Green candidate Annette Reilly draws from personal experience and family background in city council bid

What happened: Annette Reilly won a contested nomination to become the Vancouver Green Party’s candidate for city council in the upcoming municipal by-election this spring.  

The candidate: Reilly is an actor, director, and producer in the film and television industry, and – as a cancer survivor herself – an advocate for young people with cancer. 

Reilly was born in the early ‘80s in a farming community outside Red Deer, Alberta, moving to the Lower Mainland as a teenager in 1995 before attending the University of Victoria where she received her BA in Fine Arts. 

• Reilly and her husband Greg have been living in Vancouver, currently renting in Grandview-Woodland, for the past decade. 

While Reilly is a newcomer to elected politics, she has a significant familial history in Canadian politics. Reilly’s uncle Earl Dreeshen has been an MP with the federal Conservative Party since 2008, and her cousin Devin Dreeshen has been an MLA with Alberta’s United Conservative Party since 2018. Reilly also said her grandmother was the first female councillor in Penhold County.

• “I was the oddball, having a different value system than some of my more conservative relations,” Reilly said. 

“Because I came from a more conservative background as far as how I was raised, politically speaking, it wasn't until I actually started voting for the Green Party that I went, ‘oh yes, this is what I'm in alignment with. This is where my heart, where my values actually stand,’” Reilly explained. 

“To me, sustainability isn't just for our planet, it's also our social sustainability. It's our economic sustainability. [And] of course, our ecological sustainability as well,” Reilly said, pointing to social justice, participatory democracy, and working collaboratively as other key values she holds that align with the Green Party.

The party: Founded in 1984, the Vancouver Greens’ core values are environmentalism, nonviolence, social justice, and grassroots democracy, according to their website.

While the Greens elected a few municipal candidates to the park and school boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, they weren’t successful in getting a council candidate elected until 2011. Since 2011, the party has consistently been represented at city hall by a couple of key people. 

• Adriane Carr, Coun. Pete Fry, and Michael Wiebe are the only people to have sat as Green Party councillors. Carr won four consecutive elections between 2011 and 2022, Fry was elected twice in 2018 and 2022, while Wiebe served for one term in 2018. 

Following Carr’s resignation from council in January, Fry was left as the Green’s only representative at city hall – and the only non-ABC councillor overall prior to Coun. Rebecca Bligh’s removal from ABC’s caucus last week. 

• Reilly said she’s already been able to learn a lot by shadowing Fry, while Carr has been providing mentorship to the new Green candidate. “I’m so grateful to have that support,” Reilly said. 

“A hard hitting disease”: As a new mother, Reilly was diagnosed with colon cancer at age 30. Medically cured for many years now, Reilly described how the financial, social, and emotional burden of a cancer diagnosis took a toll on her life, including on her first marriage. 

“We ended up separating, and that's when I started just kind of coming into myself. I figured out who I was. I figured out that I'm a fighter, that I'm a survivor, that I'm tenacious and resilient, and I spent a lot of energy advocating and supporting people within the young adult cancer world,” Reilly shared.

• Reilly has worked with groups like Colorectal Cancer Canada and Young Adult Cancer Canada to draw attention to the unique challenges faced by young people with cancer, including stigma and other barriers in accessing proper medical care. 

Inspiration for politics: Reilly’s older sister, Katie, was a big inspiration for Reilly to become more involved in politics. Katie was beginning a career in provincial politics in Alberta shortly before she died from pancreatic cancer in 2023.

• “We would have the most wonderful political conversations, because we didn't always see eye to eye, but she had this uncanny skill to be able to bridge the gap no matter what we were talking about, and I had so much respect for that,” Reilly shared. 

“When she passed… that was the trigger for getting more involved,” Reilly said, adding that, based on genetic testing, both her and Katie’s cancers were found to be from environmental factors rather than family genes. “[That’s] also very much why the Green Party was a huge alignment for me,” Reilly said.  

Policy priorities: Like many candidates in this council by-election, Reilly knows that, if elected, she wouldn’t be in a powerful position to move motions or set policy.

“Any motions that I would put through, I would be discussing with people and seeking support across party lines. I want to do what's best for the city. I don't want interpersonal or political sides getting in the way [of] doing what's best for the people of Vancouver,” Reilly said 

• In the short term, Reilly said she’d work to hold the governing ABC party accountable to deliver ethical leadership and responsible governance. 

In terms of her own policy goals, Reilly said she wants to create stronger tenancy protections city-wide and improve standards of maintenance for rental housing. “I'm a renter… unless you're a renter, you don't know the anxiety that comes with knowing that at any moment, you could be renovicted,” Reilly said. 

“We need to make sure that anyone who is being displaced by [development] is protected,” Reilly added.

Vancouver does currently have a policy to protect and relocate tenants affected by redevelopment and renovations of market rental housing but critics say one-time payouts and right of first refusal (for tenants to return to the new building at 20% less than market rate) don’t meaningfully solve issues of displacement. 

• Protections included in the Broadway Plan area are more robust, including rent top-ups during building construction and the ability for tenants to eventually return to the building at their current rent. These policies, and similar ones in Burnaby, appear to be strong, but will require fine-tuning, according to Storeys.    

Meeting the mayor: Reilly mentioned she’s already met Mayor Ken Sim, who came outside city hall and spoke with Reilly right before the press conference announcing her candidacy. “It was interesting timing,” Reilly said. 

• “[Sim] had a certain air of trying to tell me what I needed to do in order to survive in council,” Reilly told Vancity Lookout. 

“As a woman in a man's world, this is not uncommon. So I took it with a grain of salt and plan on just staying true to who I am… maybe it was a little tongue-in-cheek. But either way, it was clearly not an authentic connection,” Reilly said. 

Last word: “I think my art background has given me a huge heart. Fighting cancer and working in the sometimes toxic, fast-paced, very difficult, long-hour film world, that's given me thick skin. So I have what's needed [for politics] because of my life experience,” Reilly said.