Bob Mackin
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s former right-hand man, Kareem Allam, officially launched his campaign to take Sim’s job in the 2026 civic election.
Allam spoke for 15 minutes to supporters of his new party, the Vancouver Liberals, at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art on Oct. 26. He outlined his platform, built around the goal of making Vancouver attractive to young people with affordable housing and job opportunities.
Criticism of Sim
Allam slammed Sim for missing city council and regional district meetings, focusing on Bitcoin and proposing the end of Park Board elections. Allam said Sim’s policy switches were at the expense of fulfilling integrity promises from the 2022 ABC platform that Allam helped author.
Big promise
Allam’s marquee promise is to lobby the federal and B.C. governments to fund the SkyTrain extension to the University of British Columbia. He said that would connect Western Canada’s largest research centre with Western Canada’s largest employment centre.
“After we do that, I’m going to go to the province and ask them to amalgamate Vancouver and the University Endowment Lands into one, single municipality,” Allam said. “We need to dream big and bring young people back to Vancouver.”
In 2022, Mayor Ken Sim and Kareem Allam (Twitter)
Who was there
Attendees included a trio of politicians elected in 2022 under the ABC banner, but who now sit as independents: Park Board vice-chair Brennan Bastyovanszky and committee chair Scott Jensen and School Board chair Victoria Jung.
Others: Former Vision Vancouver Park Board commissioner Catherine Evans and husband Paul Evans, University of B.C. professor emeritus. Former Surrey Mayor and Conservative MP Dianne Watts. Carol Reardon and Dermot Foley, supporters of Kennedy Stewart’s Forward Together party in the 2022 election.
Mark Marissen, fourth place finisher in 2022’s mayoral election with Progress Vancouver. Marissen was disqualified from running in 2026 and his party deregistered after Elections BC citations for Election Act violations.
Who else
Sim’s other challenger, so far, is Coun. Rebecca Bligh. In September, she launched her Vote Vancouver party. One of her backers is real estate marketer Bob Rennie.
Bligh was kicked out of the ABC caucus in February after she voted against Sim’s plan to pause new supportive housing projects in the city.
Legal battle
Allam is named in Sim’s May-filed defamation lawsuit, along with real estate developer Alex G. Tsakumis. Sim accused them of tarnishing his reputation by falsely alleging he drove while drunk.
In a statement of defence, Allam said he was fired from his job as Sim’s chief of staff in February 2023 after trying to get to the bottom of an allegation that a Vancouver Police officer caught Sim driving drunk.
In February, the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner cleared Sim, but refused to release its report. OPCC said Sim was not the target of its investigation. Instead, it focused on the conduct of Vancouver Police officers.
Subscribe to theBreaker.news on Substack. Find out how: Click here.
