'Don't be scared': Vancouver mayor-elect Pete Fry vows to be a moderate leader | Daily Hive

'Don't be scared': Vancouver mayor-elect Pete Fry vows to be a moderate leader for the new City Council

Vancouver mayor-elect Pete Fry at Vancouver City Hall on Oct. 20, 2026. (Kenneth Chan)

Three days after election night on Saturday, Vancouver mayor-elect Pete Fry is already preparing to take the reins at City Hall, where he will lead a largely new Vancouver City Council facing a very steep learning curve and immediate challenges, especially in determining the City of Vancouver’s 2027 budget.

When the new City Council is inaugurated on Nov. 2, 2026, its 11 seats will be held by five Green Party members — including the mayoral seat — as well as four COPE city councillors, one OneCity Vancouver city councillor, and one ABC Vancouver city councillor. No party has a majority.

Fry wants the incoming City Council to put its party colours aside, promising a more collaborative approach to governing as he prepares to tackle budget issues, housing affordability, and public safety.

In a wide-ranging interview with Daily Hive Urbanized today, Fry outlined his priorities for the transition, including bringing new city councillors up to speed, reversing restrictions on net new supportive housing and overdose prevention sites (OPS), and establishing a Community Safety Office.

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Fry said he began preparing for his new role on Sunday, the morning after election night, while also taking calls from Premier David Eby and beginning to assemble a transition team. This afternoon, he also joined Green Party of British Columbia leader Emily Lowan on the B.C. provincial election campaign trail in a riding outside Metro Vancouver.

With seven brand-new councillors joining City Council’s chamber — Annette Reilly, Stephanie Smith, Camil Dumont, and Bridget Burns of the Greens, as well as Chloe Leslie, Devyani Singh, and Solomon Yi-Kieran of COPE — Fry said he has already begun reaching out to discuss their priorities and prepare them for the decisions ahead that will come right after the inauguration on Nov. 2, including appointments to statutory roles.

He also offered reassurances to residents who are uneasy about the new City Council’s political direction, while making clear that he wants to draw on the experience of city councillor Mike Klassen, who was the only ABC member re-elected.

“Mike and I have known each other probably a little longer than anybody on Council. Mike and I go back decades. We already have a pretty friendly relationship. It got a little tested during the ABC supermajority, and that’s just how the partisan nature of things works. But I’ve been super clear that I don’t intend to run a hyperpartisan council. In fact, I really would like everybody to almost drop their colours as we get into Council, and let’s just focus on how we’re going to work for the betterment of the city,” mayor-elect Fry told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“Mike brings a great deal of strength and institutional knowledge. He’s been at the table at Metro Vancouver Regional District […] so I’m going to be leaning on Mike for a lot of stuff, because again, I have a brand-new Council. Mike has a lot of experience, and I know Mike can be a pretty reasonable guy.”

Alongside Klassen, COPE’s Sean Orr and OneCity’s Lucy Maloney are the other returning city councillors. Although he is new to City Council, Dumont also brings some municipal experience, having served as a Vancouver Park Board commissioner from 2018 to 2022.

Despite his criticism of the outgoing administration of Mayor Ken Sim, Fry said he does not plan a sweeping reshuffle of ABC’s appointed leadership of City staff outside the mayor’s office. He also wants to preserve worthwhile work, including efforts to reduce red tape and improve permitting.

Fry has already selected Dominique Damian-Wallace, a lawyer and a key member of his party’s election campaign, as the chief of staff for his new mayor’s office.

When asked whether he would retain Donny van Dyk, who became Vancouver’s city manager in September 2025, Fry signalled that he fully plans to keep him in the role. As the City’s top bureaucrat, the city manager effectively serves as the municipal government’s CEO, overseeing the day-to-day administration and reporting to the mayor and City Council, who function much like a board of directors, with the mayor as the board chair. The City manager executes the directions of City Council.

Fry expressed confidence in van Dyk’s professionalism and recalled him describing the position as his dream job when he was first hired — the culmination of a career working in municipal governments across British Columbia, including his previous role as the city manager for the City of Delta.

He acknowledged that their working relationship would differ from the relatively limited access and arrangement under ABC’s supermajority, but expressed a willingness to work with van Dyk and give him an opportunity to serve the incoming administration.

“I believe Donny’s a professional, and we’re going to work together,” he said. “I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, for sure.”

Fry met with both van Dyk and Vancouver Police Department chief Steve Rai yesterday.

As for Josh White, who was appointed the City’s director of planning and general manager of planning, urban design, and sustainability in the middle of ABC’s term, Fry said they had not yet spoken since the election. He noted that he was still working through a very large volume of correspondence since winning the election.

White is the City’s chief planner, and he leads the team that provides recommendations to City Council on development strategies, housing policies, area plans, and building development proposals. This role is absolutely crucial for delivering on housing affordability and supply and economic development strategies.

Fry is the first mayor elected under a Green party banner in a major Canadian city and was the Green Party of Vancouver’s first mayoral candidate in 30 years. He received more than 98,000 votes, setting a new record for a winning mayoral candidate in Vancouver.

According to the Consulate General of Ireland in Vancouver, Fry is the first Irish-born mayor of this city since Robert Alexander Anderson in 1894. Through his mother, longtime local federal Liberal MP Hedy Fry, he has a diverse cultural heritage.

For clarity, accurate context, and brevity, the following is an edited and condensed version of the remaining questions and answers from Daily Hive Urbanized’s interview with mayor-elect Fry, with some related responses grouped by topic:

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: What do you think voters were telling you on election night? How much of this result was support for your vision, and how much was dissatisfaction with Ken Sim and ABC?

PETE FRY: In many respects, Ken gave me a tremendous gift early in the term by kind of icing me out and making me the voice of the opposition. It wasn’t really my nature, but it just is how it kind of played out, and it kind of gave me a lot of face time as the opposition councillor, and there was some agency there that it afforded me. I was certainly frustrated.

I would say that in the campaign itself, it’s no secret. We ran a pretty grassroots campaign with not a lot of money, and ABC had a ton of money, like a huge war chest, which they chose to spend on negative ads, the plebiscite, and those kinds of things. I think that, the juxtaposition, they had underestimated how unpopular Ken had become over the course of his term, and for a variety of reasons.

I don’t exactly know what; I think people had different reasons for why they were unhappy with Ken, but by juxtaposing me as his evil opponent kind of thing, I think it actually created a narrative where folks who were frustrated with Ken saw me as the panacea.

It’s like, “Well, if you don’t like Ken, and Ken doesn’t like Pete, then you must like Pete.” And, because we were faced with the negative attack ads and we couldn’t compete on that kind of level anyway, we really did focus on the positive, which is really how I feel about the city.

I have been frustrated ever since ABC was elected with the “Vancouver’s dying” narrative, which I think really did us a disservice in many respects. Like, obviously we have major problems, we all know that, but I think by focusing and fixating on that particular narrative, it led to a lot of capital flight, it scared away business, it scared away tourists, [and] it made us feel like this collective angst that wasn’t productive.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: You’ve now spent two terms on City Council. What have you learned about why City Hall sometimes struggles to deliver, and what can you now change as mayor?

PETE FRY: It’s a big bureaucratic institution. I think the transparency piece is so critically important. Good governance and transparency did get kind of overlooked in this last term in many respects because of the hyper-partisan nature and the kind of, “Let’s do it all in the back room.” I think that led to a bit of a chaotic kind of style of internal governance that, now that I’m pulling back some of the layers, realizing it was a lot more chaotic in the back room than we really realized. A high ethical standard that puts us beyond reproach is the key, and so this is exactly what I said to Donny.

What I said to [VPD] Chief Rai is, “I want to work and support the Vancouver Police and have them support us.” There were a lot of high-profile resignations from the police board over the fact that people felt there was a lapse in judgement and good governance.

vpd vancouver police steve rai pete fry october 19 2026

Vancouver Police Department Chief Steve Rai and mayor-elect Pete Fry meeting on Oct. 19, 2026, two days after the civic election. (Steve Rai)

I’ve spent eight years on the Union of B.C. Municipalities. I’m working with mayors and councillors from across B.C. and seeing how other mayors and councils work, and, indeed, even across Canada. Political party systems are kind of unusual. They exist here because we have an at-large system, and we need political parties to reach as many voters as we can across the city that are our size, but it doesn’t actually achieve the best results when we’re hyper-partisan.

What I’ve observed with all these other Councils is the mayor is just a cheerleader-in-chief who helps to lift up the entire Council. Different councillors have different priorities and passions and abilities, right? I want a Council where we all drop our colours, and we all focus on what’s good.

For example, Lucy Maloney and active transportation. She’s brilliant in that capacity, and I know she’s got a lot to offer, and I want to support her to do as much as she can. Mike Klassen’s super connected with the business world, so let’s help him fly on that. At the end of the day, Mike’s not doing this for ABC. I mean, sure, he’s probably planning their return in the back of his mind, but I know that Lucy, Mike, Sean, and everybody can put aside their political partisan thing to really focus on how we’re going to make this city great.

Let’s treat some of the symptoms and reattract. I really feel that we have to calm the kind of narrative about how some of the other West Coast cities are dealing with some of their street disorder stuff, and it’s not unsolvable. San Francisco and Denver are doing some great work, and they’re addressing it in the kind of way that I’m talking about, with a little bit of, “Let’s deal with the reality of the situation.”

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: The Greens will hold five seats, including your mayoral seat, leaving you needing support from another party to pass motions and policy directions. How do you plan on working with COPE and OneCity in Council?

PETE FRY: We’re quite similar in many respects. I think OneCity is more unabashedly following the “Abundant Housing” kind of narrative, and whatever that contains, which I think we can all agree that we want more housing that’s affordable and accessible to folks in our city and that meets the needs.

I think obviously COPE has more of a kind of radical agenda, and we may have to smooth some of that. But I have a good relationship with Sean […] We have a huge responsibility now. It’s like going from an opposition to a full collaborator in getting things done; it takes a different tenor of responsibility.

It’s easy to be the shouting in the wind from the opposition, like a one-man army fighting against the system. It’s another thing when you actually have real power and real decision-making, and Sean’s alive to that. We’ve already talked a bit about what we need to do to.

Vancouver just elected COPE’s Solomon Yi-Kieran, who decries the “cruel austerity of capitalism” and yells “we didn’t start this class war but we’re going to own it.”

Voters, is this what you signed up for? https://t.co/8DTFn8ZrAg

— Paul Ratchford (@P_Ratchford) October 18, 2026

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: On that note, with COPE holding four city councillor seats, and taking into account some of their platform commitments, the backgrounds of some of their members, and what they stated during their election night victory speeches, what would you say to voters worried it could push City Council too far in one direction on the political spectrum? Where would you draw the line if COPE councillors propose policies you consider too extreme?

PETE FRY: I don’t want to presuppose COPE coming up with really extreme motions. I mean, I have talked to Sean about how we have 31 motions already on deck, and we’re going to calm that a little bit. Again, this is part of the evolution and the conversations that we’re going to have.

I’ve reached out to all the councillors-elect, and we’re going to be having some meetings with them before we get sworn in to talk about priorities and objectives, and how we’re going to work together. We’re going to try to establish some expectations, but also, like, no surprises, right? We don’t need to do that.

Part of the style that I’m hoping to engender is to give access and opportunity to all the councillors so they don’t feel like they have to jump into the limelight because they’re going to get the limelight themselves. They don’t need to stoke outrage.

Again, I sometimes refer to it as the gift that Ken gave me by putting me in a corner and making me the opposition guy, forcing me to come out swinging because he backed me into a corner. That’s why I became the galvanizing opposition guy and the face of that, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can give opportunities to folks without having to resort to oppositional antics.

I know the Kennedy Stewart term was viewed [as] a bit of a mess, but folks seemed to gloss over the fact that half that term was managing a pandemic, which was a literal mess and absolute chaos and hard to govern. I will say that what Kennedy did get right in the very beginning was being very generous and magnanimous with appointments for everybody.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: Which ABC policies will you move to reverse first, and which will you keep? Is there anything ABC got right that you want to build on?

PETE FRY: Right away, we’re going to reverse the ban on supportive housing and the overdose prevention site. I don’t want to assuage people. It’s not about, like, “We’re going to open up a crazy OPS in Downtown Vancouver.”

I am very committed to ensuring that supportive housing, consumption sites, and overdose prevention sites are well run, and there are rules attached to them. As I’ve opined in the past, we have more rules attached to opening a bar than we impose on these sites, and that needs to change. We need to have standards of operation that make them a benefit to a community, not a burden, 100 per cent. I’m committed to that because I lived in the Downtown Eastside for a long time; I know what’s going on in that capacity, and I get why it’s frustrating and scary.

I also want to open up the books and have a big transparent budget. I have reached out to the councillors who are not returning and asked them if there are any specific priorities or projects that they were working on that they would like to see continue, like some kind of legacy capacity. I know they might need a little bit of time to get back to me.

I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater […] but there’s lots of things that ABC has done that are not disagreeable, and certainly continuing the work on, for example, wanting to continue eliminating red tape and permit time approvals. All of that kind of stuff is important. There’s more work to be done.

Things like the Web Summit Conference. Folks don’t know it, but actually, I was instrumental in getting the Web Summit. If you talk to Kassandra Linklater, she was like, “Yeah, the ball had been dropped, and we were going to miss the deadline.” So I leaned in and wrote a motion, and then also knowing that it was Ken’s jam, I was like, “Ken, here’s the motion I just wrote for you. It’s an emergency motion. We have to do it now.”

And because at the end of the day, even though we were in a bit of a toxic relationship, at the same time, for me, this was Ken’s thing, and I felt shitty to steal it from him. But also, he had the majority, so I couldn’t steal it from him if I wanted. But also, I just wanted [it] to succeed, right? It’s like, well, this is a great opportunity. We don’t want to miss the boat on it.

2025 Web Summit Vancouver. (Web Summit)

There’s a lot to digest, but I know that there’s some good work. [Outgoing ABC city councillor] Sarah Kirby Young is one of the most brilliant people I know, and [outgoing ABC city councillor] Lisa Dominato is an amazing professional and competent. I want to pick their brains. I want to see what they think we need, what they got right, what they got wrong, and where we can improve. They’re all also passionate about the City of Vancouver and want us to succeed.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: You mentioned continuing some of ABC’s work. How high on your agenda are keeping the Vancouver Whitecaps FC in the city and attracting a Major League Baseball (MLB) team, and what steps would you take to advance each effort?

PETE FRY: A lot of that happened inside the mayor’s office, so I don’t have that level of access. You know, with MLB, I have had some insights into what’s being proposed and what’s being planned, and my understanding is it’s really at no cost to the city. It’s just us facilitating and showing the encouragement.

I also understand that MLB is interested in Vancouver because it’s a gateway to emerging markets in China and India for television rights, and so they see this as a potential win-win, and that sounds great if people see the potential. I don’t really know to what extent the economics work, but other people do, and I know that there are some heavy hitters that are involved in this bid that see the potential. I’m going to defer to the experts on that, and it sounds like it’s a winner for the city.

On the Whitecaps, obviously it’s super complicated because, as you know, I appreciate the original initiative around Hastings Park. I don’t know that it’s as viable as, like, figuring it out at BC Place, but obviously PavCo is a Crown corporation, and they have their own kind of management structure and issues. It was a great venue for FIFA. It’s a great venue for the Whitecaps.

I worry a little bit that we haven’t had much buzz about the future of the Whitecaps lately, and maybe, if we’re too sleepy on it, we might lose. So that’s definitely going to be a priority file to lean in on.

Both MLB and Whitecaps will be catch-all priorities, for sure. But I will say these are priorities in supporting — not necessarily financially supporting. I’m not proposing any kind of big money bailout or anything, but I mean, I grew up watching the Whitecaps, and I was there at the championship game back in 1979.

vancouver whitecaps bc place august 1 2026

Vancouver Whitecaps FC vs. Los Angeles FC match on Aug. 1, 2026, the Whitecaps first home match at BC Place Stadium after the FIFA World Cup. (Kenneth Chan)

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: What property tax increase should residents and businesses prepare for in your first budget for 2027?

PETE FRY: We need to see. We need to open up the books, because I think that there was a bit of a mess made in this last zero-increase budget [for the 2026 tax year], so we’re going to have a bit of a correction, possibly. We do have inflationary pressures. We do have arbitrated wage increases. The police salaries are going to be one of them.

We’re definitely not going to be doing a zero. But I think, and again, these are conversations that I’ve had on the doorstep with a lot of folks, and I think people recognize that we have to pay taxes. We don’t love it, but we have to. I think where people get frustrated is when they don’t see the value of the taxes. So for me, it’s about demonstrating the value and making sure things are efficient.

I think there are some efficiencies that I’d like to see operationally that might assuage some of the fears because we hear all the time. People are like, “I can’t believe that’s how you used my money. What are you guys doing? You don’t seem to be very efficient in your delivery of services, or you’re duplicating things. You ripped up the road last week, you’ve paved it over, and now you’ve ripped it up again.”

I think those are areas that we need to focus [on] and improve. But right away, we just need to have a budget that works for the City, and then we’re going to start working on pretty concrete improvements.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: After the official election results are released tomorrow afternoon, how much weight will you give ABC’s non-binding public safety plebiscite results if they conflict with your own position? Would you do anything differently depending on the outcome?

PETE FRY: No, not really. I was pretty critical of the plebiscite. Because it’s non-binding, it was just kind of an opinion poll, and it was a bit of a cynical election ploy to get folks to show up to vote on some issues that really weren’t our purview.

The reality is the province is already committed to secure care beds in this city. We also have the new facility on Clark Drive and East 1st Avenue, and that one has been taking forever, as we approved it in my first term in Council. That’s being built right now. We also have the new St. Paul’s Hospital, where there will be well over 100 secure beds.

Artistic rendering of the VCH Withdrawal Management Centre and SUCCESS social housing at 1636 Clark Dr., Vancouver. (Vancouver Coastal Health)

As far as open-air drug use, of course, we don’t want open-air drug use. Part of that is finding solutions and giving people better places to go. That is part and parcel with things like eliminating the ban on consumption sites and supportive housing. We need more daytime shelter access for folks who are otherwise unhoused, which gives them access to services and toilets. We will be able to mitigate a lot of those things.

Public consumption of hard drugs is already illegal under the Controlled Substances Act and Canadian federal law, right? We don’t arrest people for it, because it’s largely seen as a health issue. It’s a waste of police resources. But we can certainly use that legal status to say, “You know what, we’re going to respect your Charter rights, your Section 7 Charter rights, so we’re not going to criminalize you to that extent.” But we are going to say, “You can’t do that there, because we have somewhere better over there [where] you can do it. And that’s got to be the key.”

We can’t singularly solve addictions and mental health as the City of Vancouver. It’s a larger societal issue. But I do believe that we can do more as a society towards prevention. That’s where we’ve really dropped the ball on prevention. I mean, it kind of is mind-boggling. I don’t know. I look at this, and I’m like, “I don’t know how anybody could not see that as a warning to stay away.” But people end up in different traumatic situations, like injuries and assaults. They end up in these situations typically through some kind of trauma and not necessarily their own fault.

But we can do a lot more on the proactive side. I guess, my big take is that we’re going to do proactive intervention. This goes back to before I was elected; I did a lot of community work adjacent to the Downtown Eastside. I worked with really vulnerable families that were struggling.

Oftentimes this would end up in the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development. They would come in and take the kids into foster care, and the kids wouldn’t thrive in foster. The parents wouldn’t thrive with their kids in foster. The family was broken. And then we started realizing, “Well, wait a second. What if we solved food insecurity? What if we solved the job insecurity? Maybe marriage counselling or addictions counselling?”

The kids have undiagnosed learning differences, and they’ve fallen through the cracks, and they feel stupid at school, so they go and drop out and join a gang. These are solvable problems if we get ahead of them.

If we can be proactive and address problems before they become problems […] the reactive solutions are hugely expensive. That’s the thing, right? Police, fire, engineering, sanitation […] those aren’t cheap.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: What should we expect to see accomplished in your first 100 days?

PETE FRY: They’re going to see a lot of clarity on the budget, and they’re going to see a vision for a Council that works collaboratively, a different style of governance in the City of Vancouver, and a really hopeful vision for the future. And immediately, one of the first orders of business will be this Community Safety Office that we’ve been talking about and is a cornerstone of my Green campaign. There’s also the CROW team that we’ve talked about where folks will have an opportunity to call for low-acuity, non-emergency situations.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: What’s your first new approach for housing?

PETE FRY: We’re in an interesting time because a lot of the housing targets that the provincial government has imposed and everything in the Vancouver ODP […] you know, nothing’s getting built.

We’ve approved lots of new housing projects, but nothing’s getting financed. Nothing’s getting built, especially in that tower form.

So I think that the work around the Villages Plan, as clunky as it was, should give folks a little bit of a signal where we probably need to go, which I think is four- to six-storey, wood-framed construction, single egress staircase apartments. We need to build a lot more of that because we can build that faster and cheaper.

It’s going to take a little bit of finessing with communities that don’t want to see the change. Again, I talk to a lot of folks, and they don’t love the idea of their neighbourhoods changing. But also, many of them recognize that their neighbourhoods are changing because the single-family detached house is not accessible to a lot of families, and so we’re seeing neighbourhoods hollowing out with no kids.

Illustrative concept of what a Village area could look like under the Villages Plan. (City of Vancouver)

The challenge with the housing piece also involves: how do we deliver amenities commensurate to that growth? We can do that through taxes, but that’s a tough nut to crack. Again, nobody wants to pay more taxes.

Certainly, when we’re talking about growth-related taxes to build new amenities that might take six years to actually construct, it’s such a long-game vision. A lot of folks struggle with it, but we’re going to have to really deliver on some concrete targets with amenities commensurate to growth and also recognize that a gentler form of density can get us where we need to go probably faster and cheaper and with a lot less angst.

Now, the parts of the Villages Plan that were the big fails were, I think, that it didn’t take, like, contextual neighbourhood planning. It could have done a better job instead of saying, “One size fits all. They’re all villages.” But no, they’re all different villages.

We can still have a little bit more dynamic planning that reflects those unique characteristics that people love about their communities, without necessarily giving them a veto. And so those two binaries that exist between the NIMBYs and the YIMBYs […] what a waste of time it has been because it has really distracted from the focus of how can we actually do this in a way that can respect the multiple kinds of perspectives; it’s not a binary. It’s not an us versus them.

We all need places to live. We all want communities that can support the diversity of incomes and people who can work in and support our communities.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: This was one of your key platform promises. For people who are unfamiliar with municipal housing bonds, how would your proposal work, and how could such bonds support building new affordable homes? What would housing bonds allow Vancouver to accomplish that it cannot already do through existing borrowing tools and housing partnerships?

PETE FRY: This is something I’ve talked to finance folks about, and in the investment world, […] and it’s legal under the Vancouver Charter to create.

I guess the best framing that I’ve given when I talk to folks about it is like war bonds. In the World Wars, people would buy Canada bonds. You would buy a bond with a modest return, and that would be like supporting the troops and munitions factories. That idea could be translated into housing, especially when we’re talking about leveraging City-owned land and using a collective bond that delivers a 10-year cycle bond with a modest return, so you’re not losing money.

You’re not making tonnes of money, but you’re supporting affordable communities for folks who may be your care worker as you age. There are lots of folks in this town with money, and they have investment portfolios that could actually be thrown a little bit into a bond and then also work with institutional investors that are looking at more of a long-term. So, it’s doable.

This concept still needs some work, obviously, to flesh out and come up with what the mechanics look like, but it is something that I think could actually be a useful solution in addition to, of course, working with senior governments. But as we’ve seen with the provincial government and their recent cuts to the Community Housing Fund, when suddenly if that’s all we’ve got as our leverage point for building housing that’s affordable, we’re in trouble because when it goes, it goes. So let’s diversify our own portfolio for delivering affordable housing and look at how we can leverage our own land and public goodwill.

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: Your platform promises a dedicated Festival Fund to help major public events facing rising costs and funding and sponsorship gaps. How would this fund look to be effective?

PETE FRY: The Festival Fund was a motion that I actually brought and was passed unanimously at this last Council. This was in the heels of so many events and festivals coming to us, hat in hand. Every other week, it was a different festival coming, like a bailout request. It’s in no small part because of the cost of policing, and this is something I talked to Chief Rai about, actually.

Sponsorship dried up, and provincial funding dried up. And these festivals are huge economic drivers for our city, and they also bring us joy and happiness. Lots of cities like Toronto and Montreal, in particular, have dedicated Festival Funds that are a predictable source of more generous grants from the City to support these City festivals.

So the ask was for our City staff to have a reasonable talk to the various festivals who are still coming to us for money, have something that’s a little bit more predictable than an ad hoc emergency fund, and recognizing that that’s what we gotta do if we want to keep them. We have to figure out a way to sustain them, and it might as well be us because nobody else is doing it.

Crowds at English Bay Beach during a Honda Celebration of Light fireworks show. (Honda Celebration of Light)

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: So with that train of thought, how committed are you to ensuring the three-night Celebration of Light fireworks competition returns in Summer 2027 after this past summer’s one-night of fireworks completely funded by the City?

PETE FRY: My struggle with, I mean, I might as well lump in the Granville Street Pedestrian Zone with this, too. It was like the pedestrian zone. The one night of City-funded fireworks this past summer wasn’t done in a very transparent way. This was how the mayor’s office was operating in the back room.

Similarly, the pedestrian zone went from $3 million to $4 million to $5 million. How’s that gonna work? Like, you don’t have a plan. That happened within 24 hours. Even the Downtown Van BIA didn’t know what the plan was. I saw them the day before. It was an emergency motion called with 24 hours’ notice, with no opportunity for the public to speak. The BIA didn’t really know what the plan was, and that’s why the costs were like that.

It’s not about “I don’t like fun” and “I don’t want fireworks” […] I’m not gonna lie, I’m not the hugest fireworks guy. But, I mean, I’ve gone and had a good time at the fireworks. It brings people joy. That’s fine. And if we have to lean in and support it, this might be something that we have disagreements at Council about. A lot of people don’t like fireworks, but a lot of people also like fireworks.

I think if there’s a good economic development case for saving the Celebration of Light, we need to continue to sustain it. Ideally, I think Ken’s intention was just that this was a bridge funding to allow them to get their house in order and do it again. But, in fairness, have a dedicated Festival Fund. I would expect that the fireworks would be eligible at some level, too.

Early crowds at English Bay Beach before the Honda Celebration of Light fireworks show. (Honda Celebration of Light)

DAILY HIVE URBANIZED: We asked Ken Sim this same question four years ago right after he got elected. What would you like to say to residents who didn’t vote for you and your party?

PETE FRY: Don’t be scared. It’ll be okay.

I’ll be connecting with a lot of groups that I think probably are a little worried about outcomes and certainty.

I’m a very reasonable and moderate guy at the end of the day, and I intend to bring that level of continuity. I recognize that we have a brand new Council and there are some [city councillors] that are very new and have some kind of radically seeming political positions, and we’re going to work to temper that a little bit and focus on good governance and good results for the City of Vancouver.

And, yeah, this could be awesome.

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