Shaughnessy

Shaughnessy is Vancouver's wealthiest and most historically exclusive residential neighbourhood, developed by the Canadian Pacific Railway beginning in 1907 as a planned estate community for the city's elite. Named after CPR president Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, the neighbourhood was designed with curving streets, generous lots, and a minimum construction cost that was six times the average Vancouver home price at the time. With a population of roughly 8,400, Shaughnessy has actually shrunk by about 20 percent over the past fifty years even as the city grew. The housing stock is overwhelmingly single-family detached homes on large lots, many of them heritage mansions in neo-Tudor, Colonial Revival, and Arts and Crafts styles — roughly half of the neighbourhood's homes were built before World War II. About 75 percent of households are owner-occupied, and the median household income exceeds $111,000. Chinese-Canadians now make up roughly 44 percent of residents, reflecting waves of affluent Hong Kong immigration since the 1990s.

Shaughnessy is reliably centre-right at all levels of government and has been a stronghold for the NPA and its successors for decades. Provincially, it straddles Vancouver-Langara — a BC Liberal stronghold held by Michael Lee from 2017 until BC United suspended its campaign in 2024, after which the NDP's Sunita Dhir narrowly won the seat by 419 votes over the Conservatives — and Vancouver-Quilchena, which has never elected an NDP MLA. Federally, Shaughnessy falls within Vancouver Granville, where Liberal Taleeb Noormohamed won by just 431 votes over the NDP in 2021. In 2022, Ken Sim won 73.8 percent of the mayoral vote — the highest percentage in the city — though from a single polling station at Shaughnessy Elementary School with only 668 valid ballots, reflecting the neighbourhood's tiny and declining electorate. Stewart managed just 11.2 percent, while Hardwick took 10.0 percent.

Municipal Issues

Heritage protection and densification resistance defined local politics. First Shaughnessy — the original CPR-developed core bounded roughly by West 16th Avenue, Arbutus Street, King Edward Avenue, and Oak Street — was designated as Vancouver's first Heritage Conservation Area in 2015, giving the city power to refuse demolition of pre-1940 buildings. Of the 595 houses in the area, 315 were built before 1940. In the eighteen months before the temporary protection order, demolition inquiries had surged from 0.4 percent to 5 percent per year. The Heritage Conservation Area permitted density bonuses in exchange for preservation, including secondary suites, coach houses, and laneway houses.

The Vancouver Plan, approved in 2022, generated significant anxiety in Shaughnessy despite city staff initially proposing to exempt the neighbourhood from the gentle densification measures applied to other residential zones. The Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods, which includes the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners' Association, formally opposed the plan as too broad and lacking neighbourhood-specific consideration. ABC's property-rights-friendly platform and resistance to blanket densification resonated in a neighbourhood where the protective legislation dates back to 1914, when the Shaughnessy Settlement Act restricted lots to single-family homes, followed by the 1922 Shaughnessy Heights Building Restriction Act — provincial legislation that effectively placed the neighbourhood beyond the reach of ordinary city zoning for decades.

Public safety was the dominant city-wide campaign issue, and Shaughnessy was no exception. ABC's promise of 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health nurses, combined with the anxieties crystallized by the documentary Vancouver Is Dying ten days before the election, drove the overwhelming consolidation of the centre-right vote behind Sim. The NPA, which had historically been the dominant party in Shaughnessy, collapsed to near-irrelevance: Fred Harding won just 7 of 668 votes, illustrating the completeness of ABC's absorption of the traditional west-side right.