Hastings-Sunrise

Hastings-Sunrise is a large, predominantly working- and middle-class neighbourhood of roughly 34,000 people in northeast Vancouver, stretching from Nanaimo Street east to Boundary Road and from Broadway north to Burrard Inlet. The neighbourhood is anchored by two parallel east-west arterials — Hastings Street, the commercial spine, and the residential streets that give way to industrial waterfront along the harbour. About 40 percent of residents are Chinese-Canadian, with significant Filipino, South Asian, and Vietnamese communities and roughly 53 percent of residents born outside Canada. The housing stock is overwhelmingly single-family homes and duplexes, many of them Vancouver Specials built in the 1960s through 1980s, with some low-rise apartments along Hastings Street. About 59 percent of households are owner-occupied. Hastings Park and the PNE fairgrounds — a 62-hectare complex that includes Playland, the Pacific Coliseum, and the Hastings Racecourse — dominate the neighbourhood's north-central area.

Hastings-Sunrise was one of the city's more competitive east-side neighbourhoods, with Ken Sim winning 50.9 percent — 4,163 of 8,184 valid ballots — to Stewart's 31.5 percent. But the aggregate masked a dramatic internal split. Sim dominated Chief Maquinna Elementary on election day (980 to 360), the neighbourhood's largest poll drawing heavily from the Chinese-Canadian community along the Hastings corridor. Stewart, however, won Tillicum Community Annex by a commanding 671 to 452 — making it one of only a handful of election-day polls across Vancouver's east side where Stewart prevailed, likely reflecting a younger, more English-speaking renter population in the neighbourhood's northwest near the Grandview-Woodland border. Provincially, the neighbourhood falls within Vancouver-Hastings, held by the NDP since 1991 — by Joy MacPhail, then Shane Simpson from 2005, then by Niki Sharma, who won the 2020 general election and was re-elected in 2024 as Attorney General. Federally, it is within Vancouver East, an NDP stronghold held by Jenny Kwan since 2015.

Municipal Issues

Hastings Park and the PNE fairgrounds were a persistent local flashpoint. The PNE operates under a mandate from the city as an annual fair and year-round entertainment venue, but residents in surrounding streets had complained for years about noise from Playland and summer concerts, traffic congestion during the fair, and the lack of promised parkland restoration. A 2010 Hastings Park master plan envisioned returning portions of the site to green space and community use, including restoration of the park's historic gardens, but progress was slow. The PNE's future as a permanent attraction had been debated for decades — the park had originally been intended as a community amenity before the fair became a fixture — and the tension between event programming and neighbourhood livability remained unresolved.

Public safety drove the neighbourhood's overall tilt toward ABC. Hastings-Sunrise sits directly adjacent to the Downtown Eastside's eastern expansion along Hastings Street, and residents reported growing concerns about property crime, needle debris in parks, and visible street disorder creeping east along the Hastings corridor. Anti-Asian hate crime was a particularly potent issue: Vancouver was labelled the anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America after a surge in reported incidents, and the neighbourhood's large Chinese-Canadian and East Asian communities felt acutely targeted. ABC's promise of 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health nurses, backed by the unprecedented Vancouver Police Union endorsement, resonated strongly — as did Sim's identity as the first Chinese-Canadian elected mayor.

Skeena Terrace, a 232-unit BC Housing complex near Rupert SkyTrain station, was one of the province's largest social housing redevelopment projects in active planning. Built in the early 1960s, the complex housed roughly 600 low-income residents and had been identified for renewal under BC Housing's asset renewal strategy. Plans called for replacing the aging stock with a higher-density mixed-use development that would significantly increase the number of social and market housing units. The project was in early consultation stages during the 2022 campaign, raising concerns about displacement of existing tenants and the pace and scale of redevelopment in a neighbourhood already experiencing intensification pressure along major transit corridors.