Pete Fry says he is the 'antidote' to Ken Sim if elected Vancouver's next mayor
Pete Fry is running to be Vancouver’s next mayor — and he said he has a vision of the city achieving its “very best.”
Fry, mayoral candidate for the Green Party of Vancouver, has a platform that addresses housing, transportation, the economy, and community safety.
As a two-term City Councillor, he said he’s worried that people are struggling with quality of life in Vancouver and feeling like they don’t belong.
Daily Hive Urbanized sat down with Pete Fry ahead of the Oct. 17 municipal election, where he discussed the issues Vancouver is dealing with, addressed some of the attack ads targeting his voting record, and shared how he would change the city’s course.
“We live in one of the best cities on the planet, and so let’s lean in on that, and let’s deal with the issues of affordability. Let’s deal with the issues of community safety. Let’s deal with the ability for folks to raise families here, or for old people to age in dignity here. And let’s work on those solutions together.”
Further, Fry said he’s been hearing on doorsteps that “a lot of people just don’t like Ken Sim” and that he’s the best shot at winning against the incumbent mayor.
“If you’re dissatisfied with the last four years and where things are going with Ken Sim, then I’m the antidote to that.”
Fry said one of his biggest concerns about the current state of Vancouver is its governance, and he believes that many of the city’s issues stem from poor governance and a lack of transparency and accountability.
“Under the Vancouver Charter and Local Government Act, we‘re supposed to conduct ourselves in a certain way, and I don’t see that happening.”
He pointed out that ABC Vancouver had put forward a motion to suspend the Integrity Commissioner, as well as the party’s “inappropriate relations with the police board.” For example, the Vancouver Police Board learned about Task Force Barrage, an initiative to tackle organized crime in the Downtown Eastside, in a media announcement.
“For me, a lot of it stems from good governance,” Fry said.
Fry’s response to attack ads
Pete Fry is up against four major opponents for the mayor’s seat: incumbent mayor Ken Sim with ABC Vancouver, Rebecca Bligh with Vote Vancouver, Colleen Hardwick with TEAM for a Liveable Vancouver, and Kareem Allam with the Vancouver Liberals.
Out of all of the major mayoral candidates, Fry has been the most targeted by ABC Vancouver attack ads, many of which have questioned some of his past votes as City Councillor.
“None of those are really accurate representations,” Fry said.
“But I would say that those attack ads also position me as the alternative to Ken Sim. And what I’m hearing on the doorstep is a lot of people just don’t like Ken Sim […] They don’t like his style of leadership. They don’t like what he represents. So if I am the adversary to Ken Sim, as presented in these attack ads, I’m also the antidote to Ken Sim,” he said.
For example, when Sim brought a motion to City Council to direct City staff to use all tools available to prevent an Overdose Prevention Site (OPS) at 900 Helmcken from opening, Fry voted in opposition. He also voted in opposition to extending the Granville Pedestrian Zone after the FIFA World Cup ended, as well as voted against the public safety plebiscite.
Fry said he wanted to keep the OPS because it is a health facility, and the City can’t ban healthcare services since access to healthcare is a Canadian Charter right. (Ultimately, the OPS site had so much backlash from nearby residents and businesses that the provincial government cancelled it).
“Given the existing street disorder in that area, clearly there’s a need for something like that because there are already people doing drugs on the street right outside of that facility,” Fry said.
He said he had proposed a framework to regulate operations like OPS and supportive housing.
“My rationale was like, look, let’s give some rules, give some conditions so that they’re well run, recognizing they are a health service, sure. But let’s not let them be a magnet for street disorder. Let’s make sure they’re clean outside. Let’s make sure they have access to washrooms, so people aren’t trying to shit in the doorway next door. Let’s make sure that they have access to space to be intoxicated, so they’re not like going in there getting a supervised consumption and then like stumbling around the street.”
Fry said the facility at 900 Helmcken was big enough that it could have supported this.
Fry defended his vote against the motion to extend the Granville Street Pedestrian Zone because of “transparency and accountability.”
He said council was presented with an emergency meeting and an emergency motion during their summer break, without knowing the subject matter.
“There was no agenda. It was literally two days’ notice. I happened to talk to folks from the downtown Vancouver BIA in the days before. They didn’t know what it was.”
The price tag to extend the Granville Street Pedestrian Zone was $5 million, and Fry said: “We can’t spend $5 million on a back-of-the-napkin, mayor’s idea.”
And like many of the other mayoral candidates, Fry called the public safety plebiscite “a cynical, get-out-the-vote play.”
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, as well as 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.
Fry pointed out that the plebiscite is non-binding, the new St. Paul’s Hospital already has 100 promised secure care beds and the old St. Paul’s is owned by a private developer. Further, he said open-air drug use is already illegal and that confiscating people’s drugs “is not going to fix them.”
“They’re not going to go cold turkey and like a miracle from heaven shined out, chorus of angels, and suddenly they’re sober. They are going to be more desperate for more drugs. They’re going to engage in risky behaviour to find money to get replacement drugs,” Fry said.
Fry suggested that this could encourage people to use drugs alone and face the risk of overdose and even death. He added that if they are carrying drugs for a dealer that police confiscate, they could face violence from gangs that control the drug trade.
How would Pete Fry address the housing crisis?
The Broadway Plan was approved during Fry’s first term on council. This plan allows for much greater density around Broadway, spanning a six-square-kilometre area and 500 city blocks. It is bounded by roughly 1st Avenue to the north, Clark Drive to the east, 16th Avenue to the south, and Vine Street to the west.
Fry said in his second term, ABC amended the Broadway Plan “to make it even more aggressive for new builds and eroding tenant protections to allow faster construction.”
“None of that has actually yielded shovels in the ground,” he said.
Fry said that they’ve seen many rezoning proposals and have “moved lots of paper” but aren’t seeing new homes getting built “in a meaningful way.”
He acknowledged that the construction industry has been hampered by a slow economy, U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, federal government policies to reduce immigration, and the foreign buyer ban. This has resulted in a slowdown in presales and has meant that developers aren’t able to finance their projects, as most banks require about 60 per cent of their units presold before they will finance a project.
But Fry said he sees an opportunity for wood-frame construction, which would support B.C. communities that depend on the forestry industry and are shaken by Trump’s tariffs on Canadian forestry products.
He said he would scale four-to-six-storey wood-frame buildings all over the city with the single-egress staircase, which allows for more usable floor space in a building. Fry said that wood frame is not only cheaper and faster to build, but also creates more “liveable” spaces that have bigger units and are ground-oriented.
“And they’re, I would say, more agreeable to the typical neighbourhood in Vancouver, where people don’t exactly love the idea of a 28-story tower on their block, but they could probably live with a couple of six-story apartment buildings.”
Since these buildings are much smaller in scale and size than a tower, they cost a lot less to build — and the developers therefore don’t need to borrow so much from a bank to get a project off the ground.
“Lenders are getting squirrely about the fact that these giant towers — 28-storey towers with concrete and steel that cost tens of millions of dollars to construct — nobody wants them. Nobody wants to live in them. Nobody wants to buy them, and developers are going underwater,” Fry said.
He said they could learn from mistakes from the now-axed Villages Plan in order to push forward wood-frame construction.
City Council cancelled the Villages Plan in July 2026 after it received fierce public backlash. It was supposed to introduce low- and mid-rise residential density of up to eight storeys in 17 areas across Vancouver, largely in low-density, single-family neighbourhood areas.
It would also have created a total of about one million square feet of new retail and restaurant space across the commercial core areas of the 17 villages.
Fry said that streets like Dunbar and West 10th are already struggling, and the City should “fix” those high streets before introducing more competition. Further, the Villages Plan didn’t address the uniqueness of communities and neighbourhoods.
Supporting renters
The Vancouver Greens platform also includes bringing back the Renters’ Office, which ABC Vancouver closed by the ABC-majority City Council in January 2023 due to low usage, after handling about one call per day.
But Fry said the intention of the Renters’ Office was broader than that: it was also supposed to keep track of permits. For example, he said that if a landlord kicked out tenants for renovation, but it turned out they weren’t renovating, the Renters’ Office would be a mechanism to cross-reference.
With over 50 per cent of Vancouver’s population renting, Fry said the City has a responsibility to make sure their policies are responsive to renters, and that they enforce things like standards of maintenance, tenant relocation and protection policies, and communicate with renters.
“We have an open line of communication with every freaking developer in the city, and the Urban Development Institute, and the Urban Land Institute, and Landlord BC. We talk to all those guys. They have the ear of planning staff, and they have the ear of council. The renters do not.”
“And I think that we have a role and a responsibility to ensure that we are creating policy that is informed by the experience of renters. That we are being cognizant of affordability and displacement and all those things.”
Streets and transportation
Another major component of Vancouver Green’s platform is converting 11 percent of Vancouver roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and green space.
Fry said this is a priority on their platform as they recognized that if the City is adding a significant amount of housing density through things like the Broadway Plan, but not enough parks or other public spaces.
“Making those public spaces available for folks when they’re expected to live in smaller and smaller units is, I think, critical to livability. And it’s an opportunity to reflect that being a car-centric city is not necessarily to our benefit. We’re a geographically small city with a lot of density, and we simply cannot support the sort of old-school idea that everybody gets a car.”
This is why he wants both better transit and better infrastructure for cycling, rolling, and walking.
“We’re not saying war on the cars, but when you think about it, the private use of public space to park your car [that] isn’t necessarily being paid for, depending on what neighbourhood you hope you live in. Should there be more value assigned to a public space?”
Jobs and economy
When Daily Hive Urbanized asked Fry about his plan for the economy and jobs, he first criticized Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver for the narrative that the city is “dying.”
Vancouver is Dying is a film that former journalist Aaron Gunn produced about the city’s drug crisis, which was released during the 2022 municipal election cycle.
Fry said ABC Vancouver is “continuing with that same narrative today.”
“I don’t think that’s helping us. I don’t think that’s helping us attract capital and business and jobs, and it creates this narrative: A: that we feel bad about ourselves. And B: that we’re scary to other people.”
“We need to get past that narrative and actually look at how we can attract capital to this part of the world.”
Fry said that Vancouver has “amazingly bright people,” a beautiful city, and access to the Pacific Ocean.
“We have the bones to be a far more vibrant economy than we currently are.”
He said the Vancouver Greens would invest in a navigator service at the City to help small businesses succeed, as well as address community safety and street cleanliness.
Further, he added that the City of Vancouver has $800 million in procurement per year, and that they should prioritize local hiring.
What does Pete Fry mean by community safety?
Fry intentionally uses the term “community safety” instead of “public safety,” the term that other mayoral candidates have used.
“The public safety narrative kind of [alienates] people and suggests it’s like us versus them, whereas I think community safety is like looking at it more holistically and compassionately.”
He said people on the street are often the least safe from things like bad drugs, theft, and mental health issues.
“Not to discount or gaslight real safety issues. Of course, small businesses are suffering from thefts and people have been assaulted,” said Fry.
“I’m not diminishing that in any way, shape, or form, but I think that the idea that we have people who are so exposed and vulnerable on the streets only magnifies broader safety issues. If we can manage that and give people a little bit more stability and tether them to reality a bit more, we will see a decrease in overall concerns around public safety.”
Fry said that the City needs to do a better job in managing people who are unhoused and prevent problems from escalating to things like major street encampments.
He said that it comes down to “places to go and places to be,” like daytime shelters, drop-in spaces, and places with storage if you’re unhoused. He said the City needs to step in more to help with these operations.
“As long as I’ve been on council and as long as I’ve been paying attention to council, mayors are always pointing the finger at somebody else, some other level of government to do it, and it doesn’t get done. So at a certain point, the buck stops here,” Fry said.
He said that if they invest proactively, they can get ahead of the issues like people being street entrenched.
“This is something that I learned working with vulnerable families in the Downtown Eastside, where they were getting into trouble because of food insecurity, or addictions recovery, or poverty, or kids with early learning difficulties.”
Fry added that managing the problems downstream (like homelessness and addiction) is costly.
“Those downstream problems mean more fire, more engineering and sanitation, and more police. So if we’re getting ahead of it and investing thoughtfully at the front end, we can mitigate the growing cost at the back end.”