Kennedy Stewart

Yeah, 2022 feels more like just not enough people excited for...

I didn't even vote for Kennedy Stewart in 2022 because I was just like, ugh.

Yeah, no, that election was a clusterfuck.

One of the really great things about the people's primary and the way that it shook out, and this was part of our theory of it in trying to like line it up, is that voters who feel too confused about who to vote for fundamentally will stay home.

But fundamentally, you can't get anything done unless you have five other votes on council, and Fry decided not to automatically have that.

So, you know, four to eight years ago under Kennedy Stewart, we had lots of – you know, dealing and votes that you didn't know how they were going to go.

You had sometimes paralysis around issues like the Strathcona tent encampment because you couldn't get lots of different sides to agree on things.

Over the last four years, we've had ABC Vancouver being able to do pretty much whatever they wanted, often decided in back rooms before it came up to council as well.

Well, I think obviously there's some immediate stuff that he can do to show that he can work with a lot of different groups and put them on his side.

The mayor has the ability to make all the recommendations around appointments to various boards, whether it's the library, whether it's the PNE, the art gallery, different committees, Metro Vancouver board where there's six or seven depending on how provincial reforms happen, appointments that he's going to have to make as well.

Anita Zanker was Kennedy Stewart's former chief of staff.

She lived through these sorts of deals and compromises that you have to make.

Well, we know what happened the last time that Pete voted to reduce safety the budget of the police.

When Kennedy Stewart was mayor, Horgan, as you well know, Horgan came in and said, no, I'm restoring that budget.

So, I mean, if we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

The director of policing did.

There's nothing in the plans for that right now.

Eight years ago he was able to rely on the support of Kennedy Stewart to make that a priority for TransLink.

Will he be as successful this time around? Metro Vancouver, uh, people have been calling for changes, reforms.

Daniel Fontaine was the-

It'll be a very interesting council to watch.

It's quite a bit different than the previous one, and it's definitely a lot different than Kennedy Stewart even had.

Pete Fry doesn't quite have the votes to do anything with his Greens, right? There's five of them.

So he'll need to either convince a OneCity, Mike Klassen, or some of the Cope to go along with him.

They could have been a spoiler.

I think his Most likely outcome is he steals enough votes from Sim that Fry pulls like the progressive vote together the way Kennedy Stewart did in elections past.

Well, I don't want to say that it's exactly what we hope for for a candidate, because hoping what happened to Kennedy Stewart happens to Vancouver again isn't necessarily what we want.

But I do think that definitely the best possible chance of of beating ken sim and and ensuring that we don't have to do this again the last four years the meme mayoralty the person to to best beat him is pete fry so if you are at all on the fence vote for pete fry

imagine eight years ago matthew You were like, you know where I'm going to be in 2026 is vote for Pete Fry.

You know him as the independent filmmaker whose 2022 documentary Vancouver Is Dying amassed more than two million views within weeks of its release.

The film became part of the political wave that swept then-mayor Kennedy Stewart out of office.

But behind the scenes, our guest was engineering the revival of a political party here in BC.

After being disqualified from the 2022 BC Liberal leadership race, he founded Common Sense BC, which helped rebuild the Conservative Party of BC.

That's part of it, but not the whole story.

Um, you know, when the last administration, uh, Mayor Kennedy Stewart and Councilor Pete Fry defunded the police, uh, service by $5.7 million-

They didn't defund it.

They held the line on it.

You're dealing with a smaller sample size.

You're, it is harder to make sure that you get all parts of the equation.

We had one poll that came out the day before the last municipal election that essentially showed a de facto tie between Kennedy Stewart and Ken Sim.

Was not the case whatsoever.