These are excerpts from Stuart McNish’s interview with Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, who is seeking re-election with the ABC Vancouver party. You can watch the entire interview online at vancouversun.com/conversations. Interviews with four other Vancouver mayoral candidates — Pete Fry, Kareem Allam, Colleen Hardwick and Rebecca Bligh — can be found at the same link.

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Stuart McNish: You’ve stepped up to run again. Let’s imagine four years out. How is Vancouver going to look different because you were mayor over the next four years?

Video: Ken Sim talks zero per cent property taxes and business ‘certainty’ Back to video

Ken Sim: I think Vancouver is going to be great and I’m so super optimistic about the future. And I know we’re going through some really challenging economic times with what’s going on with tariffs. And we have public safety concerns and affordability challenges.

… A zero per cent property tax increase this year. We’re committed to a zero per cent property tax increase next year. So, holding the line … and that really goes toward providing certainty for businesses.

On the public safety side. … We still have challenges, don’t get me wrong, but the place is a lot safer now than it was four years ago. In fact, violent crime is down to a 23-year low in the city of Vancouver.

Third, just a place that works for residents. So big investments in community centres. The core services that Vancouverites want and need. There has been a lack of big investments in these areas for generations, it feels like.

… But I also want to talk about opportunity. I want to talk about vibrancy. … a pro-business, pro-prosperity entrepreneurial mindset.

McNish: The place that we have to start is the impossibly high cost of living, especially for young people. You probably saw the report in The Vancouver Sun: The population for the first time in the city and in the province is dropping.

Sim: I ran for mayor because our four boys did not see a future for themselves in Vancouver.

McNish: Your own family. That was your concern?

Sim: My own family, yes. … They weren’t thinking about housing affordability back in 2018 when I was running, they were too young. They didn’t understand it, but they were thinking in terms of career opportunity and vibrancy. And are their friends going to be here, or are there going to be things to do here?

I think you have to put the two together.

My interests are completely aligned with the problem that we’re trying to solve. When you look at housing affordability, there’s two parts to it. There’s the actual cost of housing and then there are incomes. We’ve done a lot of work on the stuff that we can control when it comes to creating an environment, because we actually don’t build homes. But doing everything we can to make it easier for homebuilders to build homes of all types in the city.

McNish: So how do you make it easier?

Sim: There’s a lot of regulatory red tape. … We actually put parameters around what we wanted to see in permitting times. … Because if people are waiting too long. … It basically adds to the cost of building homes. If you can shorten that period down, make it simpler to build, in theory, you can build more homes faster and it costs less to build these homes.

We’ve really sped up the permitting process on a whole bunch of fronts. … We cleared up over 2,000 pages of regulatory red tape as an example.

The other half of it, which seems like every other political party ignores, is … what your incomes are. And this is where entrepreneurship, supporting local businesses, supporting an environment where people can succeed in our city, in the careers and industries that they want to work in, is so critically important.

McNish: City hall plays an important role in that because how you choose to regulate those businesses can make a business affordable.

Sim: We have to focus on everything that we can control and everything we can signal to encourage businesses. Some of them are directly related to business. Some of them aren’t. The ones that aren’t directly related to business are the bread-and-butter things — public safety. We have to get really tight on public safety because it affects every single business. … If people don’t feel safe going to work, if people don’t feel safe going to your store or your place of business, it doesn’t matter how quickly we get you a permit, or even if we eliminate property taxes. …

McNish: I watched people leave from FIFA going, ‘When I walked out of the trade and convention centre, I walked into a horror zone where I (saw) the impact of the open drug use policies.’ … How did we get there?

Sim: I do believe that we can make a substantial difference in the Downtown Eastside. We’re not going to solve it. I’m not here saying we are going to solve it.

McNish: No, it’s been a problem …

Sim: … for 40 years. … I think we’re pretty close to actually having a meaningful impact on it. And if I didn’t believe that, if I didn’t believe this was possible, I wouldn’t run for mayor.

McNish: What is that path?

Sim: We have our tools to react to stuff after the fact, and that’s policing. It’s not a sustainable tool because we’re not getting to the root cause of problems. But that’s one of the only tools we have. … We have this thing called catch and release, or we did.

For three years we were lobbying the federal government to come up with bail reform. The current prime minister, Prime Minister Mark Carney, finally did come up with it. … Without getting into all the details, basically in a lot of circumstances now where the situation warrants it instead of the city or the Crown having to prove why someone should be withheld, now the onus is on the individual. … That’s a big distinction because it can help us stabilize our neighbourhoods.

Now, the (other) piece is involuntary care for people that are really sick — mental health challenges or substance use disorder. There are people that pose a risk to their safety, the safety of others … and they need to be off the streets getting health care.

And if we get those individuals off the streets, things change. We don’t have to get a lot of people off the street. I figure in Vancouver, maybe 400, because those 400 people account for probably 80 to 90 per cent of all the challenges that we see out there.

McNish: The other thing is the impossibility of getting around the city right now. Everywhere you go, streets are shut down.

Sim: … There are three things going on.

One, absolutely, our fault. We do things that may not make sense. … We’ve actually gone to neighbourhoods, for example Hastings right by the PNE, and we’ve seen these banana (traffic barrier) things. … I’m committed to figuring that out because it doesn’t make any sense. It restricts traffic.

The second part is there are things that are out of our control. For example, Metro has jurisdiction on a bunch of infrastructure here. And they just do whatever they do and they don’t tell us.

The third part of it is, yes, this is deliberate and we are doing it on purpose.

We inherited a city that had a $500 million a year capital deficit and infrastructure deficit. Prior administrations were not investing in the infrastructure we need because optically it looks like a cost. And we are making those investments, and we have to fix the stuff that was neglected or there will be certain neighbourhoods in the city that won’t be able to flush their toilets in 20 years.

And so I apologize for it. But we have to do it, and we will do it because it’s the right thing to do.