We urgently need a new kind of Vancouver. We need a city that is fully committed to restitution for the Indigenous nations that have lived in profound connection with this land for millennia; a city where everyone is guaranteed safe, affordable, and dignified housing as a human right, not as a commodity or a tool of financial speculation; a city that puts the needs of the most marginalized first, and that makes the richest people and corporations pay their fair share; a city ready to break every rule in the profiteer’s book to confront the climate crisis; a city ready to defund, disarm, and de-task the police and reinvest in community and peer led, trauma-informed, and non-violent services to those most marginalized; a city of welcoming, vibrant, diverse, safe, and self-contained neighbourhoods in permanent dialogue with each other.

Today, our city is largely run by the rich, for the rich. No wonder the status quo is failing us. The local oligarchs are free to pursue their every whim in the greatest comfort, while the rest of us are trapped in an ever-tightening vise of housing insecurity, job precarity, social isolation, compromised health, and fear for our children and family’s future. We live amid worsening heatwaves and atmospheric rivers and a global pandemic that continues to claim the lives of people we know and love — all while the rich enjoy endless profits. In short, their system is working as it is intended to.

Vancouver is the product of colonial land theft, and the city’s development has always been designed to serve the narrowest and most selfish of interests. The rail barons and speculators who dominated Vancouver’s beginnings have left behind a legacy of botched land zoning and brutal spatial inequalities. Until the 1970s, only property owners had full voting rights at the municipal level. Renters, unhoused people, and other marginalized people were excluded from any meaningful participation in the life of this city. In fact, property owners still have extra voting rights: your landlord can apply to be a “property elector” and vote in this year’s municipal election even if they don’t live in Vancouver. Even now, your landlord and your boss would prefer if you didn’t vote; they don’t want us to realize that another city hall is possible.

Tenants can and should write housing policy. Workers can and should run their workplaces. Drug users should write drug policy. Public transit users can and should run our public transit system. Disabled people can and should make decisions about building codes and accessibility. We know what’s best for us; we might as well fight for it.

Every inch of progress ever made against this rigged, exclusionary system has been the result of ordinary people organizing around defiant demands for radical and truly transformative change. The policies outlined in this document constitute a viable alternative for our city, one that addresses the pressing imperatives of our time. We’ll need all hands on deck to set these measures in motion — that means building a broad movement with our neighbours and co-workers which decisively breaks with business as usual.