ABC’s council candidates enter the electoral fray to reinforce the majority party

What happened: Last month, ABC Vancouver announced Jaime Stein and Ralph Kaisers as their candidates for city council in the upcoming municipal by-election on April 5th. ABC, the governing party at city hall, was the last of the major parties to announce their candidates. 

Background: Ralph Kaisers has worked in law enforcement with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) for over 30 years, and is the president of the Vancouver Police Union (VPU). Kaisers has also held several leadership positions in other organizations that advocate for police officers. 

• Kaisers has taken a leave of absence from the VPD and VPU to run for city council, and, regardless of the outcome, has plans to retire from policing at the end of April.  

After beginning his career as a sports broadcaster, Jaime Stein has worked in communications and digital media for businesses in various fields, including tech, banking, and sports. 

• Stein was an MLA candidate in Vancouver-Langara for BC United before the party collapsed in the lead-up to the 2024 provincial election. Stein didn’t end up running on the ballot. 

Both Stein and Kasiers were born and raised in Vancouver and profess their deep love for the city. “It’s absolutely the greatest place on earth,” Stein said, reminiscing about being a kid during Expo 86 and the formative moment of establishing a pen pal in Hong Kong. 

“I want to see this city thrive,” Kaisers said , describing how he’s “lived, worked, and played,” in Vancouver his entire life – outside of a few years living in Richmond and South Surrey. In describing his upbringing, Kaisers emphasized the values of hard work and determination that his father, who immigrated to Vancouver in the 1960s, instilled in him. 

• Kaisers began working as a deckhand on one of his dad’s commercial fishing boats at age 12, he said, even running the business for a while when his dad passed away six years later.  But commercial fishing wasn’t what he wanted to do, so after volunteering with a citizen’s watch program and graduating from college, he joined the VPD. 

Candidate’s positions: Kaisers, who describes himself as a more than suitable candidate based on his leadership background, said his focus as a councillor would be on public safety. 

• ​​”I would be advocating for policies that would support the Vancouver Police, [Vancouver Fire, and] ultimately, the public,” Kaisers said, adding that, in addition to emergency services, he’d like to shape policy around mental health, homelessness, and the economy.  

Stein said he specifically wants to focus on reducing regulations for the bar and restaurant industry, and making neighbourhood spaces more accessible and beautiful with maintenance like painting lamp posts, tidying up sidewalks, or fixing loose bricks.      

“I think maintaining and small enhancements [to] public spaces go a long way to make a big difference. If we treat and respect our neighbourhoods well, everybody will treat and respect our neighbourhoods well,” Stein said.  

The party: ABC Vancouver’s nominations seem to make sense from a values perspective, as the party has generally been characterized by policies that reduce regulation while supporting emergency services, most notably the police.

• Founded in 2021, ABC Vancouver won a huge mandate in its inaugural campaign, with their entire 17-candidate slate elected and forming majorities on city council, park board, and school board. 

Since being elected, ABC has advanced policies to reduce permitting regulations across various sectors and established a task force to identify efficiencies and revenue opportunities in the city’s budget. 

On public safety, ABC said they have “fully funded” the VPD and Vancouver Fire Rescue Services for the first time in 15 and 8 years, respectively. Police services make up 20%, or $455 million, of the 2025 city budget. 

• In 2022, ABC ran on a promise to hire 100 police officers and 100 mental health workers. In February – as part of announcing a new $5 million VPD task force targeting organized crime in the Downtown Eastside – ABC gave an update on those figures, saying they’ve hired 200 new police officers and 35 mental health workers since being elected.  

On housing, they’ve removed some of the city’s view cone policies – a move that’s spurred plans for taller buildings in northeast False Creek and downtown – while moving forward with significant rezoning plans like the Broadway and Vancouver plans introduced by the previous council.    

However: Since their big electoral victory, the party’s reign in Vancouver politics has been marked by controversial policies that weren’t part of their electoral platform. 

• That includes asking the province to dissolve the elected park board, indefinitely pausing collaboration with the province on new supportive housing developments, unsuccessfully trying to roll back climate initiatives on natural gas in new buildings, and reversing course on an unpopular motion to freeze the work of the city’s integrity commissioner. 

Those various moves led to discord in their caucus, with five of ABC’s 17 elected officials being removed from or leaving the party. 

“Leadership is hard, and part of being a good leader means making hard decisions. Sometimes that means people move out of a party, whether they choose to leave or they're asked to leave. It happens,” Stein told Vancity Lookout when asked if the previous departures from ABC concerned him as a candidate.

• “So far, what I've seen of the party, I've been pretty impressed. And if I wasn't impressed, it's certainly not something that I'd now endeavour to join,” Kaisers said in response to the same question. 

“If you feel like you can't get things done with the people you're with, then you find new people,” Stein added. 

Police union endorsement: During the 2022 municipal election campaign, the Vancouver Police Union, headed by Kaisers, took the unprecedented step of endorsing a mayoral candidate and party when it publicly supported Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver. 

The union had never endorsed a candidate before, Kaisers told Vancity Lookout, but they “were having problems” with then-Mayor Kennedy Stewart and some of city council to the detriment of police officers. “Morale was horrible,” Kaisers said in defending the decision. 

• City council had attempted to freeze the VPD’s funding in their 2021 budget — allocating $5.6 million less than the force requested — but the province overturned that decision in early 2022. 

Kaisers said he doesn’t think there’s a need for the police union to endorse a party for this by-election or in the 2026 general election, “given the current state of the city and city council.” 

In deciding to run with ABC, Kaisers said he saw them “as a group of people and a mayor that I could see myself working with because they get it. They understand my perspective of how important public safety is.” 

Breaking things: Drawing on his work experience, Stein emphasized his belief in trying to do things differently, and how that aligns him with ABC’s approach to governance. “I think fundamentally, at the end of the day, [doing things differently is] what ABC is trying to do,” Stein said. 

• “We can't always do what we've always done, or we're never going to progress…My background in technology has taught me it's okay to break things, it's okay to be wrong, because that's where you learn the most,” Stein said. 

However, Stein said he recognizes there’s a fundamental difference between that tech world mindset and working somewhere where your decisions have a direct impact on people's livelihood and well-being. “You have to also realize, what is the negative impact of trying to break things,” he reflected.

• In cases like the pause on supportive housing Stein said he thinks outcomes can be better by doing things differently, but maybe that can be done without breaking existing systems. 

“I wouldn't say I have all the answers to that,” Stein said, but committed to asking good questions and soliciting opinions from industry experts before making decisions as a councillor.  

Why it matters: The success of ABC’s candidates in the by-election will have a direct impact on the balance of power at city hall for the final year and a half of this council term. If one or both of Kaisers and Stein are elected, ABC will enjoy a strengthened super majority of seven or eight out of ten council seats, meaning they’ll likely be able to pass motions and advance their priorities even with some internal dissent. 

If neither ABC candidate is elected, the governing party would still hold a majority on council. However, a slimmer 6-4 margin means ABC councillors who have shown a willingness to vote against their caucus colleagues at times – namely, Lisa Dominato and Peter Meiszner – would hold far more power to swing the outcome of a vote, as they did on the decision to keep the natural gas ban in place.

• While Kaisers and Stein don’t bear any direct responsibility or credit for ABC’s governing record to date, their electoral success will likely be influenced by voters’ view of the party they’re representing – particularly with opposing parties framing the by-election as a referendum on Mayor Ken Sim and ABC.