Making it work: How will Vancouver's new-look, no-majority, left-leaning council function?

Vancouver city councillor Sean Orr at Vancouver city hall on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

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After Vancouver’s left-leaning civic parties successfully co-operated to take control of the city’s mayor’s office, council, park board, and school board in last weekend’s election, the question is how they’ll work together over the next four years.

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Vancouver’s three major left-of-centre parties — the Greens, COPE and OneCity — negotiated and struck a deal earlier this year to limit the number of candidates each ran for council, park and school board, to avoid splitting the progressive vote. They also agreed to work toward backing a single unity candidate for mayor, which ended up being the Green’s Pete Fry after COPE’s and OneCity’s candidates withdrew.

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It worked: The three progressive parties trounced ABC Vancouver, the right-leaning party that dominated the 2022 municipal election before being almost completely wiped off the map on Saturday.

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Mayor-elect Fry, a two-term Green councillor, has often spoken of his desire to move away from rigid partisan politics, and to bring a collaborative approach more focused on the public than party interests. He now faces a test to see how well he can pull it off.

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Fry and his four fellow Green councillors will form council’s largest caucus, but are one vote shy of a majority on the 11-seat body. COPE’s four councillors will form the second-largest caucus. COPE also has the largest bloc on school board, and a majority on park board.

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Mayor elect Pete Fry outside Vancouver City Hall on Oct. 19, 2026. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

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COPE, the Greens, and OneCity are likely to agree on a lot. Their platforms overlap on many broad points.

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But COPE, as Vancouver’s most-socialist party, tends to push further. For example, the Green platform seeks to partner with senior governments to provide more-affordable transit access for low-income people. The COPE platform aims to expand free transit to youth between 13 and 18 (it’s currently free for children under 13), and remove fares altogether on some bus routes.

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COPE wants to fund those kinds of expanded services by raising certain kinds of taxes, including a proposal to triple the empty home tax and start applying it, again, to unsold condos owned by developers.

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Fry supports the empty homes tax, but has tried to strike a more-balanced approach with developers while on council. In 2023, when the ABC-majority council considered exempting unsold condos from the empty homes tax because of challenging market conditions, Fry supported what he called a reasonable “compromise”: a time-limited exemption that recognized developers’ concerns, but still met the tax’s intention.

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Fry strongly opposed ABC’s eventual decision, which not only created an unlimited-time exemption but also refunded millions in already-paid taxes.

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When it comes to AI data centres, the digital infrastructure facilities that have become political flashpoints in several jurisdictions, COPE and the Greens want to regulate their development and operation — but COPE would prefer they were not built at all.

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Re-elected COPE Coun. Sean Orr said his party, the Greens, and OneCity will not always agree, “and I don’t think we should.”