Renfrew-Collingwood

Renfrew-Collingwood is one of Vancouver's largest and most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, with a population of roughly 51,500. People of Chinese descent make up over 40 percent of residents, with Cantonese as the most common mother tongue at about 20 percent. Filipino, Vietnamese, and South Asian communities are also substantial. More than half of residents speak English as a second language, and the neighbourhood functions as one of the city's primary immigrant gateway communities. About 58 percent of dwellings are owner-occupied — slightly above the city average — and the housing stock is dominated by duplexes, many of them the distinctive "Vancouver Special" box-style houses built between the 1960s and 1980s. Median household income sits modestly below the national average.

Despite being solidly NDP at both provincial and federal levels — Adrian Dix has held Vancouver-Kingsway for the NDP since 2005 with increasing margins, most recently winning 68 percent in 2020 — Renfrew-Collingwood proved highly receptive to ABC Vancouver's municipal platform. Ken Sim won 60.5 percent of the neighbourhood vote to Kennedy Stewart's 22.5 percent, a margin of 38 points and one of the strongest ABC results in the city. Sim won every single polling station, including all five election-day locations and the advance poll. At the Renfrew Park advance poll, his vote share exceeded 68 percent. This was a dramatic swing from 2018, when Stewart had narrowly carried the John Norquay Elementary polling station 311 to 274.

Municipal Issues

Public safety was the decisive issue in Renfrew-Collingwood, amplified by the neighbourhood's large Asian-Canadian population. Anti-Asian hate crime incidents in Vancouver rose 717 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year, and the city was labelled the "anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America" by one California-based research centre. Random assaults and vandalism targeting Asian residents and businesses generated deep frustration in Renfrew-Collingwood, where Chinese-Canadian residents who had traditionally been politically disengaged became motivated to vote. ABC's pledge to hire 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health nurses, combined with Sim's appeal as the first Chinese-Canadian to be elected mayor of Vancouver, mobilized substantial new turnout. The VPD reported 334 vehicle break-ins in the neighbourhood in 2022, ranking it fifth among Vancouver's 22 areas.

Two planning processes were reshaping the neighbourhood's physical landscape. The Joyce-Collingwood Station Precinct Plan, approved in 2016, enabled major densification around the SkyTrain station, including a 36-storey, 360-unit rental tower approved by council. Station upgrades totalling roughly $46 million across two phases were completed to support the plan. The earlier Norquay Village Neighbourhood Centre Plan had rezoned 1,912 single-family lots to allow duplexes and rowhouses, making it one of the first areas in Vancouver to undergo blanket upzoning. Some residents felt this densification overrode the neighbourhood's 2004 Community Vision document.

The opioid crisis, while centred in the Downtown Eastside, had ripple effects across east-side neighbourhoods like Renfrew-Collingwood, where concerns about open drug use, discarded needles, and associated disorder were frequently raised. The release of Vancouver Is Dying ten days before the election sharpened the public safety debate. ABC's dual messaging — 100 police officers for voters concerned about crime, 100 mental health nurses for voters focused on social services — proved particularly effective in diverse, working-class east-side neighbourhoods that were experiencing both the safety anxieties and the social crises that the campaign sought to address.