Vancouver's youngest-ever city councillor has specific transit projects in mind

When the new Vancouver City Council is sworn in on Nov. 2, it will have its youngest-ever councillor: Solomon Yi-Kieran.

Yi-Kieran, who turned 21 the day before the municipal election, ran for City Council with COPE Vancouver. They won their seat with just over 60,000 votes.

Over the course of the municipal election campaign, Yi-Kieran advocated for improved transit in Vancouver. They were active on social media, posting videos promising to fight for the SkyTrain extension to the University of British Columbia (UBC), building covered benches at every bus stop, and creating dedicated bus lanes.

Yi-Kieran said their passion for transit stems from two places: their father is a bus and Handy-Dart driver, and they themselves are a transit user.

“As a younger person, I use transit, and almost everyone I know uses transit basically daily. Most younger people cannot afford a car. Most younger people cannot afford to constantly be Ubering. And what you end up seeing is [that] transit is such an important thing.”

But Yi-Kieran said they haven’t seen transit be prioritized by elected officials, attributing this to most elected officials not being transit users themselves.

“Most elected officials [follow] the idea that it’s only going to be the wealthy homeowners who vote, so they don’t care about getting transit riders to come out and vote. They don’t care about actually making those promises and making those improvements,” Yi-Kieran said.

This sentiment is aligned with Yi-Kieran’s campaign slogan, which is included in the bio of their social media accounts: “We didn’t start this class war, but we’re gonna win it.”

@solomonxyk I’m running for city council with @CopeVancouver ♬ Assumptions – yasuhiro soda

Yi-Kieran said that in Vancouver’s history, they’ve “repeatedly seen” a government that serves the wealthy (who in turn support the government) but not the working class.

“We need to be a government that isn’t going to just serve the richest of the rich, the mansion-owning backers, the big money interests,” they said.

Yi-Kieran said that this phrase is “fundamentally about having a city government that is going to fight for and work for the interests of regular Vancouverites — and all Vancouverites — not just the wealthiest people in our city.”

Growing up in two countries and starting in student politics

Yi-Kieran grew up in both Canada and China — spending time in Victoria, Courtney, Nanaimo, Vancouver, Tianjin, and Kunming. 

“We were moving so that I wasn’t only getting one kind of cultural experience, and I was knowing both sides of my family, so that I didn’t lose any part of that,” they said.

Because of this, Yi-Kieran is fluent in Chinese, and said their upbringing also influenced their education choices later in life.

They said growing up in two countries showed them “just how different different parts of the world can be,” from urban planning to how people view government and society. They were motivated to study history at UBC with the goal of becoming a teacher in the subject.

“It led me to want to know how the world came to be the way that it was. And as I got older, I think, studying history also became a little bit of an idea of studying how things can be different and how things can change,” Yi-Kieran said.

While a student at UBC, Yi-Kieran got involved with student politics, running to be the vice president of external affairs for the student union.

Yi-Kieran cited some of their accomplishments. They led a campaign calling for the UBC SkyTrain, which included gathering 15,000 signatures on a petition, writing a unanimous council motion with Councillors Sean Orr and Lucy Maloney for the City to re-endorse the UBC SkyTrain, lobbying senior levels of government, holding a rally at UBC, and organizing a protest outside of the Commercial Broadway City Hall Station to mark the 18-year delay of the SkyTrain.

Yi-Kieran also worked with climate organizers across Canada to lobby the federal government and secure $40 million for youth climate jobs through the Youth Climate Corps. They further led student unions across B.C. to push against the province’s post-secondary review, and possibly prevent scrapping the two per cent tuition cap.

After the UBC SkyTrain rally, Yi-Kieran said they realized that “there was a lot of momentum with people who were tuned in on campus.”

“One of the things that kind of inspired me was the idea that I had a lot of momentum there. I had kind of built up a bit of a name, and if I ran, I could actually try to get young people to go vote. I could get them to get engaged. I could get them to get involved, and I think that very much did happen over the course of the campaign.”

In Yi-Kieran’s social media videos, they highlight their student experience in Vancouver as an asset, saying they understand certain things that other politicians might be out of touch with — like squeezing onto a crowded bus or barely affording rent in a basement suite.

The campaign

A big part of COPE’s campaign was its social media presence, which it used to inform people about issues in Vancouver and how COPE would address them.

“You can’t expect people to — when they have busy lives, busy schedules, they’re working jobs, they’re taking care of their family — to also have the time to research 55 candidates,” said Yi-Kerian. 

They said that COPE’s political campaign was also about building a movement.

“You have to be talking about the issues in a way that’s actually constructive, as opposed to just standing on a soapbox and preaching.”

Further, Yi-Kieran said COPE organized town halls to educate people on how to speak at city council about AI data centres (which the party vehemently opposes), as well as policy conferences where people could come to provide feedback and input on COPE’s platform.

What are Yi-Kieran’s priorities in council?

Since the election on Oct. 17, Yi-Kieran said that the COPE councillor-elects have “gotten straight to work,” researching motions, onboarding, and meeting with Mayor-elect Pete Fry and other city councillors.

“I feel like we are really jumping into it,” they said. “I feel very optimistic about this council’s ability to work together.”

Yi-Kieran said in the short term, they want to get started on the project to ensure that every single bus stop in Vancouver has a covered bench.

“We’re in a city where it rains 40 per cent of the year. We’re a city where we have a huge population of people taking transit. Forty-one per cent of seniors use transit, so it’s an accessibility issue.”

They also want to roll out priority bus lanes on several major streets — something that Vancouver City Council has already approved but has yet to implement.

“It is important that we show people that after years of government delays, after years of governments being slow to act, we’re actually able to make tangible changes and improvements to people’s daily lives, quickly,” Yi-Kieran said.

Long-term, Yi-Kieran wants to work with Mayor-elect Pete Fry, TransLink, and other municipalities to deliver transit service improvements.

While Yi-Kieran is clearly passionate about transit, they said COPE’s biggest priority is delivering affordable housing and bringing down the cost of living and rent.

COPE’s platform promises include a wide range of housing targets, including bringing back the Renter’s Office, tripling the empty homes tax, creating affordable public housing and co-ops, and taxing the wealth in mega-mansions.

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