Amy Hamm: Vancouver votes for more drug chaos and street disorder - National Post
Pete Fry celebrates winning mayor's race in Vancouver, BC, October 17, 2026. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNGArticle contentVancouver, what the hell were you thinking?
Saturday night, the city elected Green Party of Vancouver’s Pete Fry as mayor. They also wiped out former mayor Ken Sim’s centre-right ABC Vancouver party, which went from supermajority to a lone, politically neutered councillor.
This all represents a 180 from the 2022 election, in which the city had briefly come to its senses and figured out that somebody needed to do something — anything — different than before in order to rein in Vancouver’s inexcusable homelessness and addictions crisis. While Sim could have done more in his term, he at least tried to do something.
Fry, by contrast, is as pro-drug and pro-chaos as politicians come. For example, he walked out of city chambers this summer in apparent protest of Sim’s proposed drug and street disorder plebiscite, as though merely considering a crackdown on open-air drug use was too much for him to countenance. He later called the plebiscite a “very bad idea.”
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The results of this plebiscite, which asked voters if they would support a ban on public drug use, or the addition of both voluntary and involuntary mental health and addictions treatment beds in Vancouver, will be announced by Oct. 21. Even if the public overwhelmingly voted “yes” to both questions, Fry will likely be unmoved by his constituents’ concern.
Days before the election, he dismissively told media that Vancouver already has a ban on open-air drug use, while 90 new mental health beds are in the works for the new St. Paul’s Hospital. In reality, police seldom enforce existing drug laws in the city’s notorious Downtown Eastside (DTES), and acute mental health beds are not drug treatment beds. Even if they were, a meagre 90 spots is dwarfed by the thousands of mentally ill addicts that roam Vancouver’s DTES in varying states of mayhem and despair.
Fry’s party has promised “safe, dignified places for unhoused and marginalized people to gather, rest, and access support” and a focus on “compassionate” approaches that utilize “diversion, outreach, and services before enforcement.” Fry previously expressed that he wants addicts to have “free prescribed opiates” and the city to have more supervised injection sites. Oh boy.
