In 2022, businessman Ken Sim brought an astounding, unprecedented mandate to the Vancouver mayoralty.

The CEO and co-founder of the Nurse Next Door home care service led his upstart municipal ABC (A Better City) Party to an impressive victory. Not only was he comfortably elected, but all seven of his party’s candidates for council, all six of its candidates for the park board, and all five of its candidates for the school board were as well—and all of them in the top seven, six, and five spots. Think of it: his largely newbie team of 18 finished ahead of all 121 others on the ballot.

With that historic sweep, Sim said it was time for some “swagger” in Vancouver. Optimistic conservatives predicted a significant rightward shift at city hall, hoping that Sim would bring a more prudent focus on fundamental civic issues given he was promising to run the city as a fiscally responsible business. It was the arrival of, ahem, Sim City.

Less than two years in, things aren’t faring as intended, and the administration now faces serious and surprising questions about its principles and processes of governance.

Criticism is growing of a council increasingly impetuous, prone to sudden moves, impatient with public consultation, and seemingly prepared to serve the interests of developers over the community as it contends with a housing crisis. A team that was expected to implement the process-minded ways of Sim, the trained-accountant-turned-mayor, is finding mid-term that civic bureaucracies can slow even the mightiest mandate. “It takes forever to get things done,” a senior official sighed this week.

Worse, it has now found itself occupied with complaints about its conduct filed with the city’s integrity commissioner. As it took a summer break this week, Sim and his ABC councillors pressed pause while outflanked and immobilized by, of all things, a more powerful process that polices its conduct.

There seemed nowhere to go but up when Sim took ABC to power. Regimes of the previous decade had spent an inordinate time on extra-territorial fights—particularly against the TransMountain pipeline, even though it didn’t run through Vancouver—and support of a batch of international causes under the purview of the federal government. Meanwhile, the city was increasingly unsafe, a previous mayor’s pledge to end homelessness by 2015 was a town joke, a campaign to be the world’s greenest city was engorging the public teat, a decision to turn Vancouver into a sanctuary city was a moonshot, and developers and renovators were waiting unconscionable periods for permits to build and fix the simplest structures.

Tougher still, the City’s bureaucracy was laden by a 14-year recruitment binge of layer upon layer of officials and a bulbous workforce. Even if Sim was eager, unpacking all that will take at least two terms. (Time for a full disclosure: I ran for mayor in 2014 as the candidate for the Non-Partisan Association, and Sim succeeded me as its candidate in 2018. Both of us finished second, he by a mere 958 votes. When we lost, I returned to journalism, he soldiered on and created ABC.)

Sim has brought an eccentric style to the position. Few politicians dress quite so casually. Even for formal engagements, he usually arrives in a golf shirt and jeans; at a recent council meeting he donned a ballcap, t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers as if he’d dropped in on the chamber en route to the beach. He has proudly usurped a room down the hall from his office to install a personal gym. He plays AC/DC and The Police on his turntable at meetings. He shotgunned a beer at an outdoor community festival last summer. He is a bit of a 53-year-old fanboy when it comes to touting music and sports events: the Rolling Stones logo was emblazoned on city hall when their Vancouver tour date was announced; he went to this year’s Junos in Halifax because next year they head to Vancouver; and, unlike Toronto’s Olivia Chow, he has a blind spot for the economic toll that seven World Cup games will impose on the city in 2026.

Strangely, for a businessman who carted his focus on process into public life, a pattern has emerged not of conscious determination but of swift policy surprises: a hasty gesture to eliminate the park board; a reversal, with no public consultation, of a ban on natural gas as a heating and hot water source in new buildings; a willingness to permit development that would impede the so-called “view cones” many Vancouverites possess of the mountains on the North Shore; and now the determination to clip the wings of the integrity commissioner under his stated— but mostly doubted—intention to improve her mandate. In all these cases, the surprise factor has worked against the deliberateness Sim’s raised expectations had promised.

Much of this would be chalked up as a rounding error were the City’s financial position not a hot mess. But it still is, and the effect of these policies has been to compound the public’s frustration that greeted Sim when he took office, not relieve it.

Vancouver was recently identified as the world’s third-most-expensive city in which to live. In the most recent data from the third quarter of 2023, the median price for a house was 13.3 times the average annual income in the city. Sim set out to address affordability, but it has not gone smoothly.

A commitment to manage and potentially lower taxes has been an abject failure: a 10.7 percent residential property tax hike in 2023 (the largest ever) and 7.5 percent in 2024 (lowered, in part, by sizeable increases to city fees to pick up some of the expense). A task force to find what Sim thought would be “hundreds of millions” in quick savings found chickenfeed (a task force on the task force’s long-term recommendations is underway). A plan to sell naming rights to parks and other civic assets that Sim predicted would raise “$100 million to $150 million” hasn’t raised squat.

The previous civic administration paid scant attention to street safety—open drug use flourished, as did casual vandalism and theft in the downtown—and it proved a large factor in its downfall. Sim campaigned to hire 100 new police officers (it’s taking time) and 100 mental health nurses (even though the funds would be transferred to provincial health authorities), but at an estimated $16 million expense. To be fair, the city’s “crime severity index” has indeed declined, but as one senior civic official told me, “it’s perception that matters more,” meaning there is no political dividend as of yet.

Vancouver has the country’s only park board to steward the city’s 230 parks, community centres, and recreational facilities. Sim mused some time before the 2022 election that he’d dismantle it. But as the election approached, he went silent on the plan and ran a slate of uniformly successful park board candidates. Skeptics of the plan believe putting the parkland under council control will lead to the conversion of parks to housing and even sell-offs to developers, and nothing has been said to dissuade those fears. Everyone thought the threat of dissolution of the board was a thing of the past. But when it was apparent the board would balk at direction from city hall, Sim determined it was suddenly time to shut it down. It was reported that park board commissioners were given a day to come onside or leave the party—three of six left and sat as independents, meaning the net outcome of this maneuver is that ABC lost its majority control of the board.

In order to demolish the board, the province needs to amend the unique Vancouver Charter that establishes the governance framework of the City. The premier has said he’ll deal with it after the October election. On this borrowed time, commissioners are making themselves unpopular with their former boss, going so far as to complain to the integrity commissioner about his office’s conduct.

It was that complaint that critics have connected to a rash move by Sim and his ABC councillors to attempt to stifle the work of the commissioner, Lisa Southern. In her most recent annual report last December, she noted the need for a tweaking of the mandate to clarify its boundaries. Council was silent on this for months, but on the last order of business at its last meeting before a summer break, it suddenly wasn’t.

What appeared to be a routine motion to get a third-party review of the mandate was amended at the meeting to propose freezing Southern’s work for an indefinite period until the review was complete. This isn’t standard practice while mandates are reviewed—usually, it’s just business as usual while the amendments are assembled—and critics immediately wondered if council was just trying to silence the commissioner and the complainants. (The mayor’s chief of staff insists the review would be done swiftly.)

The amendment passed, but council needed another recent meeting to amend the bylaw for its measure to take effect. Meantime, Southern got busy writing and releasing two reports arising from complaints. One complaint (from a park board commissioner) alleged Sim and his officials tried to influence park board decision-making and leadership, and a second complaint (filed by Sim’s senior advisors) alleged two park board commissioners contravened the City’s code of conduct by recording and sharing phone calls they made to one of them. Southern dismissed both complaints, but her reports on them splayed open the discordant municipal political culture.

It appeared we were headed for a work freeze, but on the day before the meeting, another complaint about the ABC councillors landed with the integrity commissioner from an opposition councillor, the Green Party’s Pete Fry (son of Liberal MP Hedy Fry). Details of the complaint aren’t yet public, but Fry decided to inform councillors and the city manager of his complaint as it was filed. In doing so, he stymied councillors from voting on the freeze of Southern’s work. After all, in being named in the complaint, they would have been conflicted and have to recuse themselves at least until the commissioner’s office could investigate and rule on it.

Out of caution, Sim adjourned the meeting until late September, but not before chiding Fry and insisting again that his goal was an improved integrity commissioner’s office. Two things were most evident at the meeting: Sim’s frustration, and the surprising absence of two of his own ABC councillors from a meeting where one would think solidarity and attendance would be a whipped must.

Last week, the ABC chair of the school board quit the party over the integrity issue; she may not be the last to leave, and each departure further fritters the momentum of the 2022 mandate most everyone thought would be so empowering.

But it would be overstated to conclude that Sim, or ABC, is politically imperiled as of yet. Some of his problems are provoked by more experienced opponents still trying to sustain the Left-leaning recent ways of Vancouver municipal politics. Polls don’t show a slide. There exists no palpable alternative on the centre-Right, and the Left’s strongest candidate is running provincially. But if the administration can’t right the ship by eliminating the unforced errors, then Sim and his team will face the same sluggish going of their predecessors as they lose the numbers they need to effect the change voters wanted.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story claimed Hedy Fry was the longest-serving parliamentarian. That error has been removed. The Hub apologizes for this correction. 

In each EconMinute, Business Council of Alberta economist Alicia Planincic seeks to better understand the economic issues that matter to Canadians: from business competitiveness to housing affordability to living standards and our country’s lack of productivity growth. She strives to answer burning questions, tackle misconceptions, and uncover what’s really going on in the Canadian economy.

Over the last couple years, big-name retailers have pulled out of U.S. cities because of crime. That’s not just bad for business but for the community that’s left with less opportunity and, typically, more crime than before.

Though we haven’t seen major retailers leave Canadian cities due to crime, local businesses, especially small ones, are concerned. They increasingly cite crime as a challenge to stay in business, with some saying shoplifting is at its worst in decades.

Importantly, reports of violent crime are growing, and, by some accounts, so too is social disorder more generally. Altogether, there is a growing sense among businesses and Canadians at large that communities are unsafe.

But what’s interesting is official statistics of crime suggest that, though some types of crime have increased in recent years, it’s down significantly versus past decades.

For instance, the Crime Severity Index (CSI) which takes into account both the number of cases and the severity of crime reported by police has fallen by 24 percent over the last 20 years. According to this measure, crime is down widely across Canada, both in cities that have historically seen more crime (like Saskatoon) and those that have historically seen less (like Quebec City). Furthermore, many of the crimes that we’d think of historically as most directly affecting businesses and that account for a large portion of crime (e.g., petty theft, property crime) have decreased the most and remain near their 2019 levels.

So why might some businesses feel crime is at its worst in decades?

One possibility is that, though official reports of non-violent crime have increased only modestly in recent years, the true increase may be much bigger. This data relies on official reports by police, but things like shoplifting are said to be infrequently reported. Furthermore, as violent crime becomes more common, less serious incidents move to the bottom of law enforcement’s priority list and may therefore be less frequently reported to begin with.

Surveys of businesses and Canadians, combined with the increase in violent crime, suggest things may be worse than they appear. But whether other incidents of crime have increased much more sharply than the data suggest, we simply don’t know. And that’s a problem.

This post was originally published by the Business Council of Alberta at businesscouncilab.com.