From dishwasher and punk rocker to city councillor: Sean Orr’s unique path to City Hall

Sean Orr, one of Vancouver’s two new city councillors, had a backup plan if he didn’t win his seat. He’d simply go back to his day job as a dishwasher.

In fact, it wasn’t until he actually won his council seat – in a landslide victory on April 9 – that he ultimately gave his notice and put in his final shift at Published on Main, before beginning his new job as a municipal legislator. 

This kind of thing almost never happens. People rarely, if ever, go straight from the dish pit to political office. It’s nothing against dishwashing – or service and labour work of any stripe – but there’s typically little overlap between the jobs. 

So, what more potent example of a vibrant democracy is there than a self-identifying democratic socialist, elected to municipal government at the top of the polls, spending his final night as a civilian toiling in the underground kitchen of one of Vancouver’s trendiest restaurants? The symbolism is delicious. 

But symbolism aside, Orr said he just loves the work.

“I love the energy,” he said. “You're under this immense stress. You're, like, pushing your body to the limit, trying to go as fast as you can. It's dependent on you, but it's also dependent on the whole team and creating systems... which is kind of in line with politics. It's all very system-oriented, right? It's about seeing the big picture – not just reacting – and seeing how things could be better. If you just do this step, then this step, then this step, then the whole thing can be better for everyone.” 

We’re sitting at a table in Granville Square, a short walk from his apartment in Gastown, two weeks after his victory. The sun is beating down, almost oppressively, while Orr explains his perspective on the core struggle that Vancouver is currently grappling with.

“We're definitely at a turning point,” he said. “I think we've seen it become this kind of luxury resort for the one percent. I've used that line a few times. The UN Special Rapporteur for Housing called it an apartheid city, and it's very much a city of dualities. It’s always been this city of dualities. That's not going to change in the near future, but I think there are enough people to remind ourselves that there's a lot worth fighting for here.”

And today, under the beating Vancouver sun, sitting at the base of the building that once housed the Vancouver Sun, we see Orr in transition – a man grappling with his new reality. 

Before this campaign, he was primarily known through his online presence. Now, he’s materializing in the flesh – at community events, “popping in” as they say, revealing the face we can place to the name. A man who’s never had a desk job is now afforded his own office with two computer screens and a landline telephone. His election means he’s now making a city councillor’s base salary of $104,180 — which, for a punk rocker hospitality worker with no children and no mortgage, can be a life-changing sum.

“It's more money than I've ever seen in my entire life,” Orr said. “It feels weird. I have that impostor syndrome kind of thing – but it's like, no, I worked hard and, if I'm gonna do this work, I have to be healthy too. I have to take time for myself, be grounded. A part of that is just not worrying about fucking rent and bills.”

Orr was fundamentally elected on the promise that he would hold Mayor Ken Sim accountable. That promise was summed up perfectly in one of COPE’s campaign slogans – “grill Ken Sim” –  which went viral after the party posted a photo of Orr barbecuing hotdogs at a community cookout, wearing a red apron bearing the phrase. It turned out to be the right message, at the right time, from exactly the right person. 

Prior to the election, Orr was known – on social media, and in his writing for Scout Magazine – for his acerbic, witty, and often confrontational idealism, espousing socialist ideals at a time of growing disparity in the city. That principled yet easy rapport is part of why, after running for VOTE Socialist in the 2022 general election, COPE (the Coalition of Progressive Electors) tapped him to challenge Sim’s ABC Party in April’s by-election.

“I feel like there's just something really refreshing about a person who is not one of these polished, political test tube babies who's been practicing their Obama impression since they were eight years old,” Shawn Vulliez, COPE’s co-chair, said.

“One of the things that is amazing is just seeing how much [this victory] meant to people, not just here in the city, but from elsewhere. When you stand up and fight against mayors like Ken Sim and the billionaires who back him. I've been brought to tears multiple times seeing what this win meant to people. You feel so inspired to keep up the fight and push to win,” Vulliez said.

That underdog story is another factor in why Vancouverites overwhelmingly voted Orr into office, just a few years after the centre-right ABC swept into City Hall, winning the mayor’s office and every council seat they ran for.

Kareem Allam, a political strategist and former chief of staff for Sim’s office, says by-elections are almost always a referendum on the incumbents or the governing party —and who better to send a message to our millionaire mayor and ABC than by electing a self-described socialist.

“Campaigns are a battle of contrast and Sean Orr is the exact opposite of Ken,” Allam said. “Ken is wealthy. He lives in a big house. He’s a very successful businessman. And Sean Orr is at the opposite end by every metric.”

In other words, Orr is as outsider an elected official as you’ll find in this city – scruffy, artistic, funny and, especially, non-compromising.

“A lot of it [for me] was, showing the left that you can run a bold campaign and be openly socialist, and talk about Palestine, talk about the police, talk about, you know, harm reduction and safe supply, and not to shy away from those things,” Orr explained. “[I] try not to court voters by moving towards the right and not capitulate or move towards the center. Part of the end goal is showing people that it's possible.”

Orr’s campaign seemed to awaken a particularly virulent strain of radical progressiveness that the city hasn’t seen represented on this ABC-dominated council. Orr cites Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbin, and Jean Swanson, the latter his most-recent COPE predecessor on city council, as the political figures he looked up to most. But Orr leaned further into themes of class struggle than Swanson ever did in her campaigns.

“Sean was pretty aggressive, but it wasn't bombastic in tone. The message was rooted closely [in] what he believed in, but it was presented in a very accessible way,” Allam said. 

What made Orr’s campaign effective, according to Allam, was his ability to rally the upper-middle class of the city to his message, targeting billionaires without offending people who bought modestly priced condos in the Aughts and are now millionaires.

“He went after the problems in our society and the consequences of crony capitalism, but he didn't attack people [who] were benefiting from the system. He understood, I think, that even people who were comfortably middle class five years ago don't feel that way anymore,” Allam said. “My view is if [these people] felt threatened by Sean, he wouldn't have won. He didn't threaten those people.” 

Orr comes from a very political family. His grandfather was an MP in Northern Ireland in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and Orr says his family would hold “intense conversations” at the dinner table.  

Orr grew up in Surrey and moved to the West End in 1999.  He was active in Vancouver’s punk scene, which he describes as being “inclusive” and “a political space and a safe space to be weird.” He studied geology at UBC, where he says he was radicalized to the plight of the Palestinian people. It was during this time that he learned the concept of  socialism, which, intuitively, he had previously understood as “common sense.”

“We should just have radical compassion,” Orr said. “We should just have empathy. We should have a social safety net. There should just be justice. These are all good things. Like Sesame Street taught me that, right? These are just basic tenets that we should all agree to.”

It was also a time when his peers were fleeing Vancouver for other cities like Montreal and Berlin, a common thing for creatives who felt limited by the West Coast’s offerings and costs. He stuck around and started writing, first for Beyond Robson and then eventually Scout Magazine, writing about city life, and veered more heavily into politics after the 2016 US election. 

He credits the late Andrew Morrison, Scout’s founder and editor-in-chief, for pushing him to refine his arguments to be more palatable to the website’s audience.

“[Andrew] would say, ‘You can't say that,’ or, ‘Are you sure you want to say this?’” Orr remembers. “He’d call me in and be like, ‘Are you feeling OK?’ because sometimes, you know, I struggle with mental health. There were a couple times where he said, ‘You should take a break, you’re getting too caught up in things.’”

Through it all, Orr sat on the periphery of socialist political movements and organizing happening around the city, separating himself in a “quasi-journalistic” way, in order to stay informed and feel the heat of it, which in turn fed into his writing and his music.

Orr co-founded the punk band NEEDS with Glenn Alderson, founder of Beat Route and, later, Range Magazine, after Orr’s previous band, Taxes, went belly up.

“The politics were always embedded very deeply [in the music], I would say more from a global-issues standpoint, though local issues came into play,” said Devin O’Rourke, the drummer, and Orr’s bandmate, in NEEDS. “The problems we have here are not unique to Vancouver in a lot of ways. So I think he was speaking a lot about the philosophy of it all.”

 NEEDS – which Orr describes as “weird, screamy art-punk” – has released two LPs, which feature titles such as “Stop Getting Second Helpings at the Shit Buffet” and “The Only Good Condo is a Dead Condo.” Orr, who’s naturally reserved in his daily life, is heard shredding his vocal cords to bits throughout.

“Anyone who's seen a NEEDS show is blown away with how much of a lunatic he is on stage, and how rowdy he gets,” O’Rourke described. “Then after the show, he's just the quiet, nice, put-together guy he's always been. He just has this switch that flips in him, where, I think, he gets on stage and takes on this completely different persona. It's not acting. It's just like a part of his brain that he’s somehow able to access.”

But it was more than just Orr’s ability to perform for a crowd that drove his political success. He seems to understand intuitively how to capture the public’s attention. It helped that his message was, for better or worse, on trend.

The by-election happened against the backdrop of Canadians grappling with an existential threat to the country’s sovereignty from U.S. billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk. COPE tied those themes together locally by contrasting Orr against Sim’s cozy relationship with Vancouver’s own outspoken billionaire, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson.

“We have these out-of-control, hyper-rich billionaires who have more money than they can ever spend, who are using their influence to enrich themselves through the political process, and they're trying to make governments work for them instead of regular people,” Kareem Allam observed. “We knew this was happening in [the 2022 municipal election], but the way that happened in the United States, and how it's affecting people now in Canada, was really brought front and center for a lot of people.”

Sim’s ABC Party, among other municipal parties, is still under investigation by Elections BC for possible contraventions of campaign financing rules in the 2022 election. Investigation findings have yet to be released.  

Orr says there’s been a “groundswell of discontent” in how Sim has conducted himself in office – all this talk of “swagger,” shotgunning beers in public, and converting a City Hall meeting room into a gym, while, at the same time, “brutally sweeping people off the streets” and increasing the police budget. “I think [Sim and ABC are] deeply out of touch in a lot of ways, and we were able to stick to that message and hammer that home,” Orr said. 

At the time of our interview in late April, Orr said he’s only interacted with Sim once, a few days after the by-election.

“He shook my hand and said, ‘Let's work together. We're all on the same team.’ And then the next day, he held a press conference saying I was anti-semitic and I haven't seen him since. He's been on personal leave,” Orr said.

Sim’s press conference, which included the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver (JFGV), came a day after JFGV and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs released a joint statement condemning what they alleged was an anti-semitic social media comment made by Orr in 2021. Orr responded, saying the comment was intended as sarcasm to condemn another commentor’s anti-semitic dogwhistle. 

“It's unfortunate that this was taken out of context and misrepresented," Orr said of his 2021 comment. "[COPE’s] platform called out anti-semitism by name & committed to fighting it, along with Islamophobia and other forms of racism," he said, according to CBC.

When asked about the press conference, a spokesperson for Sim declined to comment, writing, “the Mayor and the Mayor’s Office are focused on supporting the community in the aftermath of the April 26 tragedy and preparing for the Day of Mourning and Remembrance today. That remains our sole priority right now.”

Orr’s criticism of police, specifically the Vancouver Police Department, has also sparked hostile reactions. The Vancouver Police Union and ABC Councillor Brian Montague, a former VPD officer, have criticized Orr for his past social media statements about police. They say Orr’s anti-cop comments are “disgusting” and are promoting violence against police. 

“Yes, there [were] some remarks when I was a private citizen but now that I’m a councillor things are going to be different… in terms of inciting violence, I think that’s absurd,” Orr said of the critiques of his past criticism of police, according to Global News.

“I think a lot of people underestimated Sean in our campaign, and now I think we have opposition research being done by multiple levels of conservatives,” COPE’s Vuillez said. “So I think, like the federal and provincial conservatives, have their teams working on trying to turn Sean into something they can use against, you know, their political opponents.” 

Orr has even received death threats. Orr jokes that years of Twitter “prepared me for this,” but the truth of it is, the threats have been wearing on him. Yet he also understands that, outside the extreme cases, this sort of reaction is part of what he signed up for.

“There's been kind of a hysteria since we won in certain circles, and I think that contributed to why it's escalated to death threats,” Vuillez said.

“This is a popular movement that is not about me. It's about what I represent, and the people who are struggling,” Orr said. “Every day, they're fighting just to make ends meet. They're fighting to, you know, find a place to sleep.”

For Orr, the way to really ‘grill’ Sim might have to happen outside of City Hall. “I think it's doing it outside, boosting those movements and playing politics like Ken does,” Orr said.

I asked Orr directly if he was comfortable playing politics in the new world he now operates within. “That's where I'm most comfortable, playing politics,” Orr replied, but he disagreed with the assertion that it’s ‘fun’. 

“I wouldn’t say it's fun. It's like life and death for people, right? I'm privileged that it's not necessarily life and death for me. But yeah, I'm not in it because it's a game. I'm in it because this is deadly serious for so many people.”