Kareem Allam vows to bring back young people as Vancouver mayor

Kareem Allam is running to be Vancouver’s next mayor — and he said he is doing so to bring young people back to the city.

Allam, who is running with the Vancouver Liberals (which do not have affiliation with the provincial or federal political parties), said that his platform is ambitious. It has major promises like expanding the SkyTrain to the University of British Columbia, tackling the ‘Tony Sopranos’ criminals in Vancouver, and even creating a task force to deal with the city’s rats.

“I’m tired of the politics of incrementalism that set itself in Canada; our politicians aren’t being bold,” he said.

Daily Hive Urbanized spoke with Allam on Oct. 9 to discuss some of the issues he sees in Vancouver, his platform promises, and why he thinks he and his party are the best in the race.

He said the “one reason” he is running is to bring back young people, who he said are leaving Vancouver due to issues with jobs, housing, frontline services, and public safety.

“By failing our youngest, we’re failing everyone,” he said. “I think if we can make progress on issues that young people are struggling with, I think it helps us straight across the spectrum.”

Not only does Allam believe that the Vancouver Liberals have the most substantial platform, but he also thinks that he has “put together the most substantial group of candidates assembled in a generation.”

“We got the most diverse team of all the parties, by every measure of diversity you could imagine. We built this broad-based coalition, be it [new] democrats, liberals, and conservatives.”

Allam has a history in politics, albeit not as a candidate. He is known for leading a number of political campaigns, including for Kevin Falcon’s BC Liberals (now BC United) and Ken Sim’s ABC Vancouver’s landslide victory four years ago. After ABC won, he was Sim’s Mayor’s Office Chief of Staff for about four months.

When Daily Hive Urbanized interviewed Allam in June 2025, shortly after he announced he would run for mayor, he said he was opposed to ABC’s high property taxes (which the party raised until 2026), its decampment strategy on Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside, and Sim’s previous proposal to remove the Park Board.

While Allam has run for various conservative parties in the past, his platform doesn’t necessarily look like it was penned from any ideological political background, with social support measures like free public Wi-Fi in the Downtown Eastside, a property tax exemption for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank’s Vancouver facilities, and food hubs in vacant City-owned spaces offering affordable groceries and support.

But he says his political values haven’t changed. He said he believes in creating a world-class, competitive economy, with wage equity, and using some of that wealth to pay for world-class social programs.

“Somewhere along the line, the Conservative Party has now become about freeing ostriches. I’ve lost the plot line in terms of their direction and where they’re going,” he said.

SkyTrain to UBC and building more housing

Allam called it a “crying shame” that neither Vancouver nor the Province has yet to connect UBC to Vancouver by rail.

Currently, the Millenium Lane is under construction between the existing VCC-Clark Station and the new Arbutus Station. This new leg of the SkyTrain is expected to open late next year, with the 99 B-Line bus service to complete the remainder of the journey to campus.

The Provincial government has deferred to the timeline set by TransLink’s Mayors’ Council, which means it wouldn’t go forward until the first half of the 2030s, despite the fact that it was a promise in the BC NDP’s 2022 campaign platform.

But shortly after Premier David Eby called a snap election in late September, Allam has called on B.C.’s provincial political parties to commit to extending the SkyTrain to UBC.

He also wants the provincial government to set out the legislative steps needed to bring UBC and the University Endowment into the City of Vancouver’s control, so that he would get the zoning authority to build a new “innovation corridor.”

Further, he pointed out that the SkyTrain is the “single biggest opportunity to get cars off of roads and reduce GHG emissions.”

He said that the city could help contribute to the funding of the project through density bonuses, which are when a development is allowed to build more density than zoning permits (like additional units) by paying a fee to the municipality. Housing developers have criticized hefty municipal fees and attributed them to slowing down their ability to build.

But Allam said he would speed up building in the city by replacing the Vancouver building code with the B.C. building code, which he said does little but “adds a tremendous amount of cost.”

While he said that the Vancouver building code used to have higher environmental standards than the B.C. building code, the latter has almost caught up.

He would also merge the 12 departments that housing approvals go through in the City of Vancouver into just one, in order to save time, as well as review old bylaws and get rid of any that conflict with each other.

“All these three things that I just mentioned are dramatically adding a tremendous amount of cost and time to each project,” Allam said.

Jobs and economy

Just six per cent of Vancouver’s land base is industrial, which Allam said means that small businesses move to cities like Burnaby or Surrey once they hit a certain point of growth, due to lack of space in the city.

“So whatever precious industrial land we have, we must keep it,” he said.

Allam said he’d bring back the Vancouver Economic Commission, which the ABC-led municipal government dissolved in 2023, after the Metro Vancouver Regional District created a new regional investment attraction agency called Invest Vancouver. Since then, however, Invest Vancouver has faced uncertainty due to political infighting among municipal governments.

“We’re probably now the biggest city in North America that doesn’t have its own economic development corporation,” said Allam.

He said he’s seen a number of corporate jobs, related mostly to the resource sector, move to cities like Calgary and Edmonton.

Allam also wants to create an artist land reserve, as he said artists are critical to the city’s tourism economy and part of the “creative digital future,” in areas like video games.

He added he’d also try to reduce the amount of time it takes to get a business permit.

Public safety plebiscite

Like many of the mayoral candidates, Allam has been very vocal with his criticism regarding the public safety plebiscite that Ken Sim and ABC voted through council in the summer.

When Vancouverites get their ballot, they will have the option to vote on whether or not they’re in favour of the City strengthening its laws to forbid open-air hard drug use in public spaces, and if they support the City asking the Province to convert portions of the old St. Paul’s Hospital into a medical facility with acute voluntary and involuntary care beds.

Allam pointed out that it is non-binding, that it’s already illegal to smoke hard drugs in public areas, and that the old St. Paul’s building has already been sold and isn’t seismically safe.

He also called opening a medical facility with involuntary care “a prison.”

“I don’t think we’re going to revitalise our downtown core by building a prison at the edge of Davie Village and at the edge of our business district, right across from a five-star hotel [the Sheraton] Wall Centre.”

Allam and the Vancouver Liberals are running against four other major contestants: Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver, Pete Fry for the Green Party of Vancouver, Rebecca Bligh for Vote Vancouver, and Colleen Hardwick for TEAM for a Livable Vancouver.

With files from Kenneth Chan