It’s official: Pete Fry is the Green party’s first Vancouver mayoral candidate in 30 years
Fry was first elected to City Council with the Greens in 2018, and in the current term, he has often described himself as a lone opposition voice to Mayor Ken Sim and the ABC Vancouver governing party. He says that role, combined with years of municipal experience, has prepared him to lead the City of Vancouver.
“I bring a lot of experience [to] this job. This is my eighth year on City Council. I’ve also worked on the Union of B.C. Municipalities for about eight years now,” he said.
That experience, Fry asserts, has given him a strong grounding in governance and the legal framework that shapes city decision-making.
“I’ve learned a lot about what good governance looks like and the rule of law in the context of local government and the Vancouver Charter,” he told Daily Hive Urbanized. “And so I feel I bring a lot of expertise to the job.”
Fry says his approach to leadership would emphasize collaboration over partisanship. “I feel I can bring people together in a plurality at Council and work with everybody as a leader, rather than as a partisan interest where it’s a sort of winner-takes-all approach,” he said.
At the centre of Fry’s campaign is what he describes as a “five-pointed North Star centred in community.” Public safety is a key pillar, particularly in areas such as the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown.
“I think that we all acknowledge that there are issues with the Downtown Eastside and with theft of stores and those kinds of things and public disorder,” he said. However, Fry questioned the effectiveness of current strategies, including recent policing initiatives.
While Mayor Sim and the Vancouver Police Department have deemed the Task Force Barrage, first launched in February 2025, to be a major success in tackling the underpinnings of organized crime, drug trafficking, and violence in the Downtown Eastside, Fry argues there have been some unintended impacts on dispersing illicit activity from the Downtown Eastside to neighbouring areas.
Referring to a recent visit to Chinatown with other city councillors, including ABC city councillors, he recounted a conversation with a local business owner.
“They were quite surprised when they learned that she didn’t feel Operation Barrage was successful because it really just dispersed the problem,” he said.
Fry added that the shop owner described long waits for police assistance. “When she had to deal with trespassers, the police non-emergency line told her it’d be like an hour before they could send somebody. So she didn’t feel that the investment in policing and Operation Barrage were necessarily yielding the results to better her situation.”
The mayoral candidate for the Greens says this points to the need for a different model. “We centred around community safety and recognize that no barista should have to clear somebody out of the doorway when they want to open the cafe or a shopkeeper have to deal with an aggressive trespasser,” he said. At the same time, he emphasized legal and human rights considerations.
“Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, folks have a right to be in our city, and we can’t just sort of push them along,” said Fry. “So we need to find a more thoughtful kind of approach to it.”
Other than public safety, the other four pillars in Fry’s five-pointed North Star are the economy, community services, community well-being, and community leadership.
Fry highlighted support for small businesses, including continued efforts to reduce red tape, as well as renewed investment in community services and well-being.
“I think we have a lot of need to reinvest in community infrastructure and things like community centres. And that’s work that I’m very passionate about that’s falling behind the wayside, frankly,” he said.
Daily Hive Urbanized asked Fry whether advancing the long-delayed redevelopment of the community and recreational facilities found at the Britannia civic hub in the Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood would be a key priority for him.
In October 2023, Fry raised the issue of the need to find a way to proceed with the redevelopment of building a new Britannia aquatic centre, ice rink, community centre, and other facilities.
In Fall 2025, the municipal government shared in an internal memo that City and Vancouver Park Board staff are restarting the preliminary planning process for the redevelopment after a long pause. However, with other pressing priorities to revitalize other aging community and recreational facilities elsewhere in the City, Britannia might not get the attention it needs until the 2030s under potential current timelines.
“That’s an active file that I’m currently working on,” he said, noting recent meetings with senior City staff. “I think there’s a clear path ahead to revitalize Britannia in a timely way so we can address some of the deficiencies.”
“We have community centres like Britannia, like RayCam, you know, throughout the city, you know, Renfrew, Thunderbird, they need investment to support communities,” Fry said. With continued population growth and increased density, he acknowledged that community services are struggling to keep up.
The unofficial campaign period for the 2026 civic election is heating up far earlier than in previous election cycles, including the 2022 civic election, when ABC confirmed its candidates and began releasing its platform months ahead of other parties. This time, opposition parties and candidates are following a similar strategy — and doing so even earlier.
So far, Fry will be contending for the mayor’s seat against incumbent Sim, as well as Kareem Allam of the newly formed Vancouver Liberals civic party. Allam, a political strategist and consultant, led ABC’s 2022 civic election campaign and briefly served as Sim’s chief of staff. The Vancouver Liberals currently have two sitting elected officials on the Park Board and School Board, both former ABC officials and previously independents who joined the party in recent weeks.
City Councillor Rebecca Bligh, formerly with ABC, is also running for mayor under her new Vote Vancouver party, which is expected to make a major announcement on Feb. 7, 2026.
The OneCity Vancouver party will also be putting forward a mayoral candidate. The party is scheduled to select their mayoral candidate on Feb. 11, 2026, with William Azaroff and Amanda Burrows vying for the nomination. Both Azaroff and Burrows have also made very major campaign platform announcements in recent weeks.
In a statement following the Green Party’s announcement today, the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) welcomed Fry’s official nomination and said it is also considering multiple potential candidates for mayor under its own banner. However, COPE also called for a “unity mayor” among left-wing/progressive voters, citing an October 2025 public survey that showed strong support for a COPE mayoral candidate within that voter bloc in the political spectrum.
In the 2018 civic election, Fry, who is the son of longtime federal Liberal MP Hedy Fry, secured the second-highest number of votes among the city councillor candidates, just behind Adrianne Carr, who resigned in early 2025. But in the 2022 civic election, Fry earned the fewest votes among the 10 elected city councillors, earning 37,270 votes — just behind Christine Boyle’s 38,465 votes under the OneCity Vancouver party and ahead of Dulcy Anderson’s 33,985 votes under the Forward Together party.
Fry was previously unsuccessful in the 2014 civic election, the 2016 provincial by-election in the riding of Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, and the 2017 civic by-election for a vacant city councillor seat.
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