Vancouver election plebiscite results to be released Wednesday: city

woman walks past a sign directing people to a polling station in Vancouver, on Saturday Oct. 17, 2026. British Columbians are heading to the polls to cast their votes in municipal elections being held across the province. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns

The City of Vancouver says it won’t release the results of plebiscite questions asked on election ballots until Wednesday.

In addition to selecting a mayor, ten councillors, nine school board trustees, and seven park board commissioners from a civic election ballot that listed 130 names, voters were asked to answer two questions posed by incumbent Ken Sim and his ABC majority about public safety.

The city first asked voters to support “strengthening its laws to forbid open-air hard drug use,” something that is already illegal.

ABC’s fleshed-out proposal was to update municipal bylaws to allow police to issue $0 tickets to anyone caught doing drugs in public, briefly detain the person and seize their illegal substances without the need to go through a more cumbersome criminal investigation.

The second question asked voters if the city should “formally ask the province of B.C.” to add involuntary care beds within Vancouver, suggesting parts of the soon-to-be-vacated St. Paul’s Hospital site downtown as a potential temporary location.

On Sunday morning, a spokesperson for the city told CTV News that, “Confirming the plebiscite results will only be available on Wednesday, along with the official election results.”

While the city’s official civic election results have yet to be released, the unofficial results show Pete Fry of the Green Party has been elected the next mayor of Vancouver, in favour of incumbent Ken Sim.

Criticized move

When Ken Sim and his ABC majority reconvened council in August to add the questions onto Vancouver’s election ballots, then-councillor Fry slammed the move as political theatre. He was among those who strongly opposed the move.

Fry left the council meeting, followed by councillors Rebecca Bligh and Sean Orr, and called the move to question voters on public safety “electioneering by punching down on folks in health crisis” and a “misguided frustration of the democratic process.”

Kareem Allam, who was Sim’s campaign manager in 2022 and ran against him in this year’s election under the Vancouver Liberals banner, was even more critical of the move.

“A plebiscite won’t solve anything, and neither will Ken Sim,” he told CTV News at the time. “I see this as nothing more than a cheap election trick to try to distract from his four years of poor governance of the City of Vancouver.”

Defending his non-binding questions, Sim claimed they “represent the most significant policy and culture shifts this city has considered in decades.”

“Their comments were political theatre,” Sim said after the plebiscite questions passed, referring to the opposition. “We’re actually trying to solve something. We are asking the tough questions, and we are debating those issues—and we’re voting on them.”

Fry’s platform on public safety proposes creating a 24-7 non-police outreach team to respond to non-emergency situations involving people in crisis. The mayor-elect also mentioned that he would repeal the ban on supportive housing and repeal the ban on overdose prevention sites.

B.C. already has the highest rate of involuntary detainment under its Mental Health Act of any province in Canada, and B.C.’s chief justice struck down public consumption laws, warning of “irreparable harm” if they were upheld.