A field of eight contenders has taken shape for Vancouver's mayoral race, set to go to voters on October 17. Among those on the ballot is Mayor Ken Sim, who has put his name forward for another term in office. Whoever takes the helm at Vancouver City Hall following the next election will hold that office for a four-year period.
Ken Sim, running under the ABC Vancouver banner, took the mayor's office in 2022 when voters chose him over the incumbent Kennedy Stewart, who had sought a second term. A tally of 85,732 votes carried Sim to victory, and an ABC majority government took shape at city hall as a result. Centring his re-election bid on public safety — with plebiscite questions covering open-air drug use and involuntary mental health treatment among the proposals — Sim, a Vancouver native who studied finance at UBC's Sauder School of Business and graduated in 1993, told reporters that the administration had addressed public safety, affordability, and city rebuilding during its term, and that a further mandate would carry those efforts forward. Nurse Next Door Home Healthcare Services took shape as a joint venture he helped establish during 2001, and a decade later, he and his wife joined forces with a set of business partners to launch Rosemary Rocksalt Bagels.
Having joined city council in 2018 under the NPA banner, councillor Lisa Bligh now holds her seat as a Vote Vancouver representative. At the time, Sim held the party's mayoral nomination, with Kennedy Stewart ultimately claiming victory in that race. Disagreements over the composition of the NPA's board of directors led Bligh to withdraw from the party at a later point. In 2022, she stood as a candidate under ABC Vancouver — the party Sim had founded — and won a council seat that contributed to the majority the group secured at city hall alongside Sim.
At a news conference, Bligh — who founded Vote Vancouver after departing ABC — argued that housing costs are just one thread in a larger affordability picture, with child care expenses, transportation, and the everyday costs of running a household pressing down on families with equal force. Municipal governance has limited power over the pressures of raising children, yet the policies it sets can either ease or add to those pressures, she said. Bligh pledged to locate five parcels of publicly owned land for permanently affordable housing within her first month in office, a commitment she described as shaped by her background raising a family as a single parent in Vancouver. Her election to the presidency of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities came through a vote held during 2024.
Another candidate in the race previously served as the mayoral candidate's campaign manager for TEAM for a Livable Vancouver in the 2022 municipal election, having departed that party beforehand. In the 2022 race, Stewart and Sim took the top two spots, with Hardwick settling into the position directly behind them. In the April 2025 byelection, Hardwick placed third, with Lucy Maloney of OneCity Vancouver and Sean Orr of COPE both finishing ahead of her.
Hardwick's stated motivation for entering the mayoral race centres on reversing housing policies set by both the current and preceding councils. At a news conference, she argued that Vancouver's long-standing approach of upzoning land and permitting greater density in the expectation that market supply would bring down costs has not, in practice, produced the affordability gains that approach promised. Affordability in the local housing market has proved elusive for a broad share of residents and workers in the area. The group known as TEAM has called on policymakers at city hall to move beyond what it describes as an overly narrow focus on housing supply, while Hardwick herself spent the years between the mid-1980s and 2000 building a career in film and television, eventually establishing New City Productions, a company under her direction that brought dozens of screen projects to the region.
During the 2022 municipal race, Taran Allam built a profile among local politics followers through his work as campaign manager for Sim and ABC Vancouver; he now stands as a candidate for the Vancouver Liberals. His role shifted to chief of staff under Sim before his dismissal came through in February 2023. No details about the departure have been made public by either the mayor's office or Allam. A lawsuit brought by Sim names Allam as a defendant.
Allam, who founded the Vancouver Liberals in January, has pushed back against reporter questions suggesting his campaign is motivated by revenge, telling a scrum at Helena Gutteridge Plaza outside city hall that his sole purpose is drawing younger residents back to Vancouver and that he intends to pursue that goal daily — a statement from a man whose mother arrived as a refugee and whose father endured 11 months of captivity as a prisoner of war after serving as a colonel. His advisory work has spanned the offices of federal and provincial ministers, senior civil servants, and Indigenous chiefs and councils.
Pete Fry joined the Green Party of Vancouver's council contingent in 2018, taking a seat alongside Adriane Carr — who had already served multiple terms — and Michael Wiebe, who was making his first run for elected office. Carr stepped away from the position at the end of the most recent term, while Wiebe's 2022 bid for election did not succeed. A Strathcona resident, Fry announced his mayoral candidacy in January, stating that Vancouver's people warranted representation in keeping with their goals and expressing belief in the city's ability to meet them. He has also stood against a range of Mayor Sim's initiatives, including plans to dissolve the elected park board, pause construction of additional supportive housing, and remove the integrity commissioner, as well as registering objections to ABC Vancouver.
Before Fry entered public life, his professional background spanned community development, advocacy, and communications work as an illustrator and designer. He has expressed the view that, while the city held real strengths, its current direction had not been fostering unity among residents. Growing up in Vancouver after moving there from Ireland as a child, Fry put down roots in the Canadian city that have held ever since.
