Amy Hamm: Vancouver votes for more drug chaos and street disorder

Pete Fry celebrates winning mayor's race in Vancouver, BC, October 17, 2026. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

Article content

Vancouver, what the hell were you thinking?

Article content

Saturday night, the city elected Green Party of Vancouver’s Pete Fry as mayor. They also wiped out former mayor Ken Sim’s centre-right ABC Vancouver party, which went from supermajority to a lone, politically neutered councillor.

Article content

Article content

This all represents a 180 from the 2022 election, in which the city had briefly come to its senses and figured out that somebody needed to do something — anything — different than before in order to rein in Vancouver’s inexcusable homelessness and addictions crisis. While Sim could have done more in his term, he at least tried to do something.

Article content

Article content

Fry, by contrast, is as pro-drug and pro-chaos as politicians come. For example, he walked out of city chambers this summer in apparent protest of Sim’s proposed drug and street disorder plebiscite, as though merely considering a crackdown on open-air drug use was too much for him to countenance. He later called the plebiscite a “very bad idea.”

Article content

Article content

The results of this plebiscite, which asked voters if they would support a ban on public drug use, or the addition of both voluntary and involuntary mental health and addictions treatment beds in Vancouver, will be announced by Oct. 21. Even if the public overwhelmingly voted “yes” to both questions, Fry will likely be unmoved by his constituents’ concern.

Article content

Days before the election, he dismissively told media that Vancouver already has a ban on open-air drug use, while 90 new mental health beds are in the works for the new St. Paul’s Hospital. In reality, police seldom enforce existing drug laws in the city’s notorious Downtown Eastside (DTES), and acute mental health beds are not drug treatment beds. Even if they were, a meagre 90 spots is dwarfed by the thousands of mentally ill addicts that roam Vancouver’s DTES in varying states of mayhem and despair.

Article content

Article content

Fry’s party has promised “safe, dignified places for unhoused and marginalized people to gather, rest, and access support” and a focus on “compassionate” approaches that utilize “diversion, outreach, and services before enforcement.” Fry previously expressed that he wants addicts to have “free prescribed opiates” and the city to have more supervised injection sites. Oh boy.

Article content

Article content

Hello, Fry? Is anyone home? That’s exactly what the various government and non-profit poverty pushers of Vancouver have been doing for decades, and which has gotten us so deep into this mess to begin with. Fry and those who think like him already consider the whole city, from its sidewalks to its Skytrain stations to its public parks, as “dignified spaces” for drug addicts to inject their poison and languish. Or at least they act like they do.

Article content

Must we keep pretending that layering on more of the permissive, enabling services that assist drug addicts to stay sick will magically tip the balance and make the problem disappear? This is like adding more salt to a too-salty broth in the hopes that it might become diluted in the process. It ain’t gonna work.