vancouver Aquarium, Kirby-Yung was first elected to the Vancouver Park Board as an NPA commissioner in 2014 and served as its chair. She won a council seat in 2018 under the NPA banner, then left the party in 2021 amid disputes over its mayoral nomination process. She received the most votes of any council candidate in 2022.

Lisa Dominato (ABC Vancouver, 70,415 votes) — A public policy professional who served as Chief of Staff to the BC Deputy Premier and Minister of Education, Dominato was first elected to the Vancouver School Board in a 2017 by-election and won a council seat in 2018 with the NPA. She departed the NPA alongside Kirby-Yung and joined ABC Vancouver. On council she chaired Metro Vancouver's Climate Action Committee and served on the board of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

Brian Montague (ABC Vancouver, 68,618 votes) — A first-time councillor, Montague retired from a 28-year career with the Vancouver Police Department in May 2022, just months before the election. He served as the VPD's public spokesperson for five years and received eleven commendations during his policing career. His background in law enforcement aligned closely with ABC's public safety platform.

Mike Klassen (ABC Vancouver, 65,586 votes) — A first-time councillor who spent over two decades as a community organizer on the Fraser Street corridor, Klassen served as BC provincial director for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. He was also president of PAL Vancouver, a social housing organization for the performing arts community, where he helped deliver a 66-unit affordable housing building in New Westminster. He holds a BA in Political Science from UBC.

Peter Meiszner (ABC Vancouver, 63,275 votes) — A first-time councillor with a background in broadcast journalism and digital communications, Meiszner was the first online news producer at Global BC, where he established the station's social media presence. He later worked at UBC as senior digital strategist and published urbanYVR, a website covering housing and urban development in the Lower Mainland. He served as vice-chair of the Gastown Historic Area Planning Committee.

Rebecca Bligh (ABC Vancouver, 62,765 votes) — First elected to council in 2018 with the NPA, Bligh was the first NPA councillor to resign from the party, leaving in December 2019 over what she described as anti-SOGI sentiment and a far-right drift among new board members. She sat as an independent for the remainder of the term before joining ABC Vancouver. She founded BLACKPiiN, a consultation and leadership business.

Lenny Zhou (ABC Vancouver, 62,393 votes) — A first-time councillor who came to Vancouver in 2005 as an international student, Zhou works as an operations engineer in healthcare at BC Children's Hospital. He holds a Master of Management in Operations Research from UBC's Sauder School of Business. He founded the Care to Live Foundation, a non-profit that organized global health missions providing free surgical and medical services.

Christine Boyle (OneCity, 38,465 votes) — An ordained United Church minister and community organizer, Boyle was first elected to council in 2018 as the first and only OneCity councillor. She previously worked at First United Church in the Downtown Eastside and at the Columbia Institute's Centre for Civic Governance. She studied at UBC, where she was elected to student government. Boyle left council mid-term in 2024 after winning election as BC NDP MLA for Vancouver-Little Mountain, and now serves as BC Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs.

Adriane Carr (Green Party, 41,831 votes) — The longest-serving member of the 2022 council, Carr co-founded the BC Green Party in 1983 and served as its first spokesperson. She became the first Green councillor elected in a major Canadian city when she won a Vancouver council seat in 2011 with 48,648 votes. She was re-elected in 2014, when she received the highest vote count of any council candidate, and again in 2018. Her 2022 victory gave her a fourth consecutive term. Carr resigned from council in 2025.

Pete Fry (Green Party, 37,270 votes) — A graphic designer and communications consultant, Fry spent years as a community advocate in Strathcona, where he chaired the Strathcona Residents Association. He is the son of Hedy Fry, the longtime federal Liberal MP for Vancouver Centre. After unsuccessful runs in the 2014 municipal election, a 2016 provincial by-election in Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, and a 2017 council by-election to replace Geoff Meggs, he was first elected to council in 2018 with the second-highest vote count. He is running for mayor in the 2026 Vancouver municipal election as the Green Party's candidate.

Notable Outcomes

The 2022 election marked one of the most dramatic political realignments in Vancouver's history. ABC Vancouver, a party that had not existed two years earlier, captured the mayoralty and won majorities on all three elected bodies in its inaugural election. The NPA, which had shaped Vancouver politics since 1937, was shut out entirely — a collapse accelerated by internal disputes that saw most of its elected caucus defect during the 2018–2022 term. Vision Vancouver, the party that had dominated city politics under Gregor Robertson from 2008 to 2018, also failed to win a single seat in its attempted comeback. The Green Party emerged as the strongest opposition voice with five seats across three bodies, while OneCity and COPE held two and one seats respectively.