The Rulebook Behind Vancouver's Housing Shortage: Why 2026 Approvals Stall

Adam Scalena: We're here with Kareem Allam, the Vancouver Liberals mayoral candidate. How are you doing, Kareem? Thanks for taking the time. Kareem Allam: Thank you so much for having me on. I'm doing great. We've got a few days to go before election day, at least the municipal election day, and a little bit more time before the provincial election. I'm feeling really energized about the opportunity to get into that chair and make some change with what I think is the most substantial slate of candidates assembled here in the City of Vancouver for a generation. Matt Scalena: Fantastic. It's funny, Kareem, before we went live we were just talking about how the snap call of the provincial election has led a lot of the people I've been talking to to think more about the provincial election than the municipal elections that are taking place. Most people listening will know your background, but for those who may not, can you start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself? Kareem Allam: I've had two parts to my career. One part's been in the private sector, the other part's been in politics. I've run 40 political campaigns. I've worked on Parliament Hill serving ministers. I worked at the legislature. I worked at City Hall as a staffer. I was also a bureaucrat. I'm a public policy analyst. I was policy director of the Vancouver Board of Trade, and my expertise predominantly is in transportation, energy, and healthcare administration. So that's what I've done in terms of politics. In terms of the private sector part of my career, it's been in support of building large mega capital projects throughout the province, everything from hydroelectric dams to hydroelectric transmission lines to hospitals. Building up that social licence, working with Indigenous communities, working with municipal and local governments to get to a yes on some of these projects is how I spent the last 15 years putting food on the table for my family. Matt Scalena: Right on. And in 2022, you managed ABC's campaign, correct? And you were Ken Sim's first chief of staff. Now you're running against him. What changed? Kareem Allam: I was his campaign director. I didn't co-manage it with anyone. I was hired by the board of directors. I didn't have a direct reporting relationship with Ken during the campaign; I reported to the board. I was just as much Ken Sim's campaign manager as I was Rebecca Bligh's, Brennan Bastyovanszky's, Scott Jensen's, Victoria Jung's, and everyone else's. I thought we were building a broad-based coalition to unite the city around the things that actually bring us together, rather than focus on the things that divide us. The things that divide us have been pretty apparent and pretty obvious. Shortly after Ken got elected, he took a turn towards the politics of division. He started to drift away from the platform that he campaigned on, that the rest of the team campaigned on, and the divisions in the team started to emerge quite quickly and quite early on. I didn't want to be part of that. I was very committed to working on the things that bring Vancouverites together. Those things are enhancing frontline services. Whether you're a Conservative, a Liberal, or a New Democrat, we can all agree potholes are bad. We can all agree that libraries are good. We can all agree that Kits Pool is at end of life, needs to be replaced, and should be a focus. We all agree that UBC, Western Canada's largest research centre, still remains disconnected from Western Canada's largest employment centre. There are missed opportunities in capturing the IP that's lying dormant there and connecting it with the entrepreneurs and the capital of our downtown core. That's what I thought we were doing at ABC, and that's what I'm trying to focus on with the broad-based coalition I've built with the Vancouver Liberals this time around. Adam Scalena: Kareem, I'm sure you get this question a lot, but why are you running? Kareem Allam: It's a good question. I was really unhappy with the last three years of Ken's time in office, now four years. I became an early critic of his. He raised property taxes by more than any other mayor in the history of the City of Vancouver, at 26%. He promised and campaigned on strengthening the democratically elected park board, but then started campaigning to get rid of the democratically elected park board. In my Canada, we don't get rid of democratically elected boards without some kind of public input, without a referendum. He then tried to get rid of the integrity commissioner while he was under investigation by the integrity commissioner. So I felt quite insulted by his lack of regard for democracy and our institutions, and did a lot of commentary in the media about how he was conducting his affairs in the City of Vancouver. My natural instinct, as someone who has run 40 political campaigns, was to go out and look for a candidate I thought could win the next election. I didn't find anyone. It was a friend of mine who said, "You've been doing all this commentary on CBC and CKNW. You actually speak quite well. You present quite well. Why don't you take a run at it?" So just like everything else in life, I fell into this backwards. But I'm here with every intention of doing the best job I can. I want the job, and I do think I'm the best candidate for this moment in time. Matt Scalena: I was going to save this for later, but you mentioned the politics of division. The plebiscite, the two questions on the ballot. We said this when Pete Fry was on the show: it strikes me as a little bit cynical to put those issues front and centre. What's your take on the plebiscite that voters are being asked to answer at the same time as electing city council? Kareem Allam: Well, the first issue is that it's non-binding, and there's a reason why it's non-binding. If it were binding, it would have been legally challenged. A municipal government can't ask questions that are currently being considered by the federal courts, so that's why it's non-binding. The second issue is that the first question, on open-air drug use: it's already illegal. I'm not really sure there's a mechanism to make it more illegal to use drugs. The VPD has had the power for the last 20 years to arrest anyone using drugs or carrying small quantities of drugs, and they've chosen not to, for a whole bunch of reasons. We can get into the details if you really want to dig into that, but they've chosen not to. If Ken wanted to put pressure on the VPD to start enforcing those existing laws, he could have done that. On the next question, St. Paul's Hospital. St. Paul's Hospital is at the edge of the Davie Village, and it's at the edge of our business district. Building a prison in our downtown core doesn't help us revitalize our downtown core. Involuntary care means you can't leave. That means bars on windows. That means security guards checking everyone going in to make sure they're not bringing in drugs or weapons or any of the things you wouldn't be able to bring into a prison. So let's be clear: turning St. Paul's Hospital at its current site into an involuntary care facility is building a prison. We launched the NoVancouverPrison.com campaign, and I encourage all your listeners to sign up. We need to revitalize our downtown core, and we're not going to get there by turning London Drugs, a thriving retail facility, into a police training centre, and by turning St. Paul's Hospital, which was sold by the province to pay for the new St. Paul's Hospital, into a prison. That site should be used for housing, commercial space, community space. That's what that site should be used for. It should not be used to lock people up. Adam Scalena: We did want to talk a lot about the issues, but just thinking about your campaign, Kareem: the BC Liberals went through a rebranding, if I remember correctly, in 2023. Why run under the brand of the Vancouver Liberals? I'm assuming that was a deliberate choice? Kareem Allam: Yeah. I genuinely felt that one of the biggest challenges we've had in Vancouver politics is these hard swings to the right and hard swings to the left, election to election. Every time a government gets elected in the City of Vancouver, it just spends four years undoing what the last government did. We've been going back and forth in this manner for almost 20 years now, and that's why we're not seeing any progress on the things that actually matter to Vancouverites. We're not seeing progress on getting a toy train running in Stanley Park. We're seeing 50-metre pools turn into 25-metre pools. We're seeing community centres that were built in the '50s untouched, with no new capital investment. That's because our elected officials have been occupied with undoing the ideological policies put in place by the previous government. So I wanted to signal to the electorate that we'll be making decisions based on facts, evidence, science, and lived experience, and govern with a sense of integrity, but also a sense of vision for where we think the city needs to go. I'm happy to get into that at some point today. Matt Scalena: You've mentioned the unifying features of your campaign: potholes, libraries, revitalizing downtown, getting Kits Pool redone, which I think is sorely needed. You've been on the campaign trail now for a couple of weeks. Are these what voters are talking about? I'm curious, as a guy who's out shaking hands and kissing babies, what are the main issues Vancouverites are concerned with in this election? Kareem Allam: I launched my campaign about 500 days ago, and I've been a full-time candidate this entire time. Being a new party, I felt we needed to start early. And I wanted to distill my campaign down to one thing. I'm running for one reason alone, and that's to bring young people back to the City of Vancouver. Vancouver is now one of the oldest cities in North America by average age. Young people are fleeing the city because we're not creating the jobs, the housing, the frontline services, and they're also concerned about safety. I genuinely believe in the great Canadian social contract: my generation is supposed to create the winning conditions for the next generation, so that in turn, when they reach my age and I retire, there's someone to pay for the social programs I'm going to need. By failing our youngest, we're failing everyone. We've seen the politics of incrementalism seep into the politics of Vancouver, and we've stopped reimagining what Vancouver can be. When I first graduated from university, Vancouver was Canada's third-largest corporate head office centre. We're now fifth, behind Edmonton and Calgary. That's outrageous. So what are the big swings we need to take to reimagine what this place is and what allows people to stay? On the first issue, jobs, I want to build that SkyTrain line out to UBC and, as I said earlier, connect Western Canada's largest research centre with Western Canada's largest employment centre, and connect that IP with the entrepreneurs and the business class. I then want to amalgamate the City of Vancouver and UBC into a single municipality, and I want the zoning authority to zone for a new innovation corridor that's going to enable the next generation of jobs. I want an industrial land reserve. Ken Sim got rid of the Vancouver Economic Commission. We've got to be one of the only cities in North America that doesn't have its own economic development corporation. We need to protect industrial land to give our small businesses a place to grow. So those are the big swings I want to take on jobs. Housing. Vancouver is the slowest place on planet Earth at approving housing. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said that by the end of the decade, we're going to put a man on the moon. Seven years later, the Americans put a man on the moon. Eight years is how long it takes to build a high-rise in the City of Vancouver. That's outrageous to me. What's holding us back on housing approvals is that Vancouver is the only municipality in Western Canada with its own building code. We need to get rid of the Vancouver Building Code and replace it with the BC Building Code, just like Burnaby and Surrey and every other municipality in the province. The tallest, highest, and most complicated buildings are being built in Burnaby and Surrey. They're not being built in Vancouver. There's nothing spectacularly important about the Vancouver Building Code other than 3,000 pages of regulation. The second part of speeding up housing is this. There was a time when approvals for housing went through one single department. Now there are twelve departments in the City of Vancouver that all have a veto on your project, whether you're a private sector builder, a not-for-profit builder, or a government builder. The last part is this, and you'll appreciate it. The job of a legislator is to create new laws, but it's also to go back, look at those old bad laws, and get rid of them. We have bylaws here in the City of Vancouver that say windows need to be four by four, and other bylaws that say they need to be six by six. Four by four for maximum heat efficiency, six by six so the fire department can get in with their equipment in case there's a fire. And the home builder is stuck negotiating between two departments, between two conflicting bylaws we've been drafting for the last 130 years that keep contradicting each other. It adds time, and time adds cost, particularly when every project is borrowing money. So those are the big swings I want to take on housing and on jobs. We can talk about safety and frontline services later. I don't want to dominate this with a speech; I want this to be an interview. But that's what I think we've been missing from our leadership here in the City of Vancouver: reimagining what our future looks like, and also understanding that in some cases government's not going to be the solution, it's the problem. Matt Scalena: Thinking about the Vancouver Building Code, can you dig into your housing platform a little bit more? One of the things we've talked a lot about on this show is the province mandating housing, changing the zoning, and having their hand in what was traditionally a municipal affair. First of all, why does the Vancouver Building Code exist, in your mind? Is it just a legacy thing? I don't know much about it. And by getting rid of it, does that take us a long way to getting housing built faster, or are there other things you want to take on? Kareem Allam: I think a few things. When I say I'm going to get rid of all of it, there are aspects of it that we'll probably keep. The heritage aspect is important to me. Single-stair egress is something that's unique to the Vancouver Building Code. But 95 or 96% of it doesn't make sense. The Vancouver Building Code is, I think, entrenched in the Vancouver Charter, so this would have been written up in the 1930s or '40s. One of the things about the Vancouver Building Code is that it adds a layer of complexity, but it also adds a barrier to entry. I've run campaigns in Surrey, in Richmond, in Langley, in Delta, and I've met home builders there. I asked them, "Why aren't you coming to Vancouver to build that missing middle housing we all talk about and all love in Vancouver?" They said, "Kareem, your building code's insane. I don't understand it. I can spend the next five years of my life learning the Vancouver Building Code and gain access to a market of 700,000 people, or I could just learn the Alberta Building Code and gain access to a market of four million people. Where do you think my time is best spent?" So it's become a barrier to entry. It's reduced the amount of competition, but it's also adding delays, and it's adding a tremendous amount of overhead for the existing builders who are familiar with the code, the big-name developers operating here in Vancouver, who have had to build this incredible level of specialization to get through it. One of the arguments for the Vancouver Building Code was that it had higher energy efficiency and GHG protections. But now that the province has come in with the Step Code, one, two, three, four, five, by the time we get to Step 4 and Step 5, there isn't really a lot of environmental or GHG benefit coming from the Vancouver Building Code. So the main argument for holding on to it is now gone as a result of provincial legislation. Now, to your specific question about infill housing, being able to build fourplexes and sixplexes in the City of Vancouver: it was a pretty ham-fisted approach. I support infill housing of fourplexes and sixplexes when it's around transit. But what's happening is the further you get from transit, say you have a street with two rows of single-family homes on each side, and you turn two of those homes into sixplexes, you've now taken the number of cars on that street from four to 24, the number of kids from maybe two or three to eight, and the number of dogs from two to nine. So neighbours are fighting with each other because they can't find parking on the street. The dogs dig up the parklet in front of their house, and then you get a downpour of rain and it's a cow pasture. Parents are telling me it's like The Hunger Games to get their kids into community centre programs. As all this density has come on, and as the city's revenues have gone up from the increased tax revenue they're getting from the density, they're not reinvesting it into parks. The same principle applies as for getting a pipeline or a hydroelectric transmission line approved: you need social licence. You need some modicum of social licence to be able to add that density. And the City of Vancouver keeps falling further and further behind on adding parks, on adding library hours, on building new community centres. People feel they're living in smaller, more confined spaces, but they're not seeing a commensurate increase in the service levels that the extra tax revenue from that density should be bringing. So that's where I see the challenge. Just to put a fine point on it and close this section off: fifteen years ago, the park board budget represented 16.5% of the city budget. Today it represents 7.9%. Ken Sim and ABC have defunded our park board. Beyond the governance issues, you could bring in the best governance people in the world, but when you cut the park board's budget in half, there's nothing you'll be able to do in terms of governance to work through these challenges. If we're going to bring this density on, people are going to demand those services. Adam Scalena: Kareem, we've had Wendy Waters on the program in the past, and we've had Jens von Bergmann on the show talking about how Vancouver is losing families and losing children. I think a lot of the pain points you're pointing to are why families are leaving. Can you talk about how we can get families back to Vancouver, or keep them in Vancouver? And also, why it's so important to have young people and families in a city? Kareem Allam: I've met with both Wendy and Jens, and they've both had quite a bit of influence on my thinking. It's critical to have young people because that's the labour force. Those are the people working in our restaurants and in our corporate head offices. Those are the people who have children who mow your lawn when you're a senior and can't mow your own lawn. It adds vitality, and it adds to the future of our tax base. We're only going to bring young people back if we solve four problems: the jobs part, which I already hit on; speeding up housing and getting its cost down; enhancing frontline services; and then we can get into the public safety issue. Having young people is critical to having a stable tax base to pay for the next generation. Here I am at 47 years old. I'm fifteen, sixteen years away from retiring. Who are the people who are going to be moving into my city and making sure my community centres are funded? Making sure the swimming pools I'm going to be enjoying are funded, and the parks I walk my dog in are funded? That's why it's important to have young people in the city. But also, who are going to be your firefighters? Your ambulance drivers and paramedics? Your police officers? Your nurses and doctors? A lot of these people are deciding not to set up shop here, and it's getting dramatically worse. Matt Scalena: So opportunity and housing costs are the two we've touched on. Before we move on to the other two, we talked to Pete Fry about the East-West divide in Vancouver. How are you thinking about the city overall? Do you see an East-West divide? It strikes me that in the last fifteen years, we've talked about certain communities being hollowed out, whereas density is clearly more pronounced, let's say, on the East Side. How are you thinking about the East-West divide? Kareem Allam: Yeah, I do see that there's disproportionality in city policy, between, I'd probably even say, the northwest and the southeast. We have the fewest parks and community centres in the southeast, and the highest density of parks and community centres in the northwest. These are systemic decisions going back to the '50s and '60s. They're not solvable in a single term or administration, but you can start putting in place policies so that over the long run we start to catch up. Tree canopy is a good example of that. But yes, in terms of densification, a lot of the pressure has been on the Expo Line. You had a lot of single-family homes along the Joyce-Collingwood corridor, so it makes sense to densify where there's SkyTrain. But when we see that densification, we're again not seeing a commensurate increase in service levels. I met with every single MLA, except for Dallas Brodie, as part of my campaign. I ran into Niki Sharma, who's the Attorney General. She used to be the chair of the park board. She told me that when she was chair, they used to approve a new community centre every capital cycle, so a new community centre every four years. We're now on a pace of a new community centre every 12 years. We're not going to catch up at this pace. We need to reprioritize what we're spending our money on on the capital side of the budget. The pressure points you're feeling on the East Side warrant a tremendous amount of concern. We saw it in East Fraser Lands, the River District, one of the largest development projects in the history of the City of Vancouver. They've been waiting 14 years for a community centre. They haven't even broken ground on one, and there isn't even a plan to get started. That friction really does create unhappiness with density. If that community centre were built, and the parks and everything the city and the developer promised were built, would it be easier to go to that community and say, "Hey, we want to add a few more towers here, or a few more six-storey buildings, or a few more sixplexes"? Absolutely. If people can see that the density is bringing services, that there's a positive trade-off, that the Fraser River frontage is being turned into its own version of a South Van seawall, then all of a sudden I think you do get that social buy-in. But yes, for sure, the East Side is taking the brunt of a lot of this. It's going to take some courage. One of the proposals we're putting together is a citizens' assembly. I want to give them the authority to put together a ballot question on ward STV or proportional representation for the 2030 election, as a referendum question. I do think wards would help balance out the lack of representation certain neighbourhoods are experiencing. It works provincially, it works federally. We're the largest city in Canada that doesn't have a ward system. They have one in Red Deer, Alberta, but we don't have one here. And I love Red Deer. But to me, the political system is driving some of the political outcomes, for sure. Matt Scalena: That's really interesting. Adam Scalena: It is very interesting. Moving on to the topic of safety: where do you stand in terms of decriminalization, safer supply, and involuntary care? First in terms of open drug use and some of the challenges the city's facing there, and then moving on to public safety and disorder, which I think so many people are talking about and concerned about right now, because if anything, it seems to have been expanding over the last few years and getting worse. Kareem Allam: Let's break the question into two parts. Let's first talk about crime. The Sinaloa drug cartel has taken over the streets of Vancouver. I'm going to say that again. The Sinaloa drug cartel, the gang that was run by El Chapo, that did business with Pablo Escobar, is running the streets of Vancouver. It's not the Hells Angels. Matt Scalena: This is news to me. Kareem Allam: I've been on CKNW with Mike Smyth and with Jas Johal speaking about this issue quite loudly, so this isn't the first time I've brought it up. I've brought it up in many of my speeches, and you can see some of them on my website. But yes, the Sinaloa drug cartel is running the drug trade here in the Downtown Eastside. There are 140,000 Sinaloa drug cartel members globally. This is a highly sophisticated organization, and we have 1,400 police officers in the City of Vancouver. We are outgunned and we are outmatched. The Sinaloa drug cartel is here in Vancouver for one reason: to make money. That's the job of every criminal enterprise. Vancouver is a money laundering hub. It is a money laundering haven. In 2018 and 2019, the VPD sent two reports to council asking them to ban Bitcoin ATMs in the City of Vancouver and to ban the illegal currency exchanges you're starting to see open up throughout the entire city. We're not going to make progress on street-level disorder without going after the Tony Soprano level of the crime food chain, and the only way you go after them is by choking off the money. For whatever reason, we've not seen progress on banning these Bitcoin ATMs. Just to put a fine point on it, we've seen them in vape shops, we've seen them at corner stores, and they seem innocuous. When you exchange your money at one of these Bitcoin ATMs, they charge you 15%. If you want to buy Bitcoin as an investment, sure, that's your decision, that's your prerogative. If you buy it through a CIBC brokerage account, they charge you half a percent. These Bitcoin ATMs are charging 15%. Who's buying Bitcoin at a 15% markup? Criminals, because they're trying to obscure the proceeds of crime. They're primarily using Bitcoin because they can kick up to their bosses and kick down to their suppliers for the next day, but also, if they get arrested, they're not walking around with big wads of cash, and when they get released, they still have access to the money. This is in the VPD report. The VPD also says the likely owners of these Bitcoin ATMs are the cartels themselves. So we're not going to make progress on this issue without tackling money laundering. There are things in the mayor's tool chest to attack money laundering, but we aren't properly integrated with [unclear], the CBSA, the Coast Guard, and all the other agencies. Even FINTRAC wrote a 2022 report highlighting this exact problem. Ryan Wedding is a name you might have heard. He's a Sinaloa drug cartel member who was living in Coquitlam and was laundering a billion dollars a year of cryptocurrency through Vancouver ATMs. The only reason we know about that is because he got so big he popped up on the FBI's radar. We didn't find out about it because of the RCMP or the VPD or any of our local Canadian law enforcement agencies. We found out because of the FBI. We might need, at some level as a country, an agency like the Department of Homeland Security, where we're able to aggregate all this information gathering. We have basically 20 police departments in the Lower Mainland that often aren't talking to each other. That's what's happening on the crime side. So when Mark Carney says he wants to hire a thousand new RCMP officers and a thousand new CBSA officers: Mr. Prime Minister, I'd like to have them all here in Vancouver. What are you going to do for the rest of the country? We are outgunned and we are outmatched. And the thing about these Sinaloa drug cartel members is they're here for a short amount of time. Their families don't live here, so they don't care about the amount of chaos they produce and create. It's time for us to get serious about this problem because of our port. The Port of Vancouver is larger than the next five biggest ports in the country combined. We are overexposed to the international drug trade. So that's my commentary on crime. Now let's talk about what's going on in the Downtown Eastside in regards to the unhoused and in regards to drug users. There are three parts to a drug user's life: a before, a during, and an after. When I joined the board of directors of the Downtown Eastside Overdose Prevention Society, I asked myself: where are all these people coming from? They're all people who experienced severe levels of trauma in their lives. Forty percent are Indigenous. About 8% of them are Afghanistan war veterans. Police officers, paramedics, people who put on a uniform in service, construction workers who got injured on the job, children aging out of foster care. At 18 years old in the province of British Columbia, I couldn't take care of myself at that age, and you get nothing but fifty bucks. Some programming has definitely improved there, but it's not complete enough. And then the two fastest-growing parts of the population down there are seniors and women experiencing gender-based violence. So we're seeing a tremendous number of people who've experienced trauma in their lives ending up in the Downtown Eastside, and for whatever reason, using drugs to self-medicate through whatever pain, psychological, physical, or emotional, they're going through. Canada's budget for the Department of Indigenous Affairs is $26.4 billion a year. My budget, if I'm mayor, is $2.4 billion a year, and I've got to spend $500 million on police and $400 million on fire. By the time I get to discretionary spending, I might have $100 or $150 million to do something with. I'm not going to make a dent in that problem with those limited resources. We've built all the supports for people in our healthcare system, provincially and federally, an inch from the ground. If you're a senior 60 bucks short of making rent, give them the 60 bucks. Keep them in place in the community. But we don't do that. We let you fall all the way down until you're on the street, and at that point it costs the system $70,000 to $100,000 a year to deal with that person. So we've got to build our system of supports higher up, not lower down. One of the things I'm proposing is a new Vancouver Accord. The last Vancouver Accord gave us four pillars. We've been primarily focusing on two of the four: enforcement and harm reduction. We haven't focused on the other two. And because of what we've learned, we now know there probably should be six, maybe even seven pillars. Mental health is the fifth pillar I want to bring in. Less than one cent of every dollar we spend as a province on mental health is spent on people under the age of 18. That's outrageous. You're not going to get good outcomes, and you're not going to keep people off the street and from becoming drug users, when we're not spending enough catching children when they're experiencing trauma. The second part is housing. If we don't get people into housing, no matter how much treatment you put them through, if they're not in a safe, secure location, they're going to end up back where they started. Housing is absolutely critical. And we're not talking about a big number here. We're talking about 2,715 unhoused people in the City of Vancouver. We're talking seven, maybe eight towers. That's not an insurmountable number for a country this wealthy, for a country this rich. I think we can build those eight towers. Adam Scalena: Where do they get built? This is the other thing I've noticed: we seem to be putting services and housing in one place. I know there are some campaign members talking about going back to the old zoning of the Oppenheimer District. Geographically, in your mind, does it make sense to spread out where the secured housing is, or is this something that needs to be concentrated in the Downtown Eastside? Kareem Allam: This is one of the challenges in seeing progress on this issue. Government is trying to deal with it the way government tries to deal with every problem: programmatically. It's not dealing with it on an individual, one-on-one basis. Take the example of that Afghanistan war veteran. That's a special kind of trauma, and it requires a special kind of medical services. But that person might also have another seven or eight comorbidities that require special attention. All we're doing is aggregating people with different medical needs, and we're not seeing progress. That's the core of the challenge as I see it. Every single person I know who's recovered from drugs has recovered because of an individual heroic effort from someone in the healthcare system who was able to connect the dots: "Okay, you have hepatitis, we'll get you into this program. You have AIDS, we're going to get you into this program. You have this kind of psychological trauma, we're going to get you into this program." There are 45 different kinds of services delivered in the Downtown Eastside. Adam might need seven of them, Matt might need nine of them, and I might need twelve of them, and they might all be different. To try to put us all in the same housing unit and expect that we're all going to get the right level of care to recover is insanity. Again, as I like to say, sometimes government isn't the solution to the problem. It's the problem itself. At some point we're going to need to start reshifting how we deliver care to individuals. We've seen this right across the board in other areas of public health and in other areas of our economy. Government tries to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem, and when you really dig into it, you start to recognize that everything is different. Not to put anyone on the spot, but when the province decided to upzone the whole province for fourplexes and sixplexes, that might work well in Burnaby and Vancouver, to a certain extent. But Langley still has greenfield development. I'm not really sure how well it works in Terrace, or how it works in Cranbrook. We've been approaching the Downtown Eastside with these one-size-fits-all policies, and that's why we're not seeing any progress. That's the conversation I'd love to have with the Premier, and with the Prime Minister: how do we help Kareem? How do we help Matt? How do we help Adam? As opposed to looking at this whole problem as a population. If we don't start looking at people as individuals, we're not going to see progress. Matt Scalena: What do you say to the person pushing a baby carriage on Commercial Drive, let's say, or down Hornby downtown, by the Murray Hotel? We talked about this with Pete Fry. Someone who's just frustrated, who says, "I've got a five-year-old and a three-year-old. I paid a million bucks for a condo downtown. It's not cheap to live here." Whether crime's up or down, there's a general perception of disorder and danger. All of that sounds well and good to me, but I'd imagine there's somebody out there thinking, and I think this is what Ken Sim's approach is betting on, "Just take care of this. I just want this cleaned up and out of my neighbourhood." What do you say to somebody who's fed up like that? Kareem Allam: No one's happy to see what's going on in the Downtown Eastside. No one's happy to see the problem of drug use and open-air drug use throughout the city. But let's understand that Ken has made it worse. Task Force Barrage took the problems of homelessness and drug use and spread them throughout the entire city. The number of unhoused people in Kerrisdale, an affluent neighbourhood, has tripled. We're seeing open-air drug use in the Punjabi Market for the first time in history. When you take people away from some of these services, it's hard to get them back in, so you see less progress. The other problem is that Ken Sim banned supportive housing. We've got to get these people into housing; otherwise we can't connect them to services. Whether those services are currently efficient or not, there's at least some modicum of progress when we get them into housing. Whether it should all be in the Downtown Eastside, or we should open up new mental health facilities in other jurisdictions, I'm happy to have that discussion. But the point is that banning supportive housing really set us back a generation. There was a pipeline of projects the province had funded, and once he banned it, that funding went to Prince George, it went to Surrey, and it held Vancouver back. So what we've now seen is a 12% increase in unhoused people. The third thing he just did is decide to upzone the entire Downtown Eastside, which is going to get rid of all the shelter-rate housing in Vancouver. This problem of 2,700 unhoused people in Vancouver could now double. This is going to get worse. The other thing I want to inject into this is that, again, we're looking at this problem programmatically, through one vein, one window. There are two predominant synthetic drugs driving what's going on in the streets of our city. The first is fentanyl. Fentanyl is very dangerous, it's very toxic, it kills people, and it's what's driving most of the overdose deaths. But when you take fentanyl, it puts you to sleep. People on fentanyl don't go on stabbing sprees. It's meth. We don't have a meth strategy as a province. People on meth having a psychotic episode, those are the people who go on machete attacks and stabbing sprees. Those are the ones screaming at the top of their lungs, making you feel unsafe when you're crossing the street. We need a meth strategy for the City of Vancouver. Meth is likely where we have the widest berth, under the current legal framework of the Mental Health Act and the series of recent Supreme Court decisions, to put people into involuntary care. It's very difficult to recover from meth. Once you've been on meth for a sustained period of time, recovery becomes almost impossible. That's the segment of the population that's a danger to the mother pushing her stroller down the street. That's not where the policy focus has been, because we've been really focused on getting the number of overdose deaths down, and we've been somewhat successful at that with fentanyl. But we've completely ignored the meth problem, which is the one that has created the most challenges. Wab Kinew, an NDP premier, brought in, or is working to bring in, legislation that will allow 72 hours of involuntary detention for someone having a manic episode while on meth. I predict he's not likely to win that case, but he's at least pushing the boundaries on it. At least he's trying. BC's not. Adam Scalena: One of ABC's initiatives is to keep property taxes frozen for another term. Is that a good idea, in your mind? Kareem Allam: First of all, Ken Sim has raised property taxes by 26% over the course of the last four years, including the last year, which was a zero percent tax increase. He's increased property taxes by more than any other mayor in the history of the City of Vancouver. The zero percent increase he delivered this year wasn't achieved through a reduction in costs. He just increased a blizzard of fees right across the board. Number one, he increased the utility part of your property tax bill by 10%. Number two, he's added new parking meters at Jericho Beach and at a bunch of community centres throughout the city. He's cranked up parking fees throughout the city to the point that businesses are complaining about a decrease in traffic coming downtown. For some small business owners, we've seen permit fees go up by 2,400%. So he didn't achieve the zero percent increase by finding efficiencies or by making cuts. He did it by layering on fees. This isn't a tax cut. It was a tax shift. And the shift is unfortunately impacting the oldest people in our society, the pensioners who use those community centres, and the youngest people in our society. Yes, it's expensive to live here, and I live in a basement suite, but at least I get to go play beach volleyball at Kits Beach for the summer, and that makes my life worthwhile. But now it's $25 for the day to go play volleyball at Kits Beach. How does that make the city more vibrant? So Ken Sim's fallacy of the zero percent increase is slowly being recognized. I'm hearing this from grocery store owners, the mom-and-pop grocery store owners. You might have gone to one grocery store to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables, then you might have gone to the butcher, and that might be how you shopped for your family. Now those small grocery stores and small butchers are going out of business because there are parking meters in front of their businesses, and there are no parking meters at Costco, at Save-On-Foods, at the big box stores. So we're actually negatively impacting the people Ken's supposed to be advocating for, which is the small business community. Matt Scalena: Not to go back here, but the whole campaign is based on bringing back young people and bringing back vibrancy. We talked about jobs, we talked about housing, we talked about street disorder and crime. Can we talk about the fourth pillar of your campaign? I don't think we really got into it. Kareem Allam: Sure. We got into it a little bit in terms of parks and vibrancy. My mom came to Canada after spending two years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, after a revolution in Sudan. When I was growing up, my family was going through hard times, and I had no idea we were poor, because I had this rich and vibrant childhood. I had the Marpole Library, I had Kits Pool, we could spend all day hanging out at Jericho Beach, and it cost us nothing. Kids today don't have the same opportunities I did. They don't have the same access to the world-class services that have made Vancouver so iconic. We literally have chunks of our seawall falling into the ocean. We can't keep a toy train running in Stanley Park. We have no more Olympic-sized competition pools in the City of Vancouver. We have community centres built in the '50s that we haven't touched. And kids today are having a hard time getting into programming, because as we've densified, there's less space for them. For me, one of the things that holds together this broad-based coalition we've built of New Democrats, Liberals, and Conservatives, who are all in my party, is this commitment to frontline services. As I said earlier, the park board budget used to be 16.5% of the city budget. It's now 7.9%. Our commitment is to get it to 9% over the course of the next four years. But that's the operating part. Now let's talk about the capital part. Ken Sim has made $2.5 billion worth of capital upgrade promises on pools, on rinks, on community centres. But he only recently approved $738 million for the park board's capital plan. So he's already broken his promise without even being sworn in for his next term. To me, it's abhorrent that he's getting away with making these promises. As you calculate the cost of the promises he's made: four or five community centres. He's going to do Kits Pool, which is $300 million. He's going to build a pool at Sunset, a pool at Marpole, do upgrades at Britannia, build a new skating rink. By the time you finish going through that list, it doesn't match up with what he just approved. Our plan, and I won't get a chance to present a capital plan until my fourth year in office, is $1.4 billion, over the $769 million. Where am I going to get that extra $800 million, you might be asking? Simple. Ken Sim has a plan to build a second city hall at a cost of $800 million. I'm cancelling that project, and I'm putting that $800 million towards the park assets we were just talking about. Matt Scalena: Just a couple more questions for you here, Kareem. You mentioned revitalizing downtown. I'm wondering about your take on FIFA. Was that a success, in your mind? And the closing of Granville Street: how do you think that went? Was it worth it? And what's your plan there? Kareem Allam: You can bet against Ken Sim, but you can't bet against Vancouverites. What made Vancouver fantastic during FIFA was the people themselves. My parents are both Egyptian. Egypt got to play a game here. It was one of the coolest things ever. My first time getting to see Mo Salah play in real life. I've been a big Liverpool fan my whole life, so that was one of the most special days I had this summer. There were all these Egyptians who came up from Seattle chanting all the team songs, and it was just absolutely wonderful. Then we all poured into Granville Street afterwards, and the Argentinians and the Brazilians were there cheering us on as well. I don't know why they were cheering us on, but everyone was just caught up in the infectiousness of the moment. So like I said, you can bet against the city, but you can't ever bet against Vancouverites. I think back fondly on the 2010 Olympics, and again, it was Vancouverites pouring into the streets celebrating that great goal by Sidney Crosby. It wasn't government that created that moment. It was us. I want to see more opportunities to invest in a lot of the things we're losing. The Pride Parade this year was the shortest route I'd ever seen. We've lost Vancouver Mural Festival. The blizzard of fees being layered on by the city and the VPD on some of these festivals is making them go away. We used to have Canada Day fireworks. I want to bring that back. We went from four days of fireworks to one this year. There's got to be a way for the city to work more closely with these event organizers to reduce costs. We've made it too complex. We've made it too hard. I spent a little bit of my career living in Edmonton. It proudly calls itself the City of Festivals. If Edmonton can do it, Vancouver can. We should never be outclassed as Vancouverites by Edmonton. I love you, Edmonton. I love you, Connor McDavid. But seriously, we can do way better than Edmonton. They have a thousand festivals a year in Edmonton, and in Vancouver we're at a third of that. We could do a way better job than they do. So I want to give Vancouverites that space to be creative. The regulations we've put in place for pop-up artist spaces and pop-up restaurants are just so cumbersome. You go down to Seattle, to San Francisco, or to Calgary, and for some reason they're able to have them there, but we're not able to have them here. So again, I really do think government is the problem here, not the solution. When you give Vancouverites the power to be creative and to be together, magical things happen. Adam Scalena: FIFA made my summer, and potentially my year. I thought it was the best time ever, so you're preaching to the choir. Matt, your final question. Matt Scalena: My final question, Kareem: you started off by saying you're not a fan of division. You've made a point of talking about people from across the political spectrum in the Vancouver Liberals. Are city politics right now too political, in your mind? Have they become politicized in a way that is not historically the norm, and is that a problem? Kareem Allam: I'd say all levels of politics have become much more polarized over the course of my career. I started my career in politics in 2000, and there's a huge gap between the calibre of people I served at the front end of my career and the calibre of people I've served at the back end, in sophistication and education. We used to get the best and brightest from the business community, academia, journalism, not-for-profits, and we're not necessarily seeing that anymore. There are occasional outliers. When people entered politics in the early part of my career, they were making major financial sacrifices. These were people who could have made much more money in the private sector or working at their university. It really was about sacrifice. It really was about the good of the nation. And across party lines, there generally was a view towards nation building, strengthening the institutions that bring this country together. I think that's missing from the conversation municipally, provincially, and federally. Our politics have become very Americanized. The tactics to win the election have become more important than the unity of the nation or the unity of the jurisdiction you're governing. I could also take some of the blame for times I've taken some liberties on campaigns I've run, in exploiting some of those tactics. But I think we do need to get back to a place where Canadians agree, at least, on what the most important things are. For me, it's having a world-class economy that's competitive against the Chinese and the Americans and the Brits and the French and everyone else, that generates wealth, that ensures some modicum of wage equity, and then taking some of that wealth to pay for world-class social programs. That should be it. That should be the primary focus of government: generating wealth to pay for world-class social programs. And we've gotten way too far away from that at every level of government. Adam Scalena: Kareem, we have a segment called the Five Wire, five light-hearted questions we end every show with. Can you stick around for that? Kareem Allam: Absolutely. Adam Scalena: Fantastic. First question: one book you've read recently that you would recommend to our listeners? Kareem Allam: I would say James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. Matt Scalena: I know that book. Kareem Allam: It's an interesting read. It talks about the overconfidence government tends to have in its own ability to plan things, and the unintended consequences of government's confidence in itself. It's interesting because it has historically been associated more with the progressive side of the political discourse, but it's increasingly gaining traction with centre and centre-right public policy leaders as well. So that's a book I've thoroughly enjoyed. Matt Scalena: I think I remember. He was a progressive criticizing progressive movements, or left-wing governments primarily, if I remember correctly. That's a great one. I haven't thought about that book in a long time, actually. That one threw me for a loop, Kareem. In the last few years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life? Kareem Allam: Well, I decided to run for office. I put my name on a ballot. I promised I would never, ever run for office, but it has improved my life. For someone who spent 25 years in the public policy process, there are groups of people I would never have met. There are things I've learned about this city and this province, and individuals I've engaged with, that I would never have had reason to. I got some really good advice at the beginning of the campaign: "You're running for mayor of Vancouver. You can literally pick up the phone and call anyone, and they will answer." And it's true. As a result, I've connected with people in the arts community, the business community, the tech sector. I've historically not been active in that part of our economy, and I've just learned so much about the potential here in Vancouver to reimagine the next generation of jobs. So making the decision to actually put my name on the ballot is probably the thing that's been the most life-changing for me. Adam Scalena: That's great. I have a feeling you're too busy these days, but what are you binge-watching lately, or do you have a movie recommendation? Kareem Allam: Funny enough, as I've been talking about the Sinaloa drug cartel, I'm rewatching The Sopranos. That's the reason Tony Soprano keeps coming to the top of mind, this Tony Soprano level of the crime food chain. We've got to go after Tony, and the only way to go after Tony is to go after his money. Matt Scalena: That's why I watch it at least once a year. Kareem Allam: That's exactly right. Adam Scalena: I think everyone on this call watches it every year over the holidays. I've got two months to go, but I'll be watching it again soon as well. Matt, question four. Matt Scalena: Question four, Kareem: favourite band or music recommendation? Kareem Allam: I just love all kinds of music. There was a part of my childhood where Guns N' Roses was number one, and then I joined the basketball team and it was all Tupac. So my musical range is quite wide. Adam Scalena: I think we're all pretty close in age, and I think we all had the late '90s and early 2000s as our peak adolescent years of music. Kareem Allam: Yeah. Was it Run-DMC and the Red Hot Chili Peppers together? That crossover between rap and rock was definitely a pinnacle of my time as a kid. Adam Scalena: Right. Last but not least, Kareem: something you've purchased for under $2,000 that's had a positive impact on your life. Kareem Allam: Something I purchased for under $2,000: it was a trip for my wife, right before the campaign really started gearing up. It bought me a lot of wiggle room and space. My wife has not spent a lot of time seeing me. She's been an incredible supporter of mine, and I don't think I'd be here without her. But yes, you could definitely sense the annoyance at my lack of contribution on the home front. Matt Scalena: To be expected, I guess, in the position you're in. Thank you so much for your time, Kareem. That was great. It was great learning more about your campaign. How can people learn even more about it? Kareem Allam: Go to VancouverLiberals.com. Almost everything I talked about today is in our platform. I've done over 75 videos on some of these subjects. Also check out the events page, and if you want to come to one of our events and meet me and the rest of our candidates, I encourage you to do that. Adam Scalena: Thanks again. Kareem Allam: Thanks so much, guys. I appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.