2025 BY-ELECTION PLATFORM
FIGHT FOR VANCOUVER
Vancouver doesn’t have to be this way.
Instead of a Vancouver that’s a playground for billionaires — we can have a city that’s on the side of the people.
Instead of rising homelessness, tent cities, and overdoses — we can have a solidarity city where every person matters.
Instead of a housing market that evicts us, exploits us, and beats us down — we can fight for permanently affordable housing in every neighbourhood.
Vote Sean Orr on April 5
FIGHT FOR HOUSING
Between 2016 and 2021, Vancouver lost over 47,000 affordable homes to rent increases and demovictions. [1]
🗹 Close the loopholes that landlords use to jack up rents. Sean’s first priority is closing the vacancy loophole, which allows landlords to raise rent as much as they want between tenants.
🗹 Stop demovictions. Affordable housing is being destroyed while city-owned land sits vacant and exclusionary mansion districts don’t allow any rental or public housing. Demolishing dense, livable, housing in a housing crisis makes no sense.
🗹 Buy apartments and turn them into permanently affordable public housing and co-ops. Montreal’s municipal government has done this to save vital affordable housing in their City, and we can too.
🗹 End homelessness with a tax on the mansions of the super-rich. A progressive property tax of 1% on the value over $5 million could generate enough money to end homelessness in Vancouver.
🗹 Continue to increase the Empty Home Tax. Apply a partial vacancy tax to the thousands of empty new builds which were exempted by Ken Sim, increase enforcement, and close the loopholes in the EHT that rich investors use to keep homes vacant.
🗹 Create a landlord registry to track rents and crack down on bad landlords who turn breaking the law into a business model.
🗹 Bring back the renters office – with new enforcement powers. If Ken Sim blocks us from bringing back the renters office – Sean’s office will be the renter’s office.
Over 2/3rds of people in Vancouver can’t afford the new market rate housing units that make up 84% of Vancouver’s 10-year housing targets. [2]
FIGHT FOR THE CLIMATE
We can’t get to the root of the climate crisis without addressing economic inequality and the power of the super-rich.
According to Oxfam International, the richest 1% is emitting more carbon than the poorest 50% of humanity combined. [3]
🗹 Protect people in Vancouver from the deadly effects of climate change. In the 2021 heat dome, 595 of our neighbours in BC died, including 99 in Vancouver, the majority of which were senior citizens.
🗹 Vancouver needs a climate defence strategy. With increasingly powerful storms, forest fires, heat domes, and other extreme weather events that are already here, we need both mitigation efforts and adaptation of our infrastructure for the climate chaos ahead.
🗹 Rejoin the Sue Big Oil Lawsuit. Ken Sim pulled us out of this lawsuit because he’s working for the elite. Big polluters have to pay for the climate crisis that made them rich. It’s likely no coincidence that one of Ken Sim’s top staffers is also the director of an Oil and Gas company.
🗹 Work towards fully-funded and free-to-ride public transit for all, starting by expanding free public transit to youth under the age of 18, building on the COPE’s recent success winning free transit for kids across BC with AllonBoard.
🗹 Get people out of polluting cars and into green public transit by improving accessibility and reliability of transit, including more routes, lower fares, more dedicated bus lanes, and higher levels of service. Work to reduce bus bunching and overcrowding, and work with advocacy groups to fight service cuts and restore vital bus routes such as the number 17 and 25 routes which have seen cuts both to frequency of service and the number of stops.
🗹 Support active transportation and cycling infrastructure such as protected bike lanes and flexible reflective bollards. Work to amplify community groups like Vision Zero and HUB cycling to increase cycling and pedestrian safety on roadways.
🗹 Block Ken Sim’s next attempt to enable burning methane gas in new builds, and support initiatives to retrofit electric heat pumps in existing builds. In November of last year, Ken Sim and ABC tried to take us backwards on climate to give handouts to the oil and gas industry by reversing the ban on gas heating in new buildings. Vancouverites came together and blocked it, but Sim has indicated he intends to try again at the end of the 2025. We will stop him.
🗹 Expand “libraries of things” and ‘circular economy’ initiatives that repair and recirculate goods like FreeGeek, the Vancouver Tool Library, and Our Community Bikes. If we’re going to transition from waste and pollution to a truly green city, we need institutions that enable sharing, repairing, and the recirculation of needed goods.
🗹 Honour Indigenous rights, knowledge, and voices on climate. Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall coined the concept “two-eyed seeing” as a way to integrate the best insights from both western and indigenous traditions in pursuit of justice and sustainability. Indigenous peoples have always protected, honoured, and stewarded these lands and waters, and they lead climate resistance around the world. Sean Orr will fight to ensure the City’s climate policies respect this.
🗹 We need to put climate at the core of what we do. There’s only one planet. We need to aim for governance that causes Vancouver to not only meet our IPCC GHG targets and timelines, but to beat them entirely. The billionaires backing politicians like Ken Sim and Donald Trump are sacrificing our children and grandchildren’s future to enrich themselves. Sean Orr will fight for civic governance that takes the long view, and protects our planet and our local greenspace for future generations.
🗹 Vancouver needs to demonstrate a new way forward, and push for global action. We don’t need empty greenwashing or slogans- we need to audit the environmental impact of our city, mitigate harms, and work with experts to transition towards an ecologically-grounded civic government. Then we use our status as an international city to call for global change.
While the public was largely made aware of the real threat of climate change in the 1980s, we know now that the fossil fuel industry knew about the environmental impacts of burning oil and gas as early as 1956. [5]
Instead of working to address the impending crisis, Big Oil responded by funding disinformation and misleading the public, wasting critical time for our planet to make more profits for rich investors. [6]
FIGHT FOR INTEGRITY
Around the world, billionaires are buying polticians and elections to make the world work for them instead the rest of us.
We can fight back and take democracy back from the billionaires.
🗹 COPE always rejects donations and gifts from developers and big business. In the 2022 election, COPE returned three $1,000 cheques sent to our campaign from Concord Pacific. City Councillors getting perks like tickets to Cirque du Soleil is a conflict of interest. COPE can’t be bought.
🗹 Establish a lobbyist registry and push fossil fuel and big business lobbyists out of City Hall. Our public servants should be politically independent from the influence of the ultra-wealthy.
🗹 Reverse ABC’s attacks on public democratic processes. Increase time for comment at council, and allow for follow-up questions. Make City Hall an open and welcoming space for the public. Sean Orr and COPE are committed to working with communities to hold Town Hall style meetings throughout the city.
🗹 Protect and empower the Integrity Commissioner. Ken Sim has repeatedly tried to undermine and suspend the vital work of the Integrity Commissioner. Sean Orr will fight to restore and defend integrity at City Hall.
🗹 Protect and strengthen our Park Board. Our elected park board has an essential role in protecting our public land from city councils that do not have integrity. We need to strengthen the independent park board, increase collaboration between the Park board and City Council, and make more of Vancouver’s 100+ “temporary” parks permanent.
🗹 Improve Vancouver’s civic democracy: Restore Voter Enumeration (door-to-door voter registration) in Vancouver. In the 1970s, Vancouver used to register people door-to-door in advance of elections. Right now we rely on the provincial voters list, and renters are most likely to miss notices of elections. Voter enumeration would ensure an up-to-date voters’ list, create union jobs, and promote participation in local democracy.
🗹 Eliminate extra votes in Vancouver elections for non-resident property owners. Believe it or not, non-resident property owners can register to vote in Vancouver municipal elections. That means a property owner who lives in West Vancouver can vote twice- once in each municipality. Sean Orr will fight to eliminate this extra vote for the rich.
🗹 Push the province to implement civic voting rights for Permanent Residents. In 2017, Vancouver City Council heeded COPE’s call and passed a motion to expand voting rights to people who are Permanent Residents, but the Province of BC has so far refused to enable it. Permanent Residents live here, work here, and pay taxes here. Denying them the right to participate is wrong.
🗹 Stand up for democracy and public participation. We owe it to residents to give them a voice at City Hall between elections. We should expand and democratize advisory committees, encourage public access to City Council chambers, improve and disseminate livestreams of meetings, and improve overall transparency of governance. Democracy matters.
FIGHT FOR JUSTICE
Billionaire-backed parties around the world are scapegoating immigrants, trans kids, and drug users to hold onto power and enrich themselves.
Now is not the time for 'nice.'
Now is the time to fight.
🗹 Become a real city of reconciliation. No empty slogans. We have to walk the walk on UNDRIP to earn that title. We need to address anti-Indigenous racism and bias in institutions, support the development of Indigenous land trusts, and work with host nations and urban Indigenous groups to ensure Indigenous voices are always reflected at City Hall.
🗹 Support our pools, recreation facilities, and public services with the funding they need. The annual Vancouver police budget has been increased by almost $100 million under Ken Sim, while at the same time he’s cutting green bin pickups, there are huge lineups at the city’s pools, and planned community centre upgrades are being halted. Let’s prioritize and invest in people and in the social infrastructure that every neighbourhood needs and deserves.
🗹 Expand affordable childcare spaces, and especially $10/day spaces in Vancouver. Too many families in Vancouver are commuting to Burnaby or Richmond to access childcare. It’s bad for families, and it’s bad for the environment.
🗹 Support increased funding, hours, and wages at the Vancouver Public Library, and support VPL workers. Push for library worker representation on the Vancouver Public Library board. Libraries are essential social infrastructure and we need to be expanding the City’s libraries – not squeezing their budget and forcing reductions in opening hours and staffing cutbacks.
🗹 Expand existing health and affordable meal programs and establish community kitchens. Expand community gardens, seed sharing, food storage, and facilitate skill sharing and training. Vancouver should beworking towards food justice, empowering neighbours to build networks of solidarity and increase food sovereignty.
🗹 Support peer-assisted care teams (PACTs) to intervene in mental health crises without involving police. We can reduce costs and free up funds for vital public service by providing alternatives to police as first responders to situations for which they are not qualified.
🗹 Apply a disability justice lens to city policies, systems, services, funding, and structures to make Vancouver a welcoming place for people with disabilities.
🗹 Don’t back down on the value of safe supply and harm reduction. Shame on any politician that blames half-baked decriminalization pilots for the deadly effects of prohibition. It’s a weak person who sells out or scapegoats the vulnerable. Every human being matters. Sean will continue to stand up for life-saving interventions in the drug poisoning epidemic.
🗹 Push back against hate. Fight for justice. Vancouver is for everyone. Sean Orr will always stand up for people that are targeted and scapegoated. Sean will fight back against transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, ableism, islamophobia, racism, and all forms of discrimination and exclusion. He will never be afraid to stand up for what is right.
Vancouver doesn’t have to be this way.
We can fight for housing. We can fight for the climate. We can fight for integrity. We can fight for public services. We can fight for justice.
Together we can build the city we need.
Together we can take democracy back from the billionaires.
Let’s start the process on April 5th.
Next year, we finish the job and Evict Ken Sim.
Sean Orr, COPE Candidate