Opinion: Will the real OneCity Vancouver party please stand up? | Daily Hive

OneCity Vancouver candidates for the 2026 civic election. (OneCity Vancouver)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by David Fine, who is an award-winning filmmaker and Vancouver resident. He writes on political issues and manages the 10,000-member VanPoli Facebook page.

While OneCity Vancouver’s William Azaroff was still running for mayor, I had the opportunity to meet him for coffee and a conversation about housing, alongside urban design professional and University of British Columbia professor Penny Gurstein.

I’ll be honest: Azaroff was initially a little hesitant about meeting me because of the views I had shared online about OneCity. But I wrote to reassure him that I simply wanted an open conversation, with no agenda or intention of being confrontational. He agreed, we met, and I’m really glad we did.

We had a really enjoyable chat, and he was also interested in a recent presentation I had given at the Rio featuring short NFB animation. He was personable, interesting, and came across as open-minded. Much of what he said about housing resonated with me, particularly his view that residents need to be heard in the planning process. He also seemed to feel that a top-down approach was not the way to go.

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I was impressed with Azaroff and came away with a very positive feeling about what might be a refreshed take for OneCity, but at the same time, I wondered how this would dovetail with the positions clearly expressed by the party’s sole sitting city councillor, Lucy Maloney.

At a recent all-candidates meeting, I noted that the Villages Plan had faced strong public opposition and was voted down by Vancouver City Council, with OneCity’s Maloney voting in favour. I asked the City Council candidates, including Maloney, whether they would bring the plan back. I also asked how they felt the Broadway Plan was working out and whether they planned to revisit it.

All the candidates said essentially that the Villages Plan was poorly conceived and was as good as history, except for the party’s only sitting city councillor, Maloney, who said, “I am proud to have voted in support of the Villages Plan and I would seek to bring it back.” Maloney has also publicly supported the Broadway Plan’s objectives and has not called for the plan to be repealed. This is not a surprise as it aligns with OneCity positions on development and housing, as per their platform: “build housing of all kinds everywhere.”

David Fine/submitted

OneCity’s close ties with Abundant Housing Vancouver (AHV) are also public knowledge. Two AHV principals recently sought OneCity nominations for the upcoming election. Neither was selected, but OneCity still appears to be the party of choice for AHV members. Peter Waldkirch, one of the two who sought a nomination, also attended City Council’s November 2022 swearing-in ceremony as the guest of then-OneCity city councillor Christine Boyle.

Waldkirch also spoke and played the accordion at City Council in support of the Commercial Drive Safeway redevelopment. His only complaint was that the proposed 43-storey project wasn’t big enough. I mean, if you’re going to support a development this massive, go big or go home, right?

More recently, Maloney was the only city councillor to vote in favour of the Villages Plan and the only one to vote in favour of a development at 121-129 West 11th Ave., which would have put a parklet in shade most all of the day. Maloney shared her view that shade is actually good for kids, and also shared her concern about too much sun causing skin cancer as a justification for her lone vote against sending the proposal back to City staff to look at ways to reduce the shading — effectively in full support of the application as it stood.

So, I might wonder how OneCity’s strong support for all developments, all the time, would sit with the more considered vibes I got from Azaroff. Having said that, he has now stepped down, but OneCity has another very intriguing candidate.

Lucy Maloney. (OneCity Vancouver)

Frances Bula. (OneCity Vancouver)

Frances Bula spent many years as an acclaimed journalist for The Globe and Mail and is a sharp, engaged observer of civic affairs. In our conversations, I’ve found her thoughtful and personable. Her Globe articles were consistently well researched and offered a considered, balanced perspective on civic issues. She strikes me as a strong candidate for City Council and is widely regarded as a “star candidate” for OneCity. But her views on development, like Azaroff’s, seem to differ from the positions commonly associated with OneCity and AHV.

In March 2025, Bula wrote in BC Business about the big concerns she has with the Broadway Plan:

“It has the flaws of a plan that was conceived in a panic and is focused on only one element of urban life.”

“I don’t think most people—even people who live within the plan area—realize how big a change it envisions. I’m guessing there’s a tendency to think, ‘Well, Vancouver has had lots of development before so this is just more of the same.’ It’s not. The Broadway Plan envisions packing more people into long-established neighbourhoods in a shorter period than any other time in the city’s history, and doing it with a lack of attention to urban design or neighbourhood improvement that is a startling reversal of past practices.”

“There was no attempt by planners to ask for any kind of design that would fit into these older neighbourhoods. No requirement for any kind of street-friendly townhouses at building bases—the kind that former planner Larry Beasley forced developers kicking and screaming to do in the Downtown developments along Richards and Homer, for instance.”

If I didn’t know that Bula wrote this, I would have attributed it to TEAM For A Livable Vancouver’s Colleen Hardwick. But Bula is running for OneCity and I can’t imagine how these views — views which many of us consider some of the biggest issues with the Broadway Plan — dovetail with OneCity’s voting record, activism, association with AHV, and Maloney’s apparent full support for the same Broadway Plan that Bula describes as “flawed” and “conceived in a panic.”

I thought OneCity might be moving in a new direction, trying to broaden its appeal and become more of a big-tent party. But it still appears to hold the same positions on some of the City’s most divisive development plans, including ones Bula has expressed serious concerns about.

That leaves me wondering how she would fit alongside other OneCity candidates if they were elected together. If voters give Bula the thumbs-up, I guess we’ll find out.

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