“I like being a politician of the people”: Pete Fry’s quest to become Vancouver’s next mayor

There’s a rumour afoot that Vancouver Green Party city councillor Pete Fry is plotting to take his mother’s seat as a Member of Parliament. 

The idea has been floating around local subreddits – and in the real world as well – that Fry’s bid for mayor is actually a strategic effort to elevate his profile enough that he can run in the Vancouver Centre seat held for decades by his mom, long-time Liberal MP Hedy Fry. 

He has no intentions, the theory goes, to actually be mayor. 

So I asked him: “Is this true?”

“Oh God really?” he laughs. “My mom would love that. Maybe she’s promoting that online.”

It’s easy for people with limited information on a politician’s personality and personal life to use scant public evidence and stitch together a narrative. And sure, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a politician might do something like this. 

Fry does not seem to be that person. He says the lifestyle of a federal MP doesn’t “appeal” to him, all that shuttling back and forth between Vancouver and Ottawa, “living out of a suitcase. And for what? 

“To be a backbencher for the Liberals?” he scoffs. “I have no interest in being a cog in a big machine where your vote is whipped and you’re expected to go along with the party.”

The very idea runs counter to Fry’s entire career – not just as a politician, but what came before it, as an adolescent punk in the ‘80s, a graphic designer, and this work as a councillor. He’s community-oriented and specifically Vancouver-minded.

“I’m a homebody, man. I like my cats, I like my life,” he says.

“That’s why I like local government. It’s grassroots, connecting with people. I like being a politician of the people.”

If you get the chance to sit down with Fry on, say, a blustery Tuesday morning at Propaganda Coffee in Chinatown, with a member of Russian protest-punk group Pussy Riot sitting a croissant’s throw away (yes really), you get the sense of a man in his element. He’s a man at home in the complexity, bustle, and grit of the neighbourhood he’s lived in and around for nearly 30 years. He hardly seems cynical enough to deploy such a complicated political strategy to attain higher office at the federal level.