Vancouver by-election: 8 am to 8 pm
I'm voting for OneCity's Lucy Maloney
From u/thinkdavis on Reddit:
Don't forget to vote.
Voting hours for all locations are 8am to 8pm.
Election day: April 5
You can vote at any voting location. Whether you're out running errands, spending the day with your family, or at work, you can vote at the location most convenient for you.
Learn more at https://vancouver.ca/election/2025/where-to-vote.aspx
Municipal by-election turnout is usually pretty low, which means that your vote counts for even more than usual.
I think there's three likely scenarios:
ABC's organization delivers the vote, and the two ABC candidates (Ralph Kaisers and Jaime Stein) are elected, giving ABC 10/11 votes.
The progressive vote turns out. In this case I think the most likely outcome is that Lucy Maloney (OneCity) and Sean Orr (COPE) are elected. The Vancouver District Labour Council has endorsed Maloney and Annette Reilly (Green), but Orr seems to have higher visibility.
TEAM for a Livable Vancouver (the housing-skeptical party) gets their vote out. In this case Colleen Hardwick and Theodore Abbott are elected.
TEAM didn't do well in the 2022 election, with Hardwick getting just 10% of the vote. I really don't want to see Hardwick back on council - she's a solid No vote on housing and she's hostile and intemperate to boot.
I think it'd be good to have more opposition councillors than just Pete Fry, so I'll be voting for Lucy Maloney, who is pro-housing. Maybe Sean Orr or Annette Reilly.
In particular, Lucy Maloney has an op-ed on housing which really nails it. We have people who want to live and work here, and other people who want to build housing for them. We have limited land, so we need to build up. But there's always tremendous local opposition (exemplified by TEAM), even when you're talking about a large parcel of land that's mostly empty, like the Jericho Lands. The result is a terrible housing shortage, resulting in people being forced to move away; and massive pressure to build more housing where apartment buildings already exist, again resulting in displacement.
As area plans go, the Broadway Plan surely is ambitious: nearly 140 projects in the development pipeline, representing tens of thousands of units. It is not a secret that Vancouver suffers from a profound shortage of housing, and more homes are a good thing.
But the Broadway Plan area is full of renters, many of whom live in low-rise apartment buildings with relatively affordable rents thanks to long tenures.
An area resident may be forgiven for thinking: yes, we need housing. But why does all of it have to be built here?
The answer is a simple one. With only a few exceptions, like the area around certain Skytrain stations, it’s only legal to build a new apartment building on top of an older one. And there are lots of apartment buildings in the Broadway Corridor.