Pete Fry unseats Ken Sim, will be Vancouver's next mayor

I love this city. This is a city that defines who I am. I've spent almost my entire life here and I'm very passionate about the opportunities of the city. You know, we're an amazing city that has given us so much. Poets and artists and musicians and things like Greenpeace. We have a huge creative energy here and it's a beautiful part of the world. I want to see us celebrate it and really enjoy it and I think that I'm very excited about my role as mayor leading a mixed council. to really do what we can do to better the lives of all Vancouverites and the economic opportunities and the livability and all the things. And what are your main priorities? What are you planning on doing once you get in the mayor's chair? Well, immediately I want to get some transparency around some of our accounting in the books because we haven't had a very transparent budget. So we're going to be obliged to deliver a budget quite quickly with the new council within the next 100 days. So I'd like to get some transparency on that so that we can make an informed decision and take a look at where the changes have happened since the 0% budget. And from there, we're going to start looking at how we can actually work on some of the more pressing issues, which to my mind are affordable housing, economic development, and community safety. And I think the community safety thing is one that I'm especially committed to because we have a lot of folks suffering on our streets. It's creating an unsafe environment and a perception of an unsafe environment, and we can do better, and we have to do better. So one of the criticisms of the ABC party and ABC council was the police budget, which has been ballooning over the years since ABC was elected. Is that something that you're going to take a look at again? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely called for an audit of the police budget. That'll be one of the things that we're going to take a little bit more of a look at. The reality is that under the recent administration, we saw a lot of political influence within the police board. We saw some high-profile resignations. So there hasn't been that degree of accountability and transparency at the police board. So that's also something that I'd like to look at. But recognizing, of course, that we are obliged under the Police Act to maintain a force of sufficient strength. we certainly had our hands slapped when we tried to enforce some sort of budgetary constraints on all our departments including the police back during the pandemic and so obviously you have to recognize that those limitations exist as well.